Generalizing interfaces and interaction with QGraphicsItems across form-factor boundaries

[Shantanu Tushar Jha]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 2:46 AM, Stefan Majewsky
<kdemailinglists at bethselamin.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> because some people on plasma-devel@ might not know me yet: I'm a member of
> the kdegames team, and am posting to plasma-devel@ for the first time because
> my work may have to do with what you folks are doing. (This implies that I'm
> not subscribed her, so please CC me or kde-games-devel@ in answers.)
>
> The reason why I'm writing this is because I started work on libkgame, a
> collection of libraries which shall, at some point, supersede libkdegames
> which is currently used by most games in the kdegames module. In the
> beginnings of the design process, I've identified as a main weakness of our
> applications the fact that they are designed for mouse and keyboard
> interaction and for desktop form factors. They do not scale to the mobile
> form-factors which are becoming increasingly important in casual gaming.
>
> Most of our games are QGraphicsView-based, and I know that the Plasma
> community is the home of some of the greatest QGraphicsView experts on our
> lovely planet. Plus, many of you have experience in interface design on
> constrained devices.
>
> I would like to invite you to thinking about, discussing and designing a
> general set of interface components for games which can be used on mobile
> devices instead of the usual WIMP controls. The ultimate goal is a UI system
> which allows the game developer to develop in one working step an interface
> that works both on the desktop and on mobile devices. Think XMLGUI on
> steroids. This effort should also cover input methods, in order to make it
> dead-easy to integrate multitouch support in existing applications.

Gluon ( http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/ ) aims to achieve almost all
of what you said, we aim to create an environment where its easy to
create, distribute, play and then give feedback on games. All this in
a cross platform manner. As for mobile devices, we have started
developing a player for Plasma which we think can be later run in
conjunction with Plasma Mobile.
You can drop in to #gluon on freenode for more information :)

>
> Of course, this need not be limited to games, but could be generalized to
> arbitrary applications. I doubt, however, that this is possible because games
> with their full-screen application-styled canvases have their own distinct
> requirements.
>
> Not only am I interested in your thoughts on how such interfaces (or library
> classes) might look like, I'd also like to know whether there are existing
> components which might be reused. From what I know about Plasma (and that's
> admittedly not as much as I would like), Plasma is too high-level for what I
> need. It's not about creating applets for different services, but about
> arranging buttons and score displays. But please, correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> Greetings
> Stefan
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>



-- 
Shantanu Tushar    (UTC +0530)
http://www.shantanutushar.com