There has been a lot of discussion in the Kdegames mailing list regarding the porting of the games from deprecated libraries like KGameRenderer and KGameTheme to new rendering methods and Graphics stack. This is a very good opportunity for new contributors to start contributing to Kdegames. Although some of the ports might be a bit difficult but there are easy ones too once the code of a game specially the rendering portion of the code is understood. The port table is available here http://community.kde.org/KDE_Games/Porting. A basic understanding of Qt/C++ would be required, but the junior jobs should get one up to speed for tackling the ports.
For people who want to start contributing to Kdegames , it is advisable to go through the following steps in order
1. Subscribe to the Kde-games-devel mailing list (https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-games-devel) . For those who do not know what it is, a mailing list is basically a kind of a forum where people post their queries or doubts or submit their patches. When they do that, all the people who are subscribed to this mailing list get notified by mail so that they can entertain their queries or the maintainers of the games can review the submitted patches.
2. Try to hang out in the official IRC channel (#kde-games on freenode) . You can have direct conversations with people from Kdegames here.
3. Post your willingness to contribute in the mailing list. It is more recommended than posting in the irc channel .One thing that has to be followed after posting in the mailing list is patience. People are busy and are from a lot of different time zones. They reply according to their convenience which has to be respected.
After following these steps , you should get a junior job which would surely help you get familiar with the source and in general to contribution if its your first time contributing.
Kdegames is a small group of developers and contributors and despite that they have done an awesome job. Although I haven’t been in Kdegames for very long but I really like this group and I would definitely want more people contributing to Kdegames which would help it become even better than it already is.
It’s nice to see KDE games moving foward.
Although I’m not coder wouldn’t moving KDE games to projects.kde.org improve discoverability and make it easier to contribute thanks to git? Or are there plans to move anytime soon?
I don’t know whether KDE games has any plans of moving itself to projects.kde.org but there are plans of moving it from SVN to git as the VCS.
in the kde 4.0, kdegames was often showed as a simple yet powerful example of what you can achieve with the kdelibs 4 + Qt4 (QGraphicView etc).
imho that was a good selling point.
Now, as far as I understand it, kdegames tries to promote an internal framework (KGameRenderer (is related to ‘tagaro’ ?) ).
Of course, this is eaasy to say but, I think kdegames should be ported to QML.
And… who knows ? Maybe it would be possible to run some of them on android easily with necessitas. That might be a sweet way to attract developpers.
KDEgames is promoting the use of QGraphicsView and KGameRenderer is an integrated solution for rendering SVG files. It is designed to be used along with QGraphicsView. And regardig the use of QML actually there is a GSoC proposal of porting of KDE games to QML/Qt Quick. I have applied for that idea myself, if you want you can checkout the post I made on GSoC. Its available here too http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2012/Ideas#Project:_Write_a_KDE_game_using_QML_.28.22Qt_Quick.22.29
it’s a bit OT, but… in order to learn how to write a game for kde, what docs/tutorials do you suggest? many thanks
I wouldn’t suggest going straight to writing a new game, but if you really want I would suggest learning Qt, specially QGraphicsView.The Qt documentation available online should be a good start. There is also a api documentation of libkdegames which includes some basic frameworks like the high score dialogs, AI difficulty etc. Apart from this basic frameworks the development of AI and the UI design has to be done by yourself depending on the game. But before you jump on to writing a new game you should have a look here. Chances are that game is already present in Kdegames.
It’s nice to see that there is still a lot of working going on in KDE games land.
Minor sidenote: maybe you should add the network to IRC channels, not everybody might know that there are different networks (I assume it’s freenode, like the rest of kde)
You can also put in an irc:/ link, many clients out there do understand these by now.
Thanks for your good work, happy hacking
Thanks for the suggestion Christian .I modified the post so that people see that the channel is on freenode. About the irc:/link, I think it might confuse people new to contributions, so I didn’t post that link.
I don’t really follow that KDE games are from deprecated libraries. Qt is still alive and great! Runs natively on most devices. Doesn’t run? Just needs MORE Qt.