The KPacman Handbook: Introduction

KPacman
Version 0.3.2

Prerelease for KDE2 (Documentation not fully adjusted).
The "highscore"-file is no longer been created by the installation, but as soon as the hall of fame has been entered. The path (directory/filename) could be specified in the configfile. If the systemwide "highscore"-file is not writable, a private file in the home-directory of the user is used and a corresponding message is shown.

Ms.Pacman mode implemented (mighty modification) !
Automatic Pause/Continue in Back/Foreground, for Kevin Forge (he has the idea for Ms.Pacman too) integrated. This options can be changed using the menu.
Portuguese translation by Sérgio Fernandes.
Animation of the energizers und blinking of active player ("1UP") added.
Flickering during editing the hall of fame by changing the focus removed (FocusEvents).
The mousecursor could be hidden/shown while over the playground, thru the menubar.
The boardlayout (map) could be placed in external textfiles and selected thru the configfile (kpacmanrc) if needed.
Duplicate pixmaps removed. Because all pixmapfiles could be specified thru the configfile now, pixmaps could be placed in foreign (scheme)-directories (EyesPixmapName=../tiny/eyes.xpm), or have different names (e.g.: LevelPixmapName=fruit.xpm).
After eating the last dot, the first pixmap of the last/current direction is shown. The initial pixmap of the north/up-direction was displayed so far.

Swedish translation of some text (unfortunately incomplete) by Johne.
By the use of special charaters (umlauts) in the swedish version, the whole font-handling had to be rearranged.
The fonts contains (nearly) the full ISO-Latin1 characterset (no lowercase characters).
Alignment functions built into the display routines.
No further use of xbm-fonts, therefore pbm-files were used as fonts (they need less space, even they contains much more characters).
All textelements added to the localisation (i18n). So strings like "GAME OVER" or "READY!" could be translated into any language.
The documentation and programm now contains my brandnew email-address.

Displaying of the hall of fame changed, hopefully this fix some rare bugs. Use lower/raise- instead of former used hide/show-functions to switch display.
The file used for HighScore storage, will be set to worldwriteable (chmod 666) during installation. Thru this "normal" users could store their highscores permanently.
Levels entended upto 13 (LevelPixmaps, Score), by the higher scores, the fonts (for displaying the scored points) had to be extended too. The scores could be variable (in the range from 10 to 9000, only the leading digit can be not 0. exception 1600 ) now. The pixmap for the score could be larger than the actual figure itself.
Because there is not enough room to show 13 levelsymbols in the statusline, the position of the symbol can be specified by the LevelPosition value(s).
The default-Speed of the monsters kept constant althrough higher levels, requested by Gerald Williams.
Update-routines (display) optimized.
The documentation and programm now contains my new email-address.

Added the hall of fame to store the highscores. For this, the structure of the bitfonts was extented to contain furthermore characters, the special-characters (small scores during the game) moved to the control-character-region and the fonthandling was enhanced (FontFirstChar and FontLastChar can be stored in the Configfile).
The size of the labels in the "Change Keys..."-dialog were set manually, cause the autoResize-function in the qt-libs didn't work correctly in all versions.
The menuitems are more sensitive to the actual availiable functions (disabled/enabled and checked).
Now, also in the "MIDWAY (large)"-scheme the smoother font-smooth.xbm font is used by default.
The files for the internationalization moved to represent the new standard locations.

Keyboard-routines changed to be compatible with the KDE 1.1 libraries (compiles with 1.0 and 1.1).
A small bug fixed in kpacman.cpp (CHECK_PTR( menuBar )).

Slowed down the movement of the monsters in the prison, and fixed a bug that kept the monsters moving slowly after the "harmless"-phase of the monsters.
Added a new font "font-smooth" and smoothed the pixmap "wall.xpm" for the Zacman-scheme.
Enhanced configuration of all timing-parameters using the configuration file.
Changed Help-function (kapp->getHelpMenu) to reflect the KDE-Standard.
Improved the documentation (Many thanks to Andreas Pour).

Localized the sources and added a German translation of the documentation.
Fixed bug so pixmaps and bitfonts could located correctly after using the "Change keys..."-dialog.
Changed the location of the files (sources, pixmaps, docs etc.) to reflect the recommeded structure of kapptemplate v0.1.

Improved the timing (it's not perfect yet), and I hope Andreas Pour will have more fun testing the next version.
Increased flexibility in handling the pixmaps.