GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 87886
consistant starting behaviour
Last modified: 2005-05-12 20:10:56 UTC
When a game is first opened it should be opened to a blank playing field, then a new game starts with the selection of game/new. This will depend on bug 73031 as it will change the game state. Current games that automatically (incorrectly) start a game as soon as opened are: glines gnotravex gtali mahjongg same-gnome I don't know about aisleriot as I don't have libguile to build the program, but I think I remember it working correctly.
I'm inclined to think that this only makes sense for real-time games. If the game doesn't do anything if simply left open, there's no harm in having a new game on startup. So, if I were to start up Aisleriot, and had last played Klondike with no timer in use, then I think it makes perfect sense for a new game to be dealt on startup. On the other hand, it'd be terribly frustrating if I started the gnome tetris game, and pieces started falling immediately.
The problem is with games like freecell, though it isn't a "real time game" if you automatically start a game, then click to close it, like it was a mistake, it is counted as a loss. Also, gnome-xbill has a confirmation dialog for starting a new game, I don't get that at all.
That seems easily fixed by making the game work in the same way as gnomine. That is, the game doesn't start until you actually -do- something.
The policy is going to be: start a new game unless the consequences would be disasterous (e.g. auto-start in gnometris). In the case of timed games (e.g. gnomine or aisleriot) the game isn't considered started until the user does something. The rationale behind this is simply that the user has started the program therefore they probably want to play a game -> hence start a game. aisleriot - OK blackjack - OK gataxx - Not OK, should start immediately. glines - OK gnect - Not OK, should start immediately. gnibbles - OK gnobots2 - Not OK, should start immediately. gnome-stones - OK gnometris - OK gnomine - OK gnotravex - OK gnotski - Not OK gtali - OK iagno - Not OK mahjongg - OK same-gnome - OK
Iagno should have the four initial game pieces shown at startup because it makes it difficult to decide what tileset you want because there is no preview of the pieces. This is not exaclty the same as starting automatically though. It is similarly difficult to choose a tileset in Gnometris but that will probably need to be solved in another way and I should file another report for it!
Iagno will eventually behave like Ataxx (the CVS version, not 2.6.0) which starts a game immediately (which for most cases *is* the same as starting immediately). The two programs will ultimately be merged.
I'm asking this on behalf of the cute-yet-no-longer-really-suitable "G" statup level in Klotski (Gnotski)... Should we remove the unwinnable "G" level, start- up on the last level played by the user, and play level 1 if never played before?
gnotski - OK ("G" level removed)
Some time ago gataxx was fixed up. This just leaves: gnobots2 gnect
Created attachment 39633 [details] [review] gnobots2 patch This is a proposed patch for gnobots2. It starts a game when opened, starts a game when the player dies, and starts a game when the game-type preference is changed (like how gnomines does it). It removes the concept of the not-playing state.
Thanks Michael. I have committed the patch to CVS. One request for future patches: could you provide a ChangeLog entry (if you use emacs, try 'C-x 4 a' to make it easy). And as a bonus, since we are so close, I fixed gnect to auto-start too. So now I can close this bug. Yeah!
Will do. For ChangeLog entries, what is the preferred method: including it in the patch (and dealing with potential conflicts) or out-of-band like as a bugzilla comment?
I prefer ChangeLog entries in the patch. This suits the way I deal with patches.
*** Bug 135073 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***