#tux4kids chat log for 2002-03-17

Summary

The purpose of this chat was to gain some direction for the internationalization of Tux Typing. There has been a strong push from external sources (users, game players, etc) to have Tux Typing support other character sets and keyboards. So Calvin Arndt proposed a #tux4kids meeting to discuss this. Here is a digest of what went on:

• There will be a stable and developmental branch for Tux Typing (Sam will take care of that).
• Stable will remain largely the same, but developmental will include a rewrite of the input and text core. It will be done with SDL_TTF and UNICODE.
• Internationalization will still be done through a "theming" engine, however instead of supplying new fonts via individual character image files, the theme packager will supply a new TTF font file (if needed).
• The use of TrueType fonts presents one possible problem: Can we obtain fonts that are Free (as in "Freedom") which we can legally include in Tux Typing? Jesse Andrews suggested looking into Debian to see what they've done to solve this issue for them.
• One other problem: By changing to SDL_TTF and UNICODE for Tux Typing dev branch, we will break compatibility with the current themes. However, since we only have three themes at the time of this writing, and only one of them uses a custom font, if we do ever break compatibility by doing things "The Right Way(tm)" now is the best time.
• Eventually, we would like an options menu for Tux Typing that grants users the ability to edit word files themselves. Sam Hart made a suggestion that perhaps an external program called from within Tux Typing would be better, since it could then be incorporated into other Tux4Kids projects (for example, TuxReader would be able to use this). An external editor (that could also parse Tux Typing's configuration files) would help make Tux Typing (and other Tux4Kids applications) more modular.
• Another option that would be nice would be the ability for the user to dynamically change their theme/language from within the game (via an options menu). However, we will first focus on making the theming engine more robust and using CLI options before we add a GUI allowing this.
• Sam will document playgame.c to try and make entry into the project easier.
• A patch (solving some performance issues in TT-stable) from Calvin has been lost. There are efforts currently to recover it.

In addition to these items, the following general Tux4Kids items were discussed.

• Two new projects have been added. One will be a suite of Physics simulations useful in teaching High-School and College students Physics phenomina (no web-site yet). Another is a web-based Biology project which hopes to target K-12 in addition to College level students (http://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cell/). These have not been officially announced yet.
• Qt is apparently not available under the GPL for Mac OS X. This kills a proprosed cross-platform installation program which was to be written in Qt. Such a cross-platform installation application would be very useful in making a single download or CD-ROM that could be used to install our programs on multiple OSes. We could still do such a project, but it will not be using Qt.
• A network interface for Teachers or Administrators for some of our applications might be nice. Something that could 1) tabulate scores & results, 2) allow remote configuration, and 3) store record-keeping. SDL_websrv was suggested as one way this could be accomplished. Whatever we ultimately do, we should make it 100% optional at compile time (to keep library dependancies down).
• Perhaps our games should give "constructive" responses when the children lose, so as not to discourage them from trying again. Currently, our games give very simple responses (neither constructive nor otherwise).