Re: Reviving KSokoban releases, next week already 8)

Hello Friedrich,

> On 24 Aug 2022, at 9:35 am, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau =
<[email protected]> wrote:

> in case there are still some (passive) KDE Games community members =
here, I=20
> should keep you in the loop I guess :)
>=20
> Last week, while updating code using API I had deprecated myself in =
KDE=20
> Frameworks, I came across the KSokoban repo =
(invent.kde.org/games/ksokoban).=20
> And while I remember that game from early KDE days, but not being much =
into=20
> gaming the last decade, I was surprised to see that the code was =
fairly up-to-
> date and the program actually usable, yet there had not been a release =
for=20
> more than 14 (sic!) years, the last one at KDE3 times.
>=20
> Which saddened me, all the efforts done by all the people all the =
years, yet=20
> no easy usage of the product for everyone.
> Well, besides Gentoo user as https://repology.org/project/ksokoban =
hints;)

I was around in those days on the KDE Games team. The transition from =
KDE 3
to KDE 4 was extremely difficult. Several games feel by the wayside - =
not just
KSokoban. Some major ones were KPoker, KBackgammon and KSirtet (a
Tetris-like game). Essentially it had been resolved that all the games =
needed
to have their graphics code re-written and their artwork re-created in =
SVG
(Scalable Vector Graphics). We had 20 or more people working on this,
including some artists, but not enough to to convert all of the games. =
KBlocks
eventually replaced KSirtet.

I guess KSokoban got dropped because its graphics was based on Povray, =
but
we had resolved to =E2=80=9Cstandardise=E2=80=9D on Qt4, SVG and =
QGraphicsView and nobody
understood the KSokoban code and graphics well enough to make the =
change.

> First read up a bit on the history in the ML archive, to understand =
why things=20
> are where they are. And for what I understand, the main issue was the =
non-
> scaling UI, and then the lack of fully dedicated maintainer to get =
things=20
> done, either by a replacement app like Magazynier or QML Sokoban =
(found on=20
> store.kde.org) or by doing the hard work to port KSokoban codebase to=20=

> libkdegames API and get respective scaling graphic material.

Correct.

> Long term I would like to see KSokoban joining most of the other KDE =
games as=20
> part of the KDE Gear release effort, ideally already starting with =
2KDE Gear=20
> 2.12. Feedback on the 0.5.* releases should help here.

Thank you very much for your work on this, Friedrich. I think a lot of =
people
would welcome such a release. It was a very good game!!!

All the best,
Ian Wadham.=