Subject: Re: [Kde-games-devel] Improving theme authoring for kgoldrunner - msg#00007

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Matthew Woehlke wrote:
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> Indeed. For whatever reason, KGr takes after Pacman as one of /very/ few
> games where you keep moving in the absence of any inputs. This always
> drove me nuts also. (In the Sierra version you don't keep moving
> constantly. I wouldn't know about the Broderbund version, having never
> seen it.)

Actually, Ian does have a point, its very likely that the original did have perpetual movement and would at least explain why I was quite scared to play it since my reaction times were (and still are to some extent) quite slow. If anything, its possible that most of my memories of the Atari 8-bit version were of me watching my older brother play it and sharing all the anxious moments of whether the "hamburger" (what the coins looked like in our screen) was underneath a fake tile or not (because if it wasn't, we'd have to say goodbye to 6 hours of gameplay).  :P

That being said, seeing as I really loved the Sierra version, I would at least propose one technical change, and that in addition to the current Mouse Control and Keyboard Control, we'd add a third Keyboard Control for ondemand movement similar to the Sierra version (and most other modern adventure games).  The existing one could be called "Keyboard Control - Arcade" and the proposed one can be called "Keyboard Control - Precision".

The problem of course is that the current scheme makes a popup appear when you switch between keyboard and mouse, which fits like a glove with the current two option scheme.  It might get a little too wordy if we also offered two separate suboptions within the Keyboard Control notification.

So my perhaps then the control scheme popup can be made to appear before the start of a new game and remembered thereafter so [for example...] using the mouse while under any of the two Keyboard Control modes won't invoke a popup message anymore.  [Naturally, the player can still switch control modes from the menu, as it is now.]

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Ian Wadham wrote:
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> Modesty forbids me to replay the nice things you said about KGr, Arturo,
> but thank you very, very much for saying them.  Suddenly you have made
> years of work worthwhile.  I even feel inspired to get to grips with those
> graphics and GUI libraries yet again ... :-) ...

I am very glad my words inspired you, and since I inherently admire game developers I'd love to say the feeling is mutual.  :)

It does worry me, however, that you only get told nice things about your project very rarely.  I fear that more often than not the commercial product mentality is applied, unfairly so, to FOSS development in general (or in my case to CC artwork).  Whether it is used and instantly scorned for not being up-to-snuff to a €500 locked-down equivalent, or used silently in a claustrophobic manner, either approach deprives us of the social interaction that primarily fuels us.  Whether it be a nice comment, a useful patch, some great contributed artwork or music, an informative blog entry advertising your creation, a thorough peer review, or even a well-written rant that, while annoying, can offer its own valuable insight or pique your ego back into action during a lull....

All of these, I think, are our lifeblood, raison d'être and return on our investment of time (and blood and sweat, and sometimes even money), and impossible to comprehend for people used to dehumanizing software as a total unit of cost.  And if you're not getting enough of that, then that's the first and foremost issue to tackle.  ;)

> The mouse control tries to emulate a joystick, which *real* players liked
> to use back in the day ... :-)  The hero would stop when the joystick was
> released and sprang back to center.  Our family wore out 4 or 5 sticks.

> In mouse mode, the hero stops when he catches up to the arrow.  So
> the trick is to point where you want him to go and he stops automatically
> when he gets there.  When you get to know the enemies really well,
> you can pick a good stopping point and rest or have a think, while
> they mill around uselessly in the distance.

Ah yes, I do remember using (or more accurately, my brother using) a joystick to play the game (thankfully, Atari's game system accessories were often interswappable with their PCs). 

I won't say the Mouse Mode is bad -- it has a particular elegance to it, and as the message says it just takes some getting used to.  :)

However, I spend 80% of my computing time on one of my 5 netbooks, and if a mouse can be accidentally imprecise 1 out of 10 times, the little trackpads can be accidentally imprecise 8 out of 10 times, especially on higher speeds.  :P

That's where keyboard controls could come and save the day. :)

> Heh, heh!  Did you get through the ladder-trap loop in Mazes, level 13.
> Well, this *is* an arcade game ...  The thing I loved about Lode Runner is
> that it also had puzzle and strategy characteristics.

