Re: SVG for Gnome Card Games

["Richard Hoelscher" <rah rahga com>]

Steven:

Vector graphics are already supported in Aisleriot as of gnome-games-2.10,
released March '05. You can get SVG sources and a brief overview at
http://rahga.com/svg/ , or append these filenames to that URL to get the
bleeding edge jumbo-sized 1600x1200 screenshots:

- paris.jpg - One of two card themes based on traditional Paris pattern
card decks.
- dondorf.jpg - A hybrid theme that uses PNG for the portraits and SVG for
layout and remaining graphics, built on scans from Dondorf cards.
- blackjack.jpg - Includes a preview of a theme that I'm working on to
replace bonded.png (and hope to be done with during June '05), and shows
how large our SVG cards can get.

We also have SVG support in many of our other games, such as Mahjongg,
Minesweeper, and Klotski. We intend to support full-screen modes for all
the games eventually.

----

That said, I would love to see more card quality card decks... Especially
original ones. It's a hard task, though. It's certainly nothing that will
require an official gnome-games blessing before you get started.

Adam Nathan's blog indicates that he hasn't done any graphics for the face
cards and such. In the same vein, SVG templates containing everything but
the artwork for face cards and card backs for aisleriot have been
available at my site for about half a year:
http://rahga.com/svg/cardtemplate2.svg

If you need any help getting started with gnome-games, be sure to check out
http://gnome.org/projects/gnome-games/contributing.html , and email
games-list if you have any questions.

Finally, regarding Cairo... We currently use librsvg to render our cards
to pixbufs, then we make pixmaps out of them. Since librsvg will soon
support Cairo (with plans to replace Cairo's internal SVG support,
originally forked from a much younger librsvg), little to nothing will
change about the actual appearance of the cards.

-Richard Hoelscher
http://rahga.com/svg


Jonathan Blandford said:
 <snip>
> Steven Garrity <steven silverorange com> writes:
>
>> Jonathan,
>> I'm not sure if you're the right person to ask, but you're name is at
>> the top of the list in the credits window for AisleRiot  :-)
>>
>> I was wondering if there are any plans on the table (no pun intended) to
>> use SVG for rending the cards in the various Gnome card
>> games?
>>
>> Inspired by a shot of what Microsoft is doing with their card-games
>> with XAML
>> (http://blogs.msdn.com/adam_nathan/archive/2005/05/03/414148.aspx), I
>> would love to see the quality available with SVG+Cairo in our Gnome
>> card games.
>>
>> I would be able to volunteer to get the SVG card artwork (either
>> through creating it myself, or soliciting help from others - hopefully
>> both) if there is any hope that such artwork might be able to be used.
>>
>> Unfortunately I'm a designer, and not a developer/coder myself, so I
>> can't really help with the implementation.
>>
>> Let me know if any of this makes any sense - thanks,
>> Steven Garrity