Is there a way to compile Ksirtet in such a way that it runs on a KDE4-System? I am not happy with the KDE4 Tetris clone "KBlocks", I still want to play Ksirtet, but at least Ubuntu/Kubunt doesn't even ship Ksirtet anymore. Looking at its website, it seems that Ksirtet is abandoned/dormant.

So, can I still have Ksirtet on a KDE4 distribution today? Is there any hope that Ksirtet will be ported to KDE4?

It does not even exist in openSuSE. It was removed from trunk/KDE in revision 688508, where the current revision is 878852, and was moved to trunk/playground/games where it rests untouched today. Therefore it never made it to KDE 4.0. It currently appears as if the KDE Games team has moved on to making KBlocks it's replacement.

It seems that there are also no kde3-devel packages for intrepid. But you could compile it from SVN via kdesvn-build and change kdesvn-build settings file to use the KDE3 version. But this could be some work.

Cheers, m.

Thank you for your answers. I read that there are KDE 3 packages provided by a third party for Ubuntu 8.10, including a tutorial on how to allow KDE 4 and KDE 3 to coexist. I haven't tried that yet. So, for Intrepid there is a solution, but I am worried about future releases... I also tried to "statify" (make it a statically linked binary) my shared object ksirtet executable from my Kubuntu 7.10 installation with a program called "Ermine" - I trusted it blindly, I hope, it didn't destroy anything - and it worked somewhat, but it doesn't allow me to change settings. Maybe I'll find a solution later.

P.S.: Sorry for all the commotion, I got it to work now. So, in my Kubuntu 7.10 installation I created a static executable from the existing shared one in /usr/games/ksirtet. How to do this, is explained here. Then I copied the file .kde/share/config/ksirtetrc, located in the home directory, over to the Intrepid installation, to exactly the same location. That was it.

melkart wrote:I am not happy with the KDE4 Tetris clone "KBlocks"

Could you provide more information on why you don't like KBlocks? Is it the look, or do you miss some gaming options?
Developers are probably happy to know.

Eckhart Wörner wrote:Could you provide more information on why you don't like KBlocks? Is it the look, or do you miss some gaming options?
Developers are probably happy to know.

Is KBlocks here to stay at all? On the KDE Games Center I can't find it anymore.

I tried out KBlocks on Ubuntu 8.10. In its current state it's extremely basic and lacks almost all features one expects in a state-of-the-art tetris game.

What I like about Ksirtet:

• I can configure it in such a way that, when I press Space the piece falls all the way down to the ground.
• When a piece hits the ground it bounces a weeny little bit which looks very good
• If I configure it accordingly, Ksirtet shows a shadow below the ground where exactly the piece would come down.
• Ksirtet has a multiplayer mode and an AI player.
• The looks of the pieces are very polished, too.

Dear melkart,

Thank you for your interest in KDEGames, and Ksirter in particular.

Unfortunately KDEgames development team no longer supports Ksirtet. However you may still find it under playground/games, should you so desire. The problem with Ksirtet is mostly complexity of porting. When KDEGames team had initially announced their intention to port the module over to KDE4, and sent out a request for help, no one has shown any interest in working on Ksirtet port. The situation has not changed since then. The team however, has thought it would be rather odd not to have any tetris game in the module, and so Kblocks was born.
Now Kblocks was never meaned to replace Ksirtet. From the start it was planed to become a straight and simple tetris clone.

And now to address some of your concearns:

melkart wrote:Is KBlocks here to stay at all? On the KDE Games Center I can't find it anymore.

Yes Kblocks is here to stay. The reason why you can't find it on our website is because the website is being reworked as we speak. So it will be there, have no fear

melkart wrote:I tried out KBlocks on Ubuntu 8.10. In its current state it's extremely basic and lacks almost all features one expects in a state-of-the-art tetris game.

See the introduction above.

melkart wrote:[*]I can configure it in such a way that, when I press Space the piece falls all the way down to the ground.

You can change the keys by going to 'Settings'->'Configure Shortcuts'
There is no way to make a block fall at one though. But that is more of a usability issue. You see people argued it isn't a good feature to have in a tetris game. Sometimes you may press the drop button by error, and then you are screwed

melkart wrote:[*]When a piece hits the ground it bounces a weeny little bit which looks very good

Oh, come on now. It's just a visual effect Kblock doesn't have it, I agree. But it does have a cool disappearance effect instead :P

melkart wrote:[*]If I configure it accordingly, Ksirtet shows a shadow below the ground where exactly the piece would come down.

I agree, this is a neat feature to have. I'll see if I can convince the dev to add it.

melkart wrote:[*]Ksirtet has a multiplayer mode and an AI player.

