Bloggin’ it up

I feel a list is in order:

• KSquares is now in KDE Games and so will released in KDE 4.0.0 Alpha next Monday
• I’ve been doing lots of library work for libkdegames. Stuff that no-one will ever notice
• I’ve got four exams in the coming week so that’s annoying
• Skiing was awesome
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is also awesome

Phew, this lazyman blogging is much easier

Yesterday, I massively refactored KSquares. Basically, there was too much code in the QGraphicsScene class which was handling game data. For example, it was responsible for checking for any completed squares every time a new line was drawn. As a result of this there were signals flying everywhere - mostly to KSquaresGame, the class that’s supposed to be the game controller - which was nastily messy. I moved all game specific code into the KSquaresGame class and so could vastly simplify the API of both classes. A side effect of this refactoring is that it makes it easier when I come to add network support.

All this refactoring got me in the mood to do a bit more work on Sparkle. The code that’s currently in the repository was always intended to be rewritten (maybe several times) and I figured today would be a good chance. I feel at the moment, the code structure is too complex. I need to plan better how everything is going to fit together and how to most efficiently describe the relationships between different objects.

P.S. If anyone’s tried KSquares, I’d love to hear what you think of it as I’ve had no feedback yet

I’ve got myself a SVN account on the KDE repository and have imported KSquares. It can be found at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/games/ksquares/. If you want to build it you’ll need KDE4 and you’ll have to checkout the whole playground/games folder in order to get all the CMakeLists.txt files.

Okay, loads has happened since my last post.

I started work on a 2D physics engine. You can see what I’ve managed so far at its Sourceforge page. The code is all in subversion atm. It’s certainly a WIP and won’t really blow anyone’s socks off since all it really does at the moment is crash

Also, in preparation for doing some proper KDE work I decided to learn my way around the API a little. With the help of annma’s KAppTemplate/kapp4 I managed, in only a day or two to write a little game that uses KDE4. It’s based on that game ’squares’ that is another great timewaster in the same category as Noughts and Crosses. Version 0.1 can be downloaded from this site but be aware that it will require KDE4 and CMake etc.