Re: GSoC: convert Gnobots2 to Clutter

["Thomas H.P. Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

2009/3/27 Diego López León <diega locolandia com ar>:
> Hi, I'm attaching the roadmap part of my SoC application looking for
> feedback from some mentor.
> My plan is to apply for convert Gnobots2 to clutter (as you can read
> in the subject :))

Great. Go for it! :)

To get extra points from me:
1) Implement it so that the game window can be resized
2) Currently the visual effects for "splat", "yahoo", and "aiii" are
just static images with text in them. Use pango to draw the text when
you reimplement that part. This will allow it to be translated.
3) A "danger-meter" that indicates how close you are to being caught.
A classic solution is to display a heart beating and as robots gets
closer it beats faster. Could be a nice way to help new users
understand the rules of the game.
4) Allow for overlapping graphics of robots/human. Currently the
robots have to be drawn very small. I saw (can't find it again) some
graphics where the robots were a bit bigger than their square and
overlapping parts were stacked when next to each other. The game logic
is the same but the robots can just be drawn a bit bigger to take up a
bit of space from the squares around it. I hope this makes sense :)

It sounds to me like you have a good grasp on clutter so that is nice.
Jason will have more insight there.

- thomas

> <roadmap>
>    Since I've dedicated some time to experiment with Clutter, I feel
> quite comfortable with the platform to start coding as soon as
> possible. The actors involved in this game seem easy to identify; I
> will use one for the Human and several for the Robots (with some
> possible performance issues that I'll describe below). According to
> the characteristics of this game there is no need for the Timeline
> concept, because all the events occur when the mouse is clicked.
>
>    I think that by the end of the first month I could replicate the
> current game experience using the new library. The main idea in this
> stage will be to replace the game_area GtkWidget with the ClutterGtk
> widget and change all the interactions with the game_area with
> equivalent functions. For this first stage, I propose a simple
> approach to visualizing different events like robot collision, winning
> the game or being hit by a robot (losing the game).  My idea is to
> replace the actors involved with new ones. Of course, this will change
> later but this way I can achieve the one month milestone of not using
> the ad-hoc canvas draw implementation.
>
>    On the three following weeks I will add eye candy modifications,
> like smooth robot and human movement, nice human teleport with at
> least a shade, animated explosions a short 'seeking safe place'
> animation for safe teleports. The main challenge here will be to keep
> the same game experience as the original one. I like playing this game
> because is agile and you can use it to really distract your mind
> without "dead times" like in games like Nibbles (you have to wait the
> snake get its food) or Tetris (wait until the piece hits the bottom).
> I want it to stay agile, so I don't want to add long animations, like
> big extra animated explosions, or slow teleports. I think I could fine
> tune it during the development.
>
>    The last weeks will be dedicated to performance improvements, It
> probably will not really consume too many resources, but it's possible
> to change things and experiment with features like ClutterClone (since
> 0.9) to replace the robot instances around. I think that this
> experiments will take about two more weeks, leaving two weeks at the
> end as backup time to contemplate any delay in this really early
> estimations.
> </roadmap>
>
> Best regards
> --
> diego
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