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Akademy 2007 draws to a close. Dolphin embedded as the file management view in Konqueror. Plasma continues to mature, with new data engines for Tasks and Bluetooth, and EBN and Task Manager Plasmoids making an introduction. Further progress in Javascript bindings through QtScript; import of Kimono (C#) classes. More basic functionality added to Kollagame, a game development IDE. Initial work in the KWin/Xinerama and 2d Projection for Marble Summer of Code projects, with continued progress in the Icon Cache, KOrganizer Theming, KRDC and Music Notation projects. KListView gets support for keyboard navigation, and a new, more descriptive name: KCategorizedView. KIconCache renamed to KPixmapCache to reflect its wider benefits to graphics across KDE. Paint mixing improvements and general speed optimisations in Krita. KMail and Mailody now share account identities. Support for more digital camera models in Digikam libraries, with the porting of many image plugins to KDE 4. More interface and collection management work towards Amarok 2. More effects for kwin_composite. Decibel is moved to playground/pim. system:/ and home:/ KIOSlaves removed, with preparations to remove media:/ in the near future.
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So, that's it for another year: Akademy 2007 has concluded, but not before an indelible impression was made on attendees and definition given to wide-ranging plans. As with the initial impression of last week, I have selected one of the many developer blogs covering the event: in the words of Aaron J. Seigo:
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it's been an amazing week, however. the things that struck me the most was the growing visibility of teams within kde. i think we have successfully traversed the conversion from a project to a full meta-project. while in previous years we were obviously a meta project made up of many smaller efforts, this year it is very apparent where there are teams and who they are.
the developer sprints, the increase in project specific branding and merchandising and just the general maturation of each of the teams is all resulting in good things.
i've received comments from some of the people visiting who aren't from the kde community about how friendly and open the event has been; and i have to agree. it's been a hugely successful event with very useful and important discussions touching just about every part of kde happening.
there's also been a lot of hacking with things like the infamous krunner bug finally getting fixed (lubos is a god; and even then it took god most of the day to figure out the problem which was in the netwm code in kdelibs), lots of plasma engines and other work, amarok hackery, edu apps greatness ... the announcement of webkit in 4.4 eclipses my excitement for widgets-on-graphicscene even, and seeing zack's opengl widgets on plasma is amazing =)
it's all too big to keep track of and visualize at one time, and it's moving yet faster. we haven't hit a scalability wall yet. i think that is in part due to the amazing people we have involved and in part due to us actually thinking about these things in past years.
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From my own perspective, Akademy 2007 was completely worthwhile. As a reinvigorating and rallying force for possibly the most challenging yet exciting year to come, the conference allows us to celebrate our common goals and chart paths to be eagerly explored. I enjoyed putting faces to SVN accounts, and the number of new people always (pleasantly!) surprises me.
Aaron condenses the widely-held opinion (and one that I personally subscribe to) that the "KDE Community" - which is in reality a composition of many smaller and highly-focused families - has never been as strong, vivid, and vital as it is at this point in time. With this energy, we can expect great things from KDE 4.
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Keith Neuse introduces his embryonic game development IDE, Kollagame:
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Kollagame is a game development inferface for making several common types of sprite-based games:- Final Fantasy
- Mario Brothers
- Space Invaders
- Zelda
The idea stemmed from the fact that we have so many rapid development environments for various programming languages, databases, and applications, but there are almost no IDE's for creating games, particularly on open source platforms. The idea for Kollagame is that the average user with little or no programming experience will be able to create an effective game. Kollagame will feature two seperate programs: Kolladev (the environment IDE), and Kollagame (the game engine or the program that allows the user to play the game). For such a large application, I plan to include tutorials that will help users in their quest at making their own games.
Currently, Kolladev is about 20% complete, with support for creating a game project, adding levels to the game project, and placing tiles into the various levels. Kolladev also supports level saving/loading. Kollagame, which is only currently about 1% complete, supports loading a current level.
What are the future plans for Kollagame and Kolladev? Kolladev is going to support advanced IDE functionality. For example, a user will be able to drag multiple items onto a treasure chest (including enemies, spells, and powerups) as a way to link items to a treasure chest. The user will also be able to drag items into enemies for the items the enemy will drop after it is killed. Each object in the game will have a series of properties that the user can set, to adjust the nature of the object. Also all spells, enemies, characters, weapons will support a scripting language to allow more advanced users to create custom objects. One last feature that Kollagame will support are mini games. As you know from playing Role Playing Games (RPG's), many of these games have mini games for winning special weapons and items - and even powerups. Throughout the development and planning of kolladev and kollagame, a lot of thought is going into customization and ease of use.
Here are some current development screenshots:
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It has become clear this week that the Summer of Code is now in full swing, with more projects committing initial code, and the early-starters continuing to make significant progress in their projects. Over the coming weeks, I plan to go deeper into these projects, their purpose and ambitions, and go even further, interviewing the students behind the Summer of Code at KDE. These interviews will be integrated with developer introductions of their projects here at the Digest, and will be hosted at the People Behind KDE website.
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