Re: svg cards 2.0 (pre1)

[David Bellot <david bellot gmail com>]

> Well it can't be the default, our SVG rendering is still too slow to
> make that practical. Some immediate comments based on playing with it
> for a few minutes (some good, some bad):
>
> - The detailed work is really well done - although I have to play a
> game like "cover" to see all the detail.
>  
I created this deck with other applications in mind like a (x)screen 
saver with cards turning around on the screen.
But, usually, it's better to have more detail than less. The thing is 
that we can assume we will have better computer with larger or denser 
screen. Mine is still 147dpi (1920x1200).
And other applications are to print out the cards (for kids).

> - The white space around the edge of the cards seems a bit small.
>  
Which space ? Do you mean the black border around the card which is a 
bit thin or the white border between faces and the border of the card ?

> - With the face cards, the letter seems to cut off the cut in the
> background. I suspect this is deliberate, but not to my taste.
>  
Yes, this is the original Grimaud design. I'm still not sure what to do 
with that.
I removed the faces' names as this is not very international. You can 
usually find them on the french deck of cards.
But I like the cutted letters. What other people think about that ?

> On the rendering front: I'm not entirely sure what to do. For a resize
> we could just rescale the pixmaps we have (this is quick) and then do
> the hard rendering in the background so that the user faces fuzz for a
> few seconds rather than a pause. This still doesn't help start-up time.
> I don't think that librsvg is going to miraculously get faster either.
>  
This is the kind of side-effect you can have with this program which 
changes the virtual screen by rotating a cube.
If you look carefully, it rotates a smoothed texture of the screen and 
at the end of the rotation, it changes the smoothed texture with the 
real picture of the screen. It's not very annoying but it's not a nice 
effect too.
Actually, the problems is related to the slowness of librsvg AND the 
size of the deck of cards : usually there are more than 2000 points per 
semi-faces plus joker, laurel and the rest. It means that librvg must 
render a total number of 30 000 points for the whole deck. On my laptop, 
it takes librsvg 3 sec a 800Mhz and less than 1 s at 2400Mhz to render 
the whole deck (athlon 64 3700+). Therefore, it's renders quickly, but 
it's almost impossible to resize smoothly the window.
Maybe, we can wait for Cairo/Glitz in librsvg ?

> One final question: Is this meant to be an enhanced version of the set
> we already have in gnome-games-extra-data or a new card set?
>  
No, this is an enhanced version of the previous one : it replaces it. 
The problem with my previous deck was the complexity of the drawing 
(more than 350 000 points if I remember) and the size.

David