One of the reasons there isn't a real multiplayer in any current game in the module is that the multiplayer library has only just been finished It will be implemented in the next release cycle. Though I don't know if current Kblocks maintainer has any plans for multiplayer.

melkart wrote:[*]The looks of the pieces are very polished, too.

Go to 'Settings'->'Configure Kblocks' There you can choose any of the available themes, and even download new ones using the 'Get New Stuff' service ( I know it's well hidden and isn't documented well enough. We are working on it)

it-s wrote:Unfortunately KDEgames development team no longer supports Ksirtet. However you may still find it under playground/games, should you so desire. The problem with Ksirtet is mostly complexity of porting.

Thank you for your answers. Could you tell us what makes porting Ksirtet to KDE 4 so particularly difficult? Not that I know much about programming in Qt, but I am curious nonetheless.

You can change the keys by going to 'Settings'->'Configure Shortcuts'
There is no way to make a block fall at one though. But that is more of a usability issue. You see people argued it isn't a good feature to have in a tetris game. Sometimes you may press the drop button by error, and then you are screwed

I agree that such a misfortune can happen with "fall down at once". But I choose to have it nonetheless as it makes the early stages in the game so much less boring. Shouldn't the user have a choice to configure the game in such a way? It doesn't need to be a default setting.

Anyway, for the time being I am safe, as I have my 25 MB statically linked executable of Ksirtet, which I can carry around everywhere, even to KDE 5, should it come to it.

melkart wrote:

it-s wrote:Unfortunately KDEgames development team no longer supports Ksirtet. However you may still find it under playground/games, should you so desire. The problem with Ksirtet is mostly complexity of porting.

Thank you for your answers. Could you tell us what makes porting Ksirtet to KDE 4 so particularly difficult? Not that I know much about programming in Qt, but I am curious nonetheless.

I am not a kdegames developer, but porting applications from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not a trivial task. There is a lot of code which does not work with the new libraries, so often the developers decided to start mostly from scratch instead of porting the old code. I think this also explains that some options are missing in the KDE 4 versions of some applications.

Cheers, m.

I had some small Qt3 projects. They were small, yet because of the massive change between how Qt3 worked and Qt4, I had to completely rewrite, shifting each function piece by piece to its new place in the new application and then port it to the new API, which took me a while. I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to port such a massively complex project as KDE would be. However, I was using Qt designer and its method of operation, which probably made by task extra hard.

Hello,
sorry, I'm not an expert un compiling and things like that. My wife is using ksirtet and she would like to go on using it. Would it be possible that you may send me this executable?
I would be very happy if you could do me this favor, also because I don't have anymore the older version of Ubuntu to copy that file.
My email-adress is premavilas@yahoo.com
Thanks a lot,
I hope you can help me,
greetings from Berlin,
Michael

melkart wrote:Thank you for your answers. I read that there are KDE 3 packages provided by a third party for Ubuntu 8.10, including a tutorial on how to allow KDE 4 and KDE 3 to coexist. I haven't tried that yet. So, for Intrepid there is a solution, but I am worried about future releases... I also tried to "statify" (make it a statically linked binary) my shared object ksirtet executable from my Kubuntu 7.10 installation with a program called "Ermine" - I trusted it blindly, I hope, it didn't destroy anything - and it worked somewhat, but it doesn't allow me to change settings. Maybe I'll find a solution later.

P.S.: Sorry for all the commotion, I got it to work now. So, in my Kubuntu 7.10 installation I created a static executable from the existing shared one in /usr/games/ksirtet. How to do this, is explained here. Then I copied the file .kde/share/config/ksirtetrc, located in the home directory, over to the Intrepid installation, to exactly the same location. That was it.

Hello Michael,

nice to know that there are other people besides me who like Ksirtet.

I just sent you a mail.

I just installed ubuntu 8.10 on a new laptop just to find that my all time favourite tetris is gone. This is quite horrible for me. What to do? I need ksirtet so badly! I have searched for good tetris clones and this is by far the most perfect. Please re-include it in kde! Is there something I can do meanwhile?
erik

--trying to make a static binary from an old ubuntu version....

Satosh, If you will read it-s's post you will discover what happened to KSirtet. The only solution for you is to use a computer that currently has it installed to generate the static linked executable, using the link posted by melkart to help.

bcooksley wrote:Satosh, If you will read it-s's post you will discover what happened to KSirtet. The only solution for you is to use a computer that currently has it installed to generate the static linked executable, using the link posted by melkart to help.

bcooksley, If you will read my post you will discover that I actually did I just spent an interesting hour building static binaries with statifier (gave me a segfault) and finally with ermine, it worked fine with the demo version! Thank you for the help. Only thing, I had to copy the old ksirtetrc to the new PC, didn't seem like the new static binary wanted to create the file. Anyway, hope to see ksirtet further developed (though it seems perfect in functionality for me).