A new release of Kye! No major changes in this release ‒ this is mostly an update to fix issues running Kye with newer versions of GTK and librsvg. In particular, my standard tileset no longer rendered correctly with the latest librsvg. There are also minor interface improvements.
You can get the latest version and installation help from the download page (or direct links: tgz, rpm ).
While I'm here, I was playing some levels to test the release and so I will throw out some level recommendations. Crowds is good fun. And my own level HOLD UP (from Problem.kye) remains the best of my own levels. And, um, yes I can't link to the other level set I liked because the site is down. I'll put up a few more recommendations with the next release, anyway.
I'll do a stable 1.0 release soon, once Robert's Kye page is back up (it's temporarily down while at the moment), and assuming there are no issues reported with this release.
I have added packages of Kye for python 2.5 and 2.6 to the download page.
I have been offline for most of the past month, so I have only just got around to noting the news about Kye. This site has been getting quite a few hits due to being mentioned in the OLPC news: Kye has been ported to the OLPC.
Kye might well be a very appropriate game for the OLPC, in fact; it's an innocuous child-friendly game, simple to learn but, depending on the levels you play, can be very challenging. And it seems in keeping with the intent of the original Kye (where the registration money went to Save the Children).
Mind you, the laptop will have to have a durable mouse if it is to survive kids playing RUNNER :-).
Coincidentally, it appears that the port was done by Chris Ball, who used to work with me at Netcraft.
More minor fixes in this release. The main fix here is for the wall auto-rounding option in the editor, which did not work correctly in 0.9.2. Also, the .desktop files in the RPM were not compliant with the most recent Linux desktop specification, so I have made some corrections to those. Apart from those 2 changes, the rest is minor code cleanups. Get it here.
A stable 1.0 release should be close (hmm, I think I said this before...).
It is good to see that Python Kye is getting some attention; because I get precious little feedback about it. I never know how to read this - most feedback you get about open source projects is when someone finds a bug or wants something changed, so it can mean that it is "just working" for people; or it can mean that nobody managed to get it running.
Linux Format seem to like it though, as they gave a half-page write-up of Python Kye in their "HotPicks" section in issue 88 (Jan 2007). They seem to have understood the idea of Kye as a cross between Boulderdash and Sokoban, which is roughly how I characterised it for the description on Freshmeat.
I need to pick up the development again and get a version 1.0 released — I should be only two or three releases away from being able to declare it stable.
This release is mostly about code cleanup. I think all the major code commenting & reorganisation that I have wanted to do is now complete, so I should have only minor changes to make before I make the first stable release. 1.0 is not far away now.
This release fixes some problems with the game recording feature. And I have rewritten the status bar, so that the hint text is now displayed in a tooltip if it is too long to fit in the normal display.
Mattias Drochner wrote to let me know that NetBSD has had a package of Kye for some time.
João Pinto has created an unofficial package of Kye suitable for Ubuntu 6.06, available here.
This release does not contain much new from the user's point of view. I have been improving the error handling in several areas, so file and permissions errors should be less likely to result in a crashed interface; common problems like images.tar.gz being inaccessible should result in error messages in a dialog box now. The lack of other changes needed is partly due to getting little feedback, as you would expect for a pre-v1 version of a game few people know of, and there being few bugs to fix.
Internally, I have been doing a lot of cleaning up of the code: I learned python from a python-1.5 reference book that I bought from a remainders bookshop some years ago, so I have been using a lot of rather… old python idioms. So I have been doing a lot of code refactoring to make it a bit more modern and readable. There is still more to do here; on the bright side, given the lack of any other bugs, I should be ready to do a v1.0 when the code clean-up is done.
The new version is available from the python Kye page.
This release makes few changes, despite the time lapse from 0.8 — which hopefully is a good sign for doing 1.0 as the next release. We will see. The main change in this version is another attempt to improve the keyboard input: the Kye doesn't move continuously as soon as you press a key, but waits a moment after doing the first move (rather like a normal keyboard repeat delay); hopefully this cuts down on the number of involuntary double-moves. You can hold SHIFT down to get an immediate continuous move. I am not a big keyboard user in Kye myself, so I hope people who are will tell me if this is an improvement or not.
This release also fixes a few problems with recordings. You can get 0.9 from the python Kye page.