[pio-develop] Contributing a new theme

Hey Pioneers developers,

I created a new theme for Pioneers that I would like to contribute to the
project.  What would be the best way to do that?  Obviously a patch is sort of
worthless, since there are binary images involved, but I'm not sure what your
policy is about giving new people SVN access.  I could just send the theme
directory in a tarball if that would be easiest.

About my theme (ccFlickr): all of the images used in the theme (apart from the
background, which I ganked from Ubuntu) were found on Flickr, and are licensed
under Creative Commons licenses that allow noncommercial derivative works to be
made with them.  The goal was to make an attractive theme with hexes that are
colored so as to be recognizeable and distinguishable from one another at a glance.

Thanks for your help!

Aaron

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Re: [pio-develop] Contributing a new theme

Hello Aaron,

Excuse the long delay, I've been busy IRL with other things.

> I created a new theme for Pioneers that I would like to contribute to the
> project.  What would be the best way to do that?

Please create a tarball of the related files. Either post it in the
Patches section on SourceForge, or send it to this list.

> About my theme (ccFlickr): all of the images used in the theme (apart from the
> background, which I ganked from Ubuntu) were found on Flickr, and are licensed
> under Creative Commons licenses that allow noncommercial derivative works to be
> made with them.  The goal was to make an attractive theme with hexes that are
> colored so as to be recognizeable and distinguishable from one another at a glance.

If you include files from various sources, I would welcome an
explanatory file with the location of the original files, the name of
their authors/creators, and licenses (and, if required by the license:
their approval or the method of attribution).
That is just to be sure that Pioneers will not infringe on a license
when the theme is added.

Regards,
Roland Clobus
Developer for Pioneers

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Re: [pio-develop] Contributing a new theme

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 07:35:59AM +0100, Roland Clobus wrote:
> > About my theme (ccFlickr): all of the images used in the theme
> > (apart from the background, which I ganked from Ubuntu) were found
> > on Flickr, and are licensed under Creative Commons licenses that
> > allow noncommercial derivative works to be made with them.

If only non-commercial derivative works are allowed, then this means I
cannot include it in the main Debian packages.  I could create a
pioneers-data-nonfree package, but I think that's too much trouble, plus
I don't want to suggest to people that using the non-free repositories
is a good idea.

Of course this doesn't mean that pioneers can't include it.  It just
means I'll keep the theme out of the Debian packages.  Which is a pity,
since I would really like to see a new theme.

Thanks,
Bas

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Re: [pio-develop] Contributing a new theme

Hi Bas,

> If only non-commercial derivative works are allowed, then this means I
> cannot include it in the main Debian packages.

This should have occurred to me.  I will check with the flickr users I got the
images from to see if they will grant a BY-SA license on the images, and if that
doesn't work out I'll replace them.

While we're on the subject, I think it would be great if the themes could be
decoupled from the executable, so that users could easily add themes that
weren't included by default.  Would any of the developers care to comment on how
difficult this would be to accomplish?

Thanks for your help,

Aaron

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[pio-develop] [Patch] use /dev/urandom for randomness if available

Hi!

For a game that is based on rolling dice, I found it surprising that
pioneers uses a pseudorandom sequence initialized with a call to
time(NULL).  If somebody knows roughly the time that a server process
began, as well as the results of the first few happenings of chance, it
is quite possible to determine the seed used and predict further
happenings of chance throughout the game.

At a minimum, I think the RNG's seed should be based on a less
predictable source of random data (/dev/urandom) if it is available.

The attached patch (made against svn) actually goes a step further, as
it uses /dev/urandom for all random numbers if it is available;
otherwise it falls back to glib's generator.

I started a new set of files (common/random.[c|h]) because it did not
make sense to me to have the random number routines in server/server.c
when they are used from common/map.c as well.  Feel free to put the GPL
notice in these files' headers, or feel free to move the function
wherever you see fit.

Any comments are appreciated.

All the best,
Jim

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Re: [pio-develop] Contributing a new theme

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:19:06AM -0400, Aaron Williamson wrote:
> > If only non-commercial derivative works are allowed, then this means I
> > cannot include it in the main Debian packages.
> 
> This should have occurred to me.  I will check with the flickr users I
> got the images from to see if they will grant a BY-SA license on the
> images, and if that doesn't work out I'll replace them.

That would be really nice. 

> While we're on the subject, I think it would be great if the themes
> could be decoupled from the executable, so that users could easily add
> themes that weren't included by default.  Would any of the developers
> care to comment on how difficult this would be to accomplish?

They already are.  I didn't look it up in the code, but I think it just
scans the directory ${pkgdatadir}/themes (on Debian, pkgdatadir is
configured as /usr/share/games/pioneers).  The pngs in there are the
"Default" theme (which is no longer the default, I think, but doesn't
have a different name anyway).  Any directory in there with a file named
theme.cfg should be used automatically.

There is a feature request to always scan the user's home directory as
well, so you don't need to be root to install games.  The same is true
for themes, of course.  For games, there is a workaround (running the
console server with the --file argument).  There is no workaround for
themes that I am aware of (other than installing a private copy of the
game).

[pio-develop] String freeze for 0.11.4

Hello all,

I've updated all strings for the 0.11.4 release. At this moment a string
freeze is active, I hope the translators can update the translations
before Sunday 6 April. I'll mail the translators separately too.

I've uploaded a tarball with the updated strings, the remaining time can
be used to reduce the bug count.

Regards,
Roland Clobus

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