Aisleriot ideas

["Timothy S. Nelson" <wayland wayland id au>]

	Hi all.  I've got some ideas about Aisleriot, and I wanted to put them 
out there and see what people think.

	Most of these ideas are aiming to achieve one of the following:
-	Make it easier for people to add new games without having to know as much
-	Make it easier for people to find Solitaire games that they like

A.	Move the XML out of window.c

	In window.c lines 2326-2458 contain an XML file.  It has preprocessing 
data in it.  I think it would be nice to have this as a separate file.  The 
pre-processing statements could be left in, and it could be preprocessed with 
"gcc -E".

B.	Have an XML file for data associated with each game

	It could include data like:
- The name of the game (allows punctuation, etc)
- The Category/Subcategory of the game (is it like Klondike?  FreeCell? Spider?)
- The number of decks (single/double deck)
- The type of deck (ie. have some cards been removed?
- The number of redeals

	The data above would then make it possible for games to be selected by 
category.  Also, if it was in XML, the knowledge required by contributors 
would be much lower, so others could contribute the descriptions and 
categorisations, relieving the developers of *that* load at least.

	It would also be useful if there were a Scheme function that could be 
called, so that the developers of games could access the XML data associated 
with their game.

(I posted this data in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110730 as 
well)

C.	Reorganise filesystem by game

	I wonder if it wouldn't be useful to have a directory called "games" 
that contains a directory for each game, and each game's files there.  So 
you'd end up with things like:

games/gaps/rules.scm
games/gaps/C/data.xml
games/gaps/C/help.xml
games/backbone/rules.scm
games/backbone/C/data.xml
games/backbone/C/help.xml

	I'm not sure I've understood the internationalisation stuff well 
enough to have done that properly.  But this should enable the translation of 
individual games, and the like.

D.	More .desktop files.

	Might it be useful to have the "Aisleriot Solitaire" item on the Gnome 
menus be a submenu instead, and then list all the Solitaire games 
(categorised, of course) directly on the Gnome menus?

	Thoughts?

	:)


---------------------------------------------------------------------
| Name: Tim Nelson                 | Because the Creator is,        |
| E-mail: wayland wayland id au    | I am                           |
---------------------------------------------------------------------

----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----
Version 3.12
GCS d+++ s+: a- C++$ U+++$ P+++$ L+++ E- W+ N+ w--- V- 
PE(+) Y+>++ PGP->+++ R(+) !tv b++ DI++++ D G+ e++>++++ h! y-
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----