Re: SVGCards?

[David Bellot <david bellot gmail com>]

> The choice of a monolithic file made sense from the perspective of
> simplicity of code and the versatility of images. Unfortunately it makes
> drawing the cards in the first-place an absolute nightmare. I'm
> seriously thinking of changing it to individual files for each card.
>
> I'm sure David Bellot (who created SVGCards) has something to say about
> this.
>  
Yes indeed ;-)
SVG-cards has been made especially for gnome-games. I think having a 
single file works pretty well and is usually the kind of techniques 
people use in all kind of games (have you ever disassembled amstad and 
amiga games ? ;-) )
For pixmap based games, there is no real difference between a file for 
each card or a big file. For SVG it is quite different as complex 
symbols are usually put into <defs> and used through the <use> 
mechanism. It saves a lot of space and it is especially true for cards 
games.
What I'm thinking about is to access each card separately using the DOM 
api. It is possible to do that in a web browser (still waiting for a 
full svg implementation in firefox) and you can even do nice things like 
just loading the cards you want (with xmlhttprequest for example). I 
guess it would be a better solution.
The second point in favor of having a single file is that small devices 
would prefer not to duplicate data because of their small memory. I know 
already about several projects planning to use svg-cards 2.0 into 
cellphone and PDF games, and usually they prefer to have a small file 
even if it's a bit more complex to deal with.

Best,
David