Re: Aisleriot, Klondike menu and other ideas

[Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>]

On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 18:25 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> Screenshot of Ubuntu featuring Aisleriot
> http://www.linux.com/blob.pl?id=1e89022aa9ab410a42185e57032273d2
> 
> Note the menu labelled Klondike.
> 
> Rather than dynamically rearranging and renaming menus for every
> application I was thinking it might be better to have a Settings menu
> (more on that later).
> 
The decision to do things their current way is driven by history: we got
rid of the preferences menu well before this was implemented. Obviously
I'd prefer not to do another wholesale menu rearrangement, but there is
only one obvious reason against putting these special items in a
preferences menu: discoverability. The appearance of a strange new menu
item makes it visually obvious that there is something to play with.
With a preferences menu there is never any indication that there is
something to look at.

> The game selection has a whole seperate window all to itself and it might
> make you rethink the fairly minimal game selection menu in Aisleriot.
Do you have a screenshot? I don't have easy access to a windows machine
and I am interested in making the selection dialog richer.

My current plans are to have one-sentence description with each game and
to group similar games. 

> The same options appear in many of the games.  "Autoplay" and "King Only"
> are very common and "Deal Three" appears less frequently (more often it is
> considered as a seperate game which works out nicely for marketing
> purposes I'm sure).  You probably already know "King Only" means only a
> King (or a column starting with a King) can be moved to an open space but
> it is an option many games could allow.  I've seen it used already in
> aisleriot but it certainly wasn't optional.  
So are you suggesting a consolidation of the code so that similar games
are presented as the same game with different options?

> Essentially I think a
> Settings menu would be better than having an unique menu for each game and
> there are quite a few things which could be put in it.
I'm not clear on why you think the settings menu would be better. Could
you elaborate? It's obviously not a bad idea, I'm just wondering what
the advantages are.

> Oh yeah,
> they use greyed out Aces in the foundation slots which makes it clearer
> and much more obvious what you are supposed to do. 
That is a neat idea, although really I think work on the drawing engine
is going to have to wait until the cairo back-end for librsvg is stable
- then this sort of thing will be pretty simple.

 - Callum