[Sugar-devel] karma

[Erik Garrison]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> do u mind if I fwd this msg to the sugar-devel mailing list?

Just subscribed to sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org, and CC'ing...

> On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 15:20 -0400, Erik Garrison wrote:
>> This is a great idea.  I'm down.
>>
>> >From what I remember of Conozco it seems relatively straightforward.
>>
>> Outside of Karma, what code should we be sharing/working from?
>
> here is a simpler version of Conozco-Uruguay to start playing w/
> http://github.com/bryanwb/Conozco-Uruguay
>
> I need to separate out the big Chakra framework and navigation from
> individual Karma lessons. The Chakra framewok is a UI for aggregating
> Karma lessons and not the best place to get started
>
>> I'm reading through the Karma git tree now.
>>

Is there an overview of the system's structure anywhere?  If not I can
write one as I read.  Unless there are plans to radically change it
soon.

>>
>> As for improvements that demonstrate the beneficial nature of this
>> project... I have an idea:
>>
>> Seems that there is an outstanding feature request on conozco:
>> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Conozco_Uruguay)
>> "#  Permitir utilizar distintos mapas " -- allow the use of different maps
>>
>> .. So maybe an interesting continuation of this project would be to
>> write the program in a way that doing this is easy, and ultimately
>> make a front-end to do exactly that.
>>
>> The rough plan of attack I have for the Conozco US project is to first
>> editing an SVG to include attributes that match events in the game.
>> It just makes it easy to manipulate them problematically, and simple
>> to include even complex maps composed of many pieces in one image.  If
>> you have states in your country, you can just label all the states in
>> the SVG.  In javascript you can then use these attributes to find and
>> attach events to the objects.
>>
>> Perhaps this is the kind of editing you are talking about doing with inkscape?
>
> Exactly, it isn't hard to do, just time-consuming.
>
> I did exactly what you have mention by adding class names to the
> relevant elements in the map
>
> a state has the id="deptDeptName" class="dept deptName"
>
> The label for the state has id="textDeptName" class="text deptName"
>
> I then show and hide the text elements by setting the display attribute
> display=none
>
> take a look at the svg in a plain text and u will see what I mean
>
> I used dept because states in Uruguay are called Departamentos
>
>> You could go one step further, take an existing javascript SVG editor,
>> modify it, and use it make it easy for people to use to generate the
>> game data.  That way you don't even have to install or run Inkscape.
>> One target could be: http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/  Including
>> that with the game (as a link) would allow anyone using Conozco to
>> make their own worlds.  If a good target is chosen the amount of work
>> in this step might be very low.
>>
>> -Erik
>
> I think this would be a great idea after there are 4 or more working
> Conozco's for different countries. I caution this approach because
> WYSIWG editors are a very dangerous and time-consuming road to go down,
> esp. when adding really compelling new features to Conozco, like zoom in
> and out, would be much easier.

Yes.  I wrote a sentence which said roughly this, but removed it
because I was worried I was being long-winded.  The thought was mostly
"separate application logic and data and you will have an easier time
adding features and more content".

As for best practices, it's both easy (time-wise, much moreso than
producing a wysiwyg editor) and extremely helpful to simply include
inline documentation describing the way the thing works and pointers
as to how to rework it to use a new map and text.

I'll dig into this.

Erik

>> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
>> > definitely,
>> >
>> > W/in the next couple weeks I plan to put out a tutorial on how to do
>> > Conozco Uruguay using Karma instead of pygame. I have already done a
>> > basic mockup that works but need to document it.
>> >
>> > It would be awesome if you could do a clone of it for the US, just
>> > starting by naming some major cities and not the capitals of all 50
>> > states :)  The hard part is just learning how to edit an SVG map with
>> > Inkscape. and that isn't actually hard, just time consuming ;)
>> >
>> > On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 14:47 -0400, Erik Garrison wrote:
>> >> Yep, I'm quite interested.  I've been doing a lot of javascript
>> >> coding.  It's a difficult but rewarding environment.
>> >>
>> >> How can I help?
>> >>
>> >> Erik
>> > --
>> > Bryan W. Berry
>> > Senior Engineer
>> > OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org
>> >
>> >
> --
> Bryan W. Berry
> Senior Engineer
> OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org
>
>