Friday, August 25, 2006

KMahjongg revamp

Just look at this http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_svg.png new screenshot and compare it with the older one at http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_old.png.

You can see that KMahjongg for KDE4 will be nice eh ;-)

So all of you go and thank Mauricio Piacentini for his cool work, now!

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

That screenshot looks delicious! Sharp and beautiful tile designs! Shots like that would make great marketing tools on the KDE pages.

Anonymous said...

Extremely cool and good looking. Thanks!! Is this SVG based?

Anonymous said...

That new screenshot looks exactly like Gnomes mahjongg :)

Anonymous said...

My gramma will like it.

Anonymous said...

Mahjoong requires much attention and the white background is something which can obstruct and tire the eyes. Make is with the less conspicuous tonality is perhaps a good idea.

Anonymous said...

Great artwork but what is with the "New Numbered Game" button? This is way too big.

Anonymous said...

These tile indeed look gorgeous, but in my opinion, they are mostly for screenshots and PR material, not as functional for heavy gaming. :)

I'm a great Mahjong user. One of the reasons I prefer this one to Gnome's is precisely the way the tiles are easy to read and distinguish from one another.

I think it would be better to use more colors, to better distinguish between the tiles.

Or maybe keep the old art for nostalgics.

Anonymous said...

To be honest, I don't like the new look too much. What I liked about KDE's mahjongg was that the tiles were so colorful (and without much distracting shades etc) that they were so easy to distinguish and find the counterpart in the whole stack.
With the new tiles, they all look blackish-red so you can no longer use colors to find the tile you need.

Reinhold

Anonymous said...

I like how the tiles look like, they're easy to read and they look very serious and I think that's what KDE needs in KDE4

Anonymous said...

I agree; easy to read, serious. This makes for a very polished and professional-looking application. Beautiful!

Anonymous said...

It also has a very authentic feel to it, and the tiles look like I can reach into the screen and pick them up!

Anonymous said...

Hi, guys. Thanks for the feedback. These tiles were originally done by my wife, 5 years ago. They were based on a real Mahjongg tileset she bought on a trip to Kyoto, guess that is why they have this "authentic" feel.

The original version of our game (flash based) can be found at

http://www.tabuleiro.com/jogos/shanghai.htm

For KMahjongg we are still refining the tileset art, adding a subtle highlight, and experimenting with different shadows. I agree with the comment about pure white tiles and visual stress, but if you look closely the new tileset is already greyish, to minimize this. I guess it depends on the background, we can still work on this. And I liked the idea about a more colorful version, we definately need to add a version like this. It could be great for children as well, as matching colors is definately easier than looking for the matches in the tiles, and game logic is about the same.

Just to let you know that our plan is to adapt the existing tilesets, so the legacy options would still be available for the nostalgic. Of course, the existing tilesets use pixmap graphics, so they do not scale as cleanly. But the option to use them will be available.

Anonymous said...

Also, regarding the comment that the tiles look "serious", this has a lot to do with the color scheme. The classic white-red-black scheme is usually associated with this feeling, and it is a trick used by web designers, and press designers long before the internet boom. See for example

www.time.com
www.newsweek.com
www.cnn.com

Of course, we will still need to supply other tilesets. Some could be more colorful and/or less detailed, others could match the KDE4 desktop look more closely.

Anonymous said...

And lastly, regarding the "New numbered game" icon. It is already there in the current version, just right-click the toolbar and select the TEXT POSITION menu to enable it. The real issue imo is that the current icon is too small, it does not match the others in the toolbar. We need to supply a new icon, or alternatively remove this option from the toolbar (it would still be present in the menus, of course.)

Anonymous said...

Looks great, good to see work being done on KMahjongg.

It really helps to have the numbers showing on the tiles but if you could adjust thing so that more of the tiles had the number on the top left I think it would look a little better.

Anonymous said...

Hi, following up from my post somewhere above...

Some points to perhaps consider:

- the numbers should all be at the same place (left-top corner seems indeed a good idea, as suggested by a previous poster).

- however, perhaps numbers are not always necessary (the bamboos are self-descriptive, I think). For the chinese characters, however, it would help to have the numbers, though. Perhaps also for the "ones" which are quite different from the others from the same set (circles and bamboos)...

- it would really be great if the similar tiles were colored/tinted in the same color: green for the bamboos, yellow for the circles, in the same fashion as the old tileset.

- one last thought: are the shadows on the tiles on the same sides as the ones on the rest of KDE ? Think 3D buttons and light effects on the icons. I'm not sure, but someone should check with the styles and icons people that the shadows are consistent, or else we'll end up with a perspective that doesn't feel quite right.

I'm very excited at the perspective of wasting countless more hours playing Mahjong... :)

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it looks really great I wanted to play it at once but it's not in SVN yet :-(

About the tilesets, maybe it's also possible to have different materials (porcelain, wood, glass, metallic).

But IMO more important is to cleanup the toolbar. At least "New Numbered Game", Load and Save should be removed. Whether the game really needs cheating buttons (Undo, Redo and Hint) in the first place I'm not sure. And the clock could/should be part of the graphic.

P.S. Can I also write a comment with Konqueror somehow? The word to verify isn't shown and I've to use Firefox.

Anonymous said...

I really don't think it's neccessary to provide multiple tilesets.
As most people already commented the new design has some usability issues which are probably best solved by adding colors so the tiles are easier distinguishable. In my opinion this change is a must-do for the new design.

Now I don't think it's neccessary to add another even more colorfull version for children (I don't think mahjongg is a game for children, anyways). If you really want to create a tileset for children it should look completely different to the the current design. This would require a lot of work, which, I think, is better spend on other kde games.

Even more so, I don't think it's a good idea to add the nostalgia tileset. All those people saying they like the old one better stated that this is solely because the new one is not colorfull (and thereby usable) enough. As soon as the new tileset is updated this souldn't be a problem anymore and the old one won't have any advantages over the new one (I don't consider 'being the old' one as an advantage) and there won't be a reason left to keep it.

Now there are good reasons to provide alternative tilesets: color blindness, for example. Tilesets and themes (for other kde games, too) for colorblind persons would be a great idea.
I wish I had time to work on KDE ...

Albert Astals Cid said...

I can post with Konqi, yes, this is the proof :-D

Anonymous said...

Wow, lots of attention to this topic. This can only be good. The original file closely mimics a real Mahjongg tileset, and these are traditionally printed with a small number of colors. But I did an exercise following some of the suggestions, adding color (not much!) and changing the position of the numbers. I ended up with something like

http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_color.png

Of course, it is impossible to please everyone all the time, so we should definately support multiple tilesets.

And I learned a lesson, and will not post screenshots anymore until code is at SVN. :)

The nice thing is that with the planned initial SVG support we can progressively (it is not a promise!) integrate something like this in the near future

http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/08/magic.html

So some customization is possible without the need to create whole new art. Specially in the case of colors, the changes I made could in theory be controlled by a CSS file, using the original black/red/white version. Cool.

Anonymous said...

Will the new KMahjongg have the Hot New Stuff feature, where new tilesets and themes can be downloaded?

Mau said...

That (KNewStuff) is in the plans. I would like to add it, but I am not sure yet if it will happen.