Re: [TetrisBattle] Extending Tetris to multiplayer game for gnome

[John Ward <john johnward net>]

Hi Neha,

This is something that I have looked into briefly, and once I get all the issues completed and add a couple of basic features such as music (which is what I'm doing at the moment), I was going to give it some attention. I also want to do a GTK4 port before March. So as you can imagine this is way down the list. The architectural changes to the game would be significant, so like Arnaud, I am hesitant at this stage, the application would need to be refactored to accommodate multiplayer. However I am very interested to add this feature so I would welcome you on to the project and I am keen to hear your proposal / ideas.

Quadrapassel is written in Vala.

Kind regards,

John

On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 at 09:46, Arnaud Bonatti <arnaud bonatti gmail com> wrote:

Hi Neha,

Pinging John also, as he’s the current Quadrapassel maintainer.
(Federico, not sure you’re interested by the conversation!)

2020-11-28 5:37 UTC+01:00, Neha via games-list <games-list gnome org>:
> This is Neha Govardhana. I'm from Bangalore, India. I worked on GNOME Shell
> as part of GSoC 2011 project.
>
> I was looking to build multiplayer Tetris Game for gnome and came across
> this game on gnome wiki - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/quadrapassel.

Multiplayer Tetris are always great; notably, the Tetrinet protocol is
quite interesting: it’s shared by multiple UIs, and is fun to play. I
know for having recently played that a Gtk client for Tetrinet, called
GTetrinet[1], continues to be packaged in distributions and to work.
Depending on what you want, that might be a better base than
Quadrapassel.

[1] I imagine the homepage is http://gtetrinet.sourceforge.net/ ; needs a check

> I just wanted to know if it is okay to extend this game to multiplayer
> mode. I wanted to develop extra features over it for educational purposes
> for kids.

I’m not opposed to add to Quadrapassel a multiplayer mode; but adding
such features usually comes with big UI challenges (not even counting
the bugs!), with the risk of making the application more complicated
to use for the current players (and for future soloplayers!). So I’m a
bit hesitating, notably as I already find the Preferences dialog UI
quite complex.

Of course, you *can* just do it: the code is under a free license!
(it’s GPL v2.) So you might do your changes, propose them, and you’ll
be anyway allowed to distribute a forked application if they’re
difficult to merge upstream. Again, it depends of what you want to do
exactly!

> I would be grateful for any suggestions regarding this.
>
> Looking forward for your response!

So if I was you, I’d check first GTetrinet; they are not under the
GNOME umbrella, but I’m sure this old project also needs love (not
even sure it’s maintained currently…). I didn’t looked the code, but
it’s probably C. And if you find yourself better with the Vala code of
Quadrapassel, well, see with John, and also don’t hesitate to ask me
for help. :·)

Regards,
Arnaud

--
Arnaud Bonatti
________________________________
courriel : arnaud bonatti gmail com

--

John Ward
Email: john johnward net
Mob: +44(0)7866 622421