Re: gbrainy & GNOME games

["Vincent Povirk" <madewokherd+d41d gmail com>]

This is sort of a response to
http://blogs.gnome.org/phomes/2008/01/22/the-role-of-gnome-games-and-broken-promisses/
and
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509692

While the changes people are talking about making to robots seem like
they would turn robots into a different game entirely (something that
makes me nervous), this may actually be a good idea. If an engine is
flexible enough (see aisleriot), it can be used to effectively sneak
more games in without cluttering the menus or making maintenance more
difficult. If someone is rewriting robots, why not make an engine that
can handle sokoban as well? It doesn't seem like much of a stretch
(after all, in some variations of gnobots you can push the destroyed
robots around). Having some boxes you could push seems simple in
comparison to, say, weapons. (At the same time, you have to be careful
how many things you try to squeeze in--an engine that is flexible
without having to handle a lot of specific cases is best.)

On Jan 20, 2008 8:55 AM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <phomes gmail com> wrote:
> Here is an email I sent to Jordi back in late November (wow, that far
> back already) :(. I have a draft for a more lengthy blog post about
> this but I have to get my presentation for tomorrow ready first.
> Basically it covers issues like:
> - identifying the role of the gnome-games team. Are we code
> maintainers or judges of games to include in gnome?
> - do distributions want this or do they want to choose games individually?
> - do we want yet more dependencies? Will/can we maintain more
> games/code languages?
> - is adding more games better or worse. The list is already pretty
> long in the menu. Distributions can use
> --enable-games=list_of_games_they_want
> - does gnome-games size matter to distributions?
> - do we want every gnome based game under the sun in one module?
> - what do users want? New games pr. default, more games, more choice
> of different games, more diversity in games (less puzzle based games,
> a children game pr. default)?
> - now that we have swfdec should/will distributions start looking at
> flash based games? Can / should we have some sort of support for this?
> - do game developers want a separate games support library to use
> instead of keeping it inside gnome-games?
>
> This is just my quick ramblings. The blog post will be more structured
> :) It's basically just about getting some more input from the
> stakeholders to base our decisions on. I will get this posted on
> planet tomorrow evening - promise ;)
>
> The mail:
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I've been following your development of the game with interest and I
> really like it. The biggest problem I see is the dependencies. I'm no
> mono hater but there is a lot of politics around the issue and the
> might cause some problems.
>
> Another point which I intend to blog about once I hit planet is the
> point of having a gnome-games package at all. For some of the games it
> makes sense as they use the gnome-games support library. But then some
> others don't and the only real reason that they are in gnome-games is
> so that the get distributed automatically. The question is whether it
> makes sense that we choose what games should get in or not. I would
> rather have the distributions take that decision and pick the games
> they want individually.
>
> Yet another problem is maintenance. We currently use C, C++, scheme
> and python for the games. If we add mono that's yet another language
> I'd have to know fairly well to be a capable maintainer of. While I
> know you would want to continue as maintainer and continue development
> it makes little sense to me to have a lot of maintainers of subsystems
> in one module. Robert Ancell currently maintains chess, Thomas M. Hinkle
> sudoku, Christian Persch and Vincent Povirk aisleriot. Not officially
> but in practice. It works pretty well but I don't see why we don't
> just use different modules for this.
>
> I have yet to make up my mind as to what direction I think we should
> go. There are plans to make python bindings for the library to make
> chess and sudoku use that as well. Maybe we could get some
> monobindings as well. But in the end I'm not too sure how much your
> gbrainy would gain from that. (highscore, clocks, boards, etc.)
>
> But I'll keep you posted and I hope to get some opinions from the
> gnome community as well as the distributors when I get on planet. But
> I want to wait with the discussion until then as I want to reach a
> broader audience than just the gnome-games mailinglist. These are also just my
> thoughts currently and I haven't discussed it much with the other
> developers.
>
>
> On Jan 20, 2008 11:53 AM, Jordi Mas <jmas softcatala org> wrote:
> > Hello Andreas,
> > > Although I don't think there is room for more games in the
> > > main gnome-games distribution, perhaps instead new proposals such as
> > > gbrainy could be included in a new package, for example
> > > gnome-games-extra-data.
> >
> > This would solve an important issue: games that are not part of
> > gnome-games have a big challenge in reaching more users, potential
> > contributors, getting packaged for more distros and so on.
> >
> > Another idea would be to split gnome-games in different packets
> > according to the kind of games that they are card games, arcade games,
> > logic games, board games and you could have a different maintainer for
> > every package.
> >
> > It would be good if we can find an approach where gnome-games helps new
> > games to reach more audience and acts as umbrella project. Right now,
> > gnome-games can only really help the games included in its own package.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > --
> >
> > Jordi Mas i Hernàndez, HomePage http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/
> > Bloc personal http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/bloc/
> > Planeta Softcatalà: http://www.softcatala.org/planet/
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> >
> > Games-list mailing list
> > Games-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/games-list
> >
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-- 
Vincent Povirk