Same GNOME is one of the games in gnome-games that has not received a lot of love recently. It is largely bug-free, but the drawing engine needs a rewrite and the graphics are looking tired. It is near the top of the list for major attention in the 2.9/2.10 time-frame. This time, rather than bolting on new features or rewriting sub-systems I’m trying an experiment: rewriting it from the ground up with the final feature-set in mind from the beginning. I’ve made a good start with the basic application up and running, the menus layed out and the beginning of the graphics sub-system.
New features planned/semi-implemented are:
- Resizable graphics (one of the gnome-games long-term goals).
- Small, medium and large playing areas (just like Mines).
- Custom size mode.
- More exicting animation.
- Full-screen mode (this should be a requirement for all of gnome-games).
- No preferences menu – there are “size” and “view” menus instead.
- New high-score dialog (again, similar to what Mines has).
- Preview of the themes in the theme selector.
- Setting the background colour (via drag and drop, like gnometris).
- Working session management.
Any suggestions are welcome, but ultimately I want to stick to a philosophy of similar behaviour and features between the games and to keep to the GNOME ideal of “simplicity that just works”.
The code is not currently in CVS, but I will place it there once I’m confident that this is going to work out and after I split off the gnome-2-8 branch, which will be after the documentation updates, which I am avoiding by doing the Same GNOME rewrite.