Stories of a KDE programmer

While watching some television, I hacked on Kolf 2 and built a simple putting interface. The usual disclaimer reads this time that Kolf 2 is absolutely buggy:

• Collision still has some bugs to be sorted out (don’t panic; I have concepts to solve these).
• There is no friction; the ball does never stop.
• Even if friction was there, one could currently not start a second put because there is no instance who shows the putter again; the game management is simply missing.

Still, I find it quite amazing what could be reached in four days of coding (with huge pauses inbetween) using Qt/KDE pillars. In February and March, I will have more than two weeks which I can spend on coding only, and this should be enough time to get Kolf 2 ready for 4.3. Help is of course appreciated (someone has already stepped up to look into 3D rendering, but more helping hands never hurt).

The current putting interface (cursor is at end of the dashed line)

Real life has been busy recently, but work on Kolf 2 is going on. My recent achievement has been first code for collision handling. The new implementation is much more compact and readable than the old one, and I have ensured through some simple tricks that the quirks with the old code (esp. ball-wall collision) cannot happen. Now some of you would like to see this code in action. As you cannot see correct collisions on a screenshot, and I have not yet installed recordmydesktop or such, you will have to checkout the code from playground/games.

I have spent much time to think about the further way of Kolf, and the path seems quite clear now. We¹ will implement a 2D top-down view in Kolf 2.0 as it is known from the 1.x series. Some people wanted an isometric view, but we² decided that it’s too hard to implement. Instead, we³ will be striving to deliver a really good 2D view with clear height impressions for 4.3. (Of course, that means for me personally that Palapeli won’t be ready before 4.4, but Kolf has more priority because of its popularity.) I really want a 3D view, but it will be optional (because the 2D view is much better for the level editor, and also carries the classical Kolf spirit from my point of view). This combination should be able to make anyone happy.

Now on to the announcement: We’re looking for an OpenGL programmer to do this 3D view (I had a look into OpenGL earlier, but did not continue on it). Please contact the kde-games-devel mailinglist if you’re interested.

¹ Concerning programmers, “we” is still “I”, but contributors are welcome.
² In this case, “we” are the visitors of the kdegames IRC channel.
³ Right, that’s “me” again. Contributors are still welcome.