[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Progress on incorporating GSoC 2009 into new releases

[David Bruce]

Hello,

I've been using any available hacking time to try to get all the
summer projects incorporated into tuxmath and tuxtype, and I thought a
status report would be in order.

On the tuxtype side, the changes were not so extensive - Sarah's word
list editor has been merged into trunk.  We have also greatly expanded
the word lists and xml lessons (at least in English), and have
replaced the old backgrounds with greatly improved ones, thanks to
Caroline.  Also, the few dubiously-licensed "non-free" data files have
been removed, so tuxtype no longer has to have a "non-free data"
package.  It should be possible to release a nicely refurbished
tuxtype in the very near future.

Regarding tuxmath, the obstacles are greater.  The LAN multiplayer
project is merged and functional, albeit still with room for
refinement (e.g. display of player's and opponent's scores, animation
and sound effects for when opponent shoots a comet first , etc.)

The new menu system has two problems that I can see.  First, the menu
sprites (and Tux) only display the default frame.  The same thing
seems to happen with the comets during game play.

Second, the main menu only displays English, as far as I can tell.
The code in menu.c appears to call gettext() appropriately, but the
translations are no longer in the po files.  Now that the menu entries
are stored in xml files rather than in the source code itself, we need
to work out a way to tell gettext that these strings need to be
translated - we need to get them into a file listed in POTFILES.in.
It is sort of like the situation with the strings in the lesson files,
which get copied into "data/missions/lessons/descr_lessons" so they
can be picked up by gettext.

Best,

David