Re: Proposed: monkey-bubble

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey,
	I've just taken a poke at this. I like it ... it looks like it would be
a nice addition to the desktop.

	I know Callum doesn't want to take this in gnome-games[1] but I don't
have any problem with this being included in its own tarball. While
something is in active development like this, it seems much more
sensible for it to be separate and solely under the maintainership of
its authors.

	Some comments for the authors:

  + First and foremost, you've got to do something about the bubble    
    colours ! :-) Being quite badly colour blind, I totally suck at
    the game because its very hard to distinguish between 
    bubble_05/bubble_07 and bubble_02/bubble_08. Possibly using stripes
    or spots on some of the bubbles might help.

  + You should have defaults for the controls - you shouldn't require
    every user to configure the controls before playing. I'd go for
    "left", "space", "right" for player one and "z", "x", "c" for player
    two, or something.

  + You should really use eggaccelerators.[ch] for the controls 
    preferences, and the UI should probably something very like the
    keybindings capplet (see gnome-control-center/capplets/keybindings).
    This is something you should aim to have done before 2.6 as well,
    because we really don't want to be changing gconf keys after the
    release.

  + You should have accelerators for "New Game", "Pause Game" etc.

  + I think you shouldn't have both a "Pause Game" and "Resume Game"
    menu item. Use a single menu item and change the text depending
    on whether the game is paused. Possibly it should be a toggle
    menu item. Consult the HIG.

  + I don't that we need "Stop Game" at all, but you should definitely
    be able to start a new game without explicitly stopping the game.

  + High scores ?

  + It is utterly essential that you have some wacky little easter egg.

  + It seems to require GStreamer 0.6. The GStreamer version that's
    going into 2.6 is 0.7. monkey-bubble needs to use 0.7.

  + The sound support seems to be still in development (it looks
    for sounds in /home/lolo). It probably makes sense to only
    build this with --enable-sounds so that there is no GStreamer
    dependency until its finished.

  + Some of the code infringes on the Gdk and Gst namespaces. Not
    a huge deal, but if e.g. a GdkCanvas was added to gtk+ 2.6
    this version of monkey-bubble would be unusable with that
    version of gtk+. I'd do a s/GstAudio/MonkeyAudio/ and a   
    s/GdkCanvas/MonkeyCanvas/ and a s/GdkView/MonkeyView/

  + Have you looked at FooCanvas? It might be more suitable for you
    than your own canvas implementation.

Cheers,
Mark.

[1] - Totally understand that ... the motivation sounds very similar to
my reluctance to add netstatus to gnome-applets.