LOL!  No, I'm such a bad player, I plunged to my doom often in Level 1 ONLY.  >v<
First time it happed because my mouse slipped while I was on a stair, second time it happened because the character didn't go up the stairs because I pressed Key Up too late so off he went, and third time happened because I didn't notice the two new stairs pop up next to the mummies, lol.  ^^;

I reiterate my comments from Granatier: just cause I love game X doesn't necessarily mean I was ever really good at it.  ^^;

Traditionally I've only really excelled in either RPGs (and not online ones, I've never touched an MMORPG in my life), or games that allow cheat code entries.  ^__^;

> Well, it's not in Wikipedia, but we have Google around here too ... ;-)
> I even linked to the first issue of "Ubunchu", in English.  When I was in
> Japan some centuries ago, I loved the traditional culture and found much
> of the popular culture interesting too ... King Kong movies, music halls,
> precision chorus lines ... but I could not understand pachinko and manga
> comics at all ... :-(

Manga began as a low-cost motion picture (or TV series) substitute that could be produced by a single dedicated person (or small group), and has continued in that paradign ever since.  And Anime, while obviously of MUCH higher production value, is also better appreciated in the context of being a movie/tv series substitute, especially with Science Fiction stories where the cost of special effects (and great actors to accompany them) would be prohibitive. 

Ironically, while there is collaboration between manga artists, there seems to be very little actual "open" collaboration and sharing amongst them, I guess due to the retail-heavy nature of the medium.  Seotch-san's Ubunchu is a notable exception, and I admire it more for that (and also because he was so fun to work with during the translation process) than I do for the fact it's a promotional for Ubuntu.

> My son, Peter, who composed the KGoldrunner sounds and many of the
> levels, is devoted to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki and I rather like them too.
> My favorites are "My Friend Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service".

Oh wow, I all-of-a-sudden LOVE the sounds in KGr now.  Forget what I said before,... um,... did I actually say anything?  No?  Good, hehe.... ^___^;

Yes I love many of Miyazaki-san's works, although my favorite would have to go to "Porco Rosso" due to my own personal bias.  -.-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porco_Rosso

> So, if you would like to do an anime theme, please be my guest ... :-)  The
> tech details are in kgoldrunner/themes/README.

Thank you. ^^
Granted I do love Ubunchu, but even I would probably want to show self-constraint and not devote too much time and resources on something inherently distro-specific.  Besides, for that I would prefer to wait until Seotch-san successfully relicenses all the Ubunchu chapters from his publisher -- curently only two have been released, and the third is delayed.

Instead, since a lot of my work revolves around anthropomorphic representations of computer operating systems and components...

(good example, horrible article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os-tan )

...it's my hope to eventually create one representative of KDE, and use her for the basis of not only kdegame themes but interactive educational material as well.  It'll be a challenge coming up with a commonly agreed-upon design, but one thing is certain....

Whether her role is that of a knight, scientist, beastmaster, veterinarian, adventurer, or an unusual combination of those, she would always be accompanied by a pair of green dragons (I wonder why...).  ;)

Well for the time being I'll throw that out as very loud brainstorming.

> These are excellent ideas, Arturo.  I hope the rest of the KDE Games team
> are following this thread, but I'm not sure if we are ready for MUGEN ...

Agreed, and yes you do touch on a point I would've addressed as a "downside" to my other bit of "loud brainstorming" from before.  :P

Realistically-speaking, the per-software Micro Community Integration may only have less than a 30% chance of living up to its purported use.  Or it may be very successful for one game/program, but not 50 others, in which case it would hardly be any different from the current forum/IRC/mailing list support network you have in place now.  These are just wild conclusions thrown out -- for a bit more data, it'd be interesting to see how often the Plasma microblogging and social desktop thingamajigs are used since the MCI concept is just a way of marrying social desktop features seamlessly into a program.

[And just for the record, I want to describe an MCI window in my mind as containing a miniature blog (for announcements), a miniature forum (for easy discussion), a miniature gallery (for artwork review, with perhaps integration with existing theme loaders), a miniature help wanted list (to facilitate contributions), a miniature bug list (which just pulls from the KDE bug tracker), and a miniature wiki (which allows for free-for-all documentation and translation, which could be useful for kde-doc in creating the actual docbook manuals).]

But if for some broad stroke of luck(?) this idea would prove incredibly popular, there's very little doubt you could suffer what I call the "MUGEN problem" which is heavily saturated and uncontrollable user participation.  You could easily go from chatting with our friendly little bunch and taking it easy, to accounting for over a 1000 fans (and leeches).  Its possible our community may attract honest and constructive folks, but no doubt you'll come across objectionable behavior, obscenities or flagrant copyright violations.  Unless there's an efficient (but not offish) moderator system in place, there's always the risk you could spend more time managing the MCIs assigned to your programs rather than actually working on the programs themselves.  :P

On the other hand, I could also think up a whole assortment of creative benefits to this system as well, so I don't want to paint this as all doom-and-gloom.  But bottom line is this all depends on how comfortable YOU (as developers) are with the way things are.  You deserve to place your needs first and foremost.  ^^b

As an artist I'm pretty recluse, but I'm comfortable with that only because I don't want a repeat of the days when that [often thankless] life consumed my real one.  -v-

--Arturo