Release GCompris

[_wb_]

I'm just uploaded GCompris 12.01 to the repo. There still are some annoying issues, but it works.


Remaining issues:


- fullscreen cuts off the top and bottom part of the screen (fix: go to windowed mode and back, by pressing CTRL-F twice)


- sometimes when you quit an activity and go back to the main menu, the menu is not shown (the screen is white). Only thing you can do is press CTRL-Q to quit and restart the application


Features:


- 124 educational activities for children aged 2 and up


- localization (including voices) for many languages, including English, French, German, Dutch, ...


- touch screen support (no visible mouse cursor); alternatively, it can be run with mouse cursor (for use with nubs or external mouse)


- Python support, so all activities (also the ones written in Python) should work, including the admin menu


- Network support


- Bundled with gnuchess (for the chess activity)


- Bundled with gnucap (for the electrical simulation activity)


- modified the ballcatching activity to use the shoulder buttons instead of the two shift buttons (I did not translate this in any language other than English though, so this could be confusing)


Essentially this was just a simple recompile, the only thing was that there were a lot of dependencies to get. If you want to do this yourself: just get the sources from gcompris.net, and track down all dependencies the configure script complains about. There seems to be a bug in the configure script such that it does not detect the Python headers properly - I ended up hardcoding the correct paths in the script. Make sure sqlite is installed too. I used --enable-sdlmixer instead of the default (which uses gstreamer). You'll have to compile GNet yourself to get network support; you can use the opkg package gnome-gnuchess for chess, and you'll have to compile gnucap yourself (which requires adding the line "#include <cstring>" to many of the source files to get them compiled with the current gcc version).

 

[_wb_]

There also seems to be some strange bug in the localization, causing the text to remain in English while the voices change to the selected language.

 

[_wb_]

This is great! Thanks for taking the plunge, wb!


I'd vote for making several stripped-down packages, as 150MB is quite a lot.


How much space does one voice take up? Do they all take the same amount or magnitude of space?


Idea: one package with the 3 or 4 most important voices (maybe make a poll here on the boards, to find out what's most demanded), and one package with all the remaining voices (both packages including the main program, too)


This scheme would probably mean the least efforts on your side, and least probability for problems on users' side, while still providing relatively small package size.


Daniel

All voices together are about 100MB. English is 5.8MB, French 6MB, German for some reason only 820KB (could be not everything is translated to German, or perhaps German is an exceptionally short language . The language strings are about 11MB for all languages together, or about 200KB per language. Seems a good idea to have a poll and include only those, so things can be reduced from 147MB to something like 50MB for most people.

A couple of options come to mind here..


You could make a number of installer PNDs (for a language or group of languages) that just dump the selected voice files in appdata...


If you want to keep the voice files compressed you could bundle them as squashfs filesystems and setup the runscript to mount one containing the desired language.


- Neelix

Yes, dumping to appdata could be an option. It's still quite a lot of work to make all those installers. No need to add extra compression to the voice files, they are already in .ogg format so I doubt squashfs can shave off anything from those.

 

[_wb_]

In order to slim down the size of the GCompris PND file, I would like to make two versions: one with every language that is available (about 150MB), and one with only a selection of 5 or so languages (maybe 50MB or so). You can check the full list of available languages here: http://l10n.gnome.org/module/gcompris/


The idea is that for 90% of the Pandora users, the small PND file should be enough. So please select all languages you would like to have in the small PND file.

 

[_wb_]

Yesterday upstream released version 12.05, so I'll update the repo when compilation is done. Not much seems to have changed except for bugfixes.


Meanwhile, please keep voting for languages. I'll make a selection based on these votes by the end of the week and prepare a slimmed down PND.

 

[_wb_]

I feel lonely being the only one to post in this thread


The upstream release compiled nicely, but I'm taking some time to fix some remaining issues. I already got the fullscreen resolution right (without having to go to windowed mode and back). Now I just need to find out why the main menu sometimes refuses to be redrawn after an activity quits.


Also, perhaps I should make 3 versions of the PND: one with all languages, one with all languages that get at least 1 vote, and one with only the top few languages.

 

[sepp256]

Can you include Japanese and Korean?

 

[peelie]

nice 1st time heard of gcompris

 

[Farox]

I feel lonely too for voting a PND with an italian language


Anyway thanks so much for compiling this

 

[Farox]

Today magically 03 vote ....sometimes good things happen


I feels not so lonely now

 

[_wb_]

GCompris normally works on a 800x520 canvas which gets rescaled to the window or screen size. I am changing this to 800x480, so there are no black areas on the sides as before (because of the rescaling from a slightly different aspect ratio