Re: Gataxx

[MattyT <mattyt-spam tpg com au>]

On Wed, 2003-12-31 at 12:59, Callum wrote:

> You do realise that this almost makes gnome-games completely redundant
> :) ?

I've thought for quite a while that it would be ideal to unify Gataxx,
Iagno, Lines, Same GNOME and Four-in-a-Row, under a board architecture,
providing the features of each individual game universally, and bring in
Chess, Draughts and Go.  It would be great if GtkBoard could eventually
make this happen.

It would also be wonderful if someone did something similar for
non-solitaire card games like Poker, Rummy, Hearts and so on.  I can't
see the logic for hundreds of card games taking up much disk space if
done right, the main obstacle would be programmer time.

I know you said this in jest, but I would hope that "making gnome-games
redundant" might be a call for people to make new games to put into it
so there's a bit more variety than just a lot of board and card games. 
This might include games such as Dominoes, Backgammon, Scrabble,
Battleship, more miscellaneous dice games, and so on.

In fact, I don't see why gnome-games couldn't have a *LOT* of games in
the long term without tremendous disk space usage, given a lot of the
space seems to be sounds and images which should be able to be reused a
lot.  Clearly no one would want the menu size bloated either, but I
think you can have a program for each family of games without too big a
menu.

This having been said, it might be a good idea before doing all this to
think about how these mega-programs should present their UI for game
selection, and whether AisleRiot or GtkBoard has the best solution. 
Presumably the UI should be consistent across them.

> Nothing new is going into gnome-games for 2.6. I keep thinking about doing
> a bit of a shake-up for 2.8 and throwing some games out (or at least into
> a separate package). That might be the right time for GtkBoard and
> gnome-games to meet.

Do games really need to be moved now there's been and continues to be a
lot of refactoring work going on?

-- 
         Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy        
 My Short Autobiography: 1985 Grade Bin Monitor 1990 Class Clown Award
1992 Awarded Most Likely To Spontaneously Combust 1996 Crowned Galactic
         Emperor 1998 Released From Smith Psychiatric Hospital