Re: [Tuxmath-devel] New Tuxmath commit (Re: New icons for tuxmath)

[Tim H. <ho...@wu...>]

Hi David,

On Thursday 25 January 2007 05:17, David Bruce wrote:
> Try it now - I had changed the backgrounds from .png to .jpg (much smaller
> files) but forgot to change the code in one place and had left the old .png
> file in the data dir - should be fixed.
>
> For some reason, svn kept telling me that data/images/menu was already
> under source control, even though it wasn't.  I have renamed it to
> data/images/sprites and added it successfully.  I just did a clean checkout
> in a test directory on my Debian box and it works OK.

Holy smokes. I'm deeply impressed. I look forward to giving it a more serious 
test, but I really liked what I saw.

> > I notice that game.c has not changed in a while; presumably your work
> > with the menu code does not affect this? Thus, unless you disagree, I'd
> > be happy to hack on game.c to incorporate the new icons/effects, since
> > that shouldn't conflict with the work you're doing.
>
> That would be fine.  For what it's worth, my daughter is very adamant that
> we keep the "city" graphics as an option, at least.

It wouldn't do to disappoint her, then! I also like the city 
graphics---they're done with real style and panache. However, just this 
morning I got most of our new icons & actions integrated into the game, and 
it was quite a hit in our family; I hope your daughter will like them, too. 
Still more work to be done there before it's ready to submit to you, though. 
Especially if we have the penguins get up from their melted igloos and waddle 
offstage (so that no comets rain down on them), there will be some extra 
complexity in the game status & rendering code.

Since you're working on the options overhaul, perhaps it would be best to ask 
you to add the "use cities or igloos" option field and config parsing to the 
code. I will write the rendering code in game.c to handle both cases.

One issue: does anyone know of a sizable archive of public-domain sounds? I'm 
looking for a "steam" or "sizzle" sound (ideally, one that's distinguishable 
from the comet zap sizzle, although I'll use that one if necessary). I guess 
we could also do a swap, using the explosion sound for zapping the comets, 
and the sizzle sound for when a comet melts part of the igloo...still, it 
could be nice to have a 2nd sizzle if someone knows where to find one.

>
> Also, one issue will be whether to bundle any fonts.  I understand that
> tuxtype went through some sort of issue with this in the past - for now, it
> just has a hard-coded path to where the desired font is located in Debian,
> and the tuxtype-derived code now in tuxmath does the same thing.  I would
> favor bundling a single default/fallback font with the program, and
> eventually putting in some smarter code to search for system fonts (this
> seems to be what TuxPaint does).

I think that's a good idea---clearly moving to sdl-ttf is a big win in terms 
of flexibility, but it also adds new issues. Another one that we may 
want/need to face eventually is internationalization...

Best,
--Tim