Re: some help appreciated!

[Mario Frasca <mario anche no>]

good day to you Arth,

On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 02:41:00 +0530
Arth Patel <arth svnit gmail com> wrote:

> Yay!! One more classic!!

yes! :)

and after Skat then need "scopa" and "tressette", I am already
almost done putting a set of Neapolitan cards in svg format.

you are Indian, aren't you? or that's only the way your name sounds?
which cards and card-games are specific to your area?

back to xSkat...

> > someone wants to help porting it to gnome?
> I am not sure how much time will I be able to spend on this project,
> but I can help in porting back-end stuff ( I'm not really good at
> using GTK library. :-/ ).

if you want to help think about it, we can use
https://github.com/mfrasca/xskat/issues to split up the todo list. we
could use a label named "porting to gtk" to keep issues together.

my thoughts after having dug in the source code for xskat is that it is
close to being unreadable. wait, don't be discouraged: the relevant
parts are recognizable and can be separated. the part which I do not
manage to follow is the part related to user interface and it might be
my limitation. Anyhow I don't think this is a problem because it is
exactly the part we want to rewrite and writing from scratch is a lot
easier than translating.

so other part of the thoughts arising after reading the code is we could
start by designing a dummy program that looks good and does not even
know the rules. then extract from current xskat the parts related to the
automatic players and the computation of the result. as said these are
quite separate parts.

so. what do you think?

we have a game for three players (parametrizing is advisable!),
each player receives 10 cards (but during play this goes down to 0),
we need display 12 cards and allow the user discard 2,
the window for bidding/accepting the bid/passing,
and the window for finalizing the contract.
all options can fit in a tabbed window, not?
I think it isn't such a huge amount of work actually...
I definitely want to use svg cards as the ones in aisleriot.

later points, but not part of porting itself:
do we want sounds? cards being shuffled, card falls on table, ...
do we want the cards to move from player to table?
I think we do "click on card to play it", rather than "drag and drop".

> I am not much knowledge about the fitness of the game to be included
> in gnome-games, but I'm ready as a +1 in porting the game. :)

seems they do not accept any more games in gnome-games, but this is not
a problem: we can start a gnome-skat project. and then maybe rename it
to gnome-cardgames in case we can expand it to contain more games.

> https://github.com/mfrasca/xskat/
>
> I'll be mostly consumed by my semester exams in near future, but do
> let me know if you decide to port it.

oh, but I definitely want to rewrite it in gtk!

I would like to add stuff to the program, but if it stays as it is, I
do not manage to make any changes! one modification I made, altering
the text on the three top lines in the results window, have quite
surprising effect: if the text is too long, it is not any more centred
but starts somewhere close to the middle of the line, then goes back to
the beginning and the last few characters are repeated in the next
line, I do not plan examining the issue, I look at it as hinting at
porting to gnome and abandoning the current version.

(the text is about computing the result of a hand. when a hand ends,
its value is computed based on the trump suit (base value), the number
of high trumps with-or-against, whether or not one had more than 90
points, whether or not one had the full 120 points, and even more
yes/no questions, so a possible explanation text could be "club 12,
against 2, game 3" and on the next line "the value of the game is 36",
but it could be quite longer, as "diamond 9; with 4, game 5, hand 6,
schneider 7, announced 8, overbid 16", for this the next line would read
"the value of the game is -144". the computation of this text is the
parts I managed reading, the part displaying it was the problem.)

> I might join once the exams are over.

I hope you (and others) will.

(when are semester exams over?)

let's see if I can convince you... I can offer you a professional
approach, I have almost two decades work experience, am currently
unemployed and need stay active, even if it's for a cards game! :)

and I want to learn gtk

cheers,
MF