tuxmath-devel

[Tuxmath-devel] New icons for tuxmath

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

Hi all,

My third-grader wondered when the igloos and penguins were coming to tuxmath. 
When I told her that somebody had to make them first, she enthusiastically 
volunteered. Thus begins the next generation of open-source contributers...

So, with a wee bit of help from dad, she's produced some candidate icons for 
replacing the exploding cities. There are a few samples attached, as png 
files. The originals are SVGs we created with Inkscape, which seems to be one 
heck of a drawing program. (I'm attaching the SVG file too---improvements 
welcome!) The penguin was based on some clip art by "Anita" submitted to the 
Open Clip Art gallery. And we were inspired by the tuxpaint igloo stamp, 
although our drawing is from scratch.

The attached PNG files represent 3 combination icons that we would envision 
fleshing out with additional samples (some of which are already drawn, as you 
can see in the SVG file): the happy penguin inside its intact igloo would 
occasionally flap its wings; the penguin does a "duck and cover" whenever a 
comet is about to hit (as seen in the "incoming.png" file); steam goes up at 
the moment of impact (there, I suspect our drawing needs work...). We've also 
wondered about stealing the "running penguin" from tuxtype and having the 
penguin run off-stage when its igloo is completely destroyed. (That was my 
daughter's idea, which I like because that way the penguin itself doesn't get 
hit by any comets.) And finally, an enhancement to the arcade mode play: 
after the player clears a wave, one destroyed igloo gets subjected to a "snow 
storm" that partially (or completely?) rebuilds it. The penguin happily 
reoccupies its igloo. This would basically provide "extra lives," which seem 
so effective in maintaining kids' interest in other arcade games.

Anyway, all these ideas would take some effort yet to implement, but we 
thought it best to share our work in progress with the rest of you to see how 
you like it, and how to proceed from here.

Best wishes,
--Tim & Kendra

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

[David B. <db...@ta...>]

Hi Time and everyone,

On Tuesday 23 January 2007 23:17, Tim Holy wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> My third-grader wondered when the igloos and penguins were coming to
> tuxmath. When I told her that somebody had to make them first, she
> enthusiastically volunteered. Thus begins the next generation of
> open-source contributers...

Cool - I think your third-grade daughter should meet my third-grade daughter!

>
> So, with a wee bit of help from dad, she's produced some candidate icons
> for replacing the exploding cities.

They will certainly be used, as will your Mac build contributions.  It'll just 
take me a while to get to them.

I just commited revision 69 to svn - the menu overhaul is coming along pretty 
well, time permitting.  Feel free to have a look.  Highlights:

- lots of new space-themed graphics, courtesy of the "cosmos" backgrounds 
bundled with Gnome.
- "Math Command Training Academy", basically a way to choose from a series of 
pre-defined option files bundled with Tuxmath.  I think I have 10 "lessons" 
so far - the only limit on the number of lessons is a compiler constant that 
I have arbitrarily set at 100.  The lessons use Tim's feedback code and are 
not intended to speed up very much.
- "Arcade" mode - the original mode where the game keeps speeding up until all 
of the cities are destroyed and players go for a high score.  There are four 
difficulty levels (Space Cadet, Scout, Ranger, Ace) - eventually these will 
be used for high score tables.

The actual options() code is not yet changed, but the above will remove a lot 
of the reason for players/teachers/parents to want to adjust settings.

The code is still, well, a big mess, but improving. 

-- 
David Bruce

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

[David B. <db...@ta...>]

Hi Tim,

On Wednesday 24 January 2007 21:13, Tim Holy wrote:

>
> I updated my sources & recompiled without trouble. But executing tuxmath, I
> ran into a couple of issues:
> 1. Until I changed titlescreen.c so that the reference to main_bkg.jpg was
> turned into main_bkg.png, I got a segfault just after Loading... was
> complete.

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.

> 2. After recompiling, I got farther: past the tux4kids logo, with the
> main_bkg loaded and showing, but as soon as the "Tux of Math Command" text
> reached the left edge of the screen, another segfault. I noticed a lot of
> failures to load images that are nominally in data/images/menu---however,
> in my checkout, there is no data/images/menu. Might that directory not have
> been added to the svn tree? Or is this still a work in progress?

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. 
>
> 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.

> I can submit my patches to you; I never did get a response about getting an 
SVN account.

I don't exactly know who administers the svn site - I think Holger knows. 

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).

-- 
David Bruce

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

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

[David B. <db...@ta...>]

Hi Tim et al,

> 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.

I've just added the above to the game_options struct - the field is called 
use_igloos and the default value is 1.  The relevant accessor functions are  
void Opts_SetUseIgloos(int) and int Opts_UseIgloos(void).  We are now up to 
rev 71 in svn.

Cheers,
-- 
David Bruce