Re: GSoC: convert Gnobots2 to Clutter

[Diego López León <diega locolandia com ar>]

2009/3/27 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! :)
I really thank you your suggestions and feedback.
>
> To get extra points from me:
> 1) Implement it so that the game window can be resized

Do you think that we need to set a minimum size for the window?
because the game could be unplayable in a tiny one.

> 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.

I can add it, but is necessary to translate those words?

> 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.

This is absolutely great.

> 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's a nice effect and to implement the overlap shouldn't be so difficult

>
> 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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>



-- 
diego