G'nex Updates

[Darren Vincent Hart <dvhart byu edu>]

Great!

I agree regarding the AI.  Someone in IRC somewhere said they were going
to add it... but they never got back to me, so I added some braindead
support today with the infrastructure for 3 levels of AI.

I revamped the preferences dialog, I hope you like it better. (I hadn't
noticed how off balance it was until you mentioned it, it was bad!).

I reworked the game API so it has a much cleaner interface now.  It uses
a callback system, similar to xine's stream event listener mechanism. 
It really cleaned up the callbacks.c file and made AI support and future
gnome audio support easy to add.

Please have a look and let me know if this what you had in mind.
http://www.dvhart.com/projects/gnex/

I haven't figured out all the details to resizing yet... would larger
graphics work as well perhaps?  ie double thick grid lines, 20 pixel
squares instead of 10, etc.  (you can set the square size in gconf
directly - but I haven't implemented a callback, so you'll have to
restart gnex).

I am still trying to think of a good way to make it more clear which
player's turn it is (that was a great sentence!).

I'd appreciate your feedback!

Thanks, Darren Hart

On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 18:48, Callum wrote:
> > I would really like to 1) get some feedback from seasoned gnome
> > developers and 2) find out if there is a possibility of including the
> > game in the gnome-games package.
> I'll answer these in reverse order:
> 
> 2) Yes, there is a possibility. Certainly there is space in the tarball
> now (I try to limit it to less than 10M). My main reason for not including
> it would be maintanence issues: if there is a minor policy change then
> each game has to be updated, probably only a few lines each, but this
> builds up to be a big problem for me and the more games there are the
> bigger the problem. Conversely this is the ideal sort of game for
> gnome-games and one I had on my private list of future possibilities.
> 
> If you can add the following features then I would probably include it in
> gnome-games:
>  - Make the game scalable, see gnotravex or gnomine for what I mean. Even
>    on a 1024x768 screen this game looks small in its default mode, so
>    players should have a chance to resize the window.
>  - Add an AI, all gnome-games are meant to be casual amusements and so
>    should be playable by one person.
>  - Documentation is also essential.
> 
> There are a few other suggestions I would like to make, although none are
> important:
> 
>  - Make it clear which colour relates to which player
>    (e.g. replace/augment the counts on the side with coloured bar graphs)
>  - The alignment of the Players item in the preferences dialog seems
>    askew.
>  - The drag handle on the menubar seems to be there even though I've
>    disabled it, have you explicitly enabled it ? GTK+ should handle this
>    based on the users preferences. This may just be something screwy in my
>    system.
> 
> Other than that I must congratulate you on a nice simple game that
> actually behaves like a GNOME application should (most gnome-games don't
> fulfill this criteria yet :).
> 
>  - Callum
> 
>