Harsh J

If you like open source software, you end up doing that someday sooner or later – you scratch your itch and make a contribution. That’s how it rolls. Well unless you’re sponsored to do so, of course.

I did the same for KDE, having had an on/off relationship with it since 3.x, and finally settling onto 4.3, I managed to get into writing code for it. Although not a fan of the entire desktop, it is what I use on a daily basis and I do feel the lack of a few things sometimes. There’s already too much to customize; and am sure I don’t know the half of it yet.

I read a lot of comic books in my free time, on the PC. While I do have my collections named and arranged neatly, it has always been hard finding a particular file since there were no previews of its covers on KDE 4. Since Okular, KDE’s magnificent all-in-one document reader, reads the files (.cbr, .cbz type) why not also preview it. That became my itch, my want. And I scratched it with copious amounts of help provided by its development community. However, I’d be glad if some artist came along and gave the format an Oxygen-style icon as well – since it still lacks one.

In KDE 4.4, you will have comic book previews which would show you the comic book covers in its file manager’s preview mode. This should make your life easier. However, for .cbr thumbnails to work, you’d need the non-free version of unrar cause the free ones don’t do version 3+ files well. It isn’t a hard dependency, and .cbz ZIP files would work just fine without unrar. I’d also written support for .cbt, but it’d have to wait until KDE 4.5 cause of their ‘feature freeze’.

Since I made it this far, I also fixed certain minor annoyances – some reported by other people as well. A small list:

• Move spelling suggestions to top level menu
• Add timezone data to KRFB while sending desktop invites
• Don’t show ‘add to places’ in dolphin if item is already in there
• Fix the new Kickoff menu for recent applications
• Fix a minor annoyance with KMail’s Composer shortcuts

I’ll be more than glad to hammer more bugs, once the feature freeze melts. Go here to read about what’s new in KDE 4.4.

I’m sure there has been a lot of incidents where you have cursed your most recently acquired game, be it anything from a silly to annoying bug, the lack of a feature that would have made playing more heavenly for you or even something as small as better detail on some object on screen.

Now what if the game were open source, to the fullest extent rather than just the “Extend”. You don’t like the character’s tail, you contribute an idea in form of a feature-request or by getting into the development yourself. So do million others. Together you can, over time, form a completely different game than the one you were being unsatisfied with!

Yo Frankie! - An open source game in active development.

The usual way of extending a game would be to add in map and skin packs while letting the functionality of the entire game remain constant. What if the game evolves with time, adding in new moves, more pick-ups and extras, and more elements to the game, such as weapons or collectibles?

Though these are present in some of the games alive today, it would be greater if the game were or went open-source, opening the game’s code to a world of never-before imagined possibilities and also getting in tons of optimization over time. Of course, building a game big enough like the heavyweights we have today requires the work of a large active team behind it, but once done with its release, getting in additions to the code would we amazingly easy were it supported by a good version-tracking system!

Playing such a game would mean endless hours of fun, repeated every couple of months for a completely different experience while still remaining the old charms that a player liked. New innovative concepts implemented by avid code-enabled gamers would add in more and more goodies, much like how Compiz-Fusion is today, an idea being born a day and implemented almost as fast.

Yes there would be a point where it would hit a roadblock and this is where the next game development has to begin. Ideas found in the older version could be tried out across a multitude of other genres, and what a learning experience would it be for creating that “ultimate” game many always dreamed about!

I hope some biggie in gaming gets onto this OSS bandwagon, with atleast a half-baked title cracked open, and pretty soon, since the game market is losing out on ideas really, and thats cause ideas are limited to them in the closed confines they live in.

You’d say what of the OSS games we have today, and I’d point at their evergrowing success till date. No game has ever been given a cold shoulder and kicked out of existence, right from Nethack to Nezuiz. Though this post was inspired by a particular game known as Yo Frankie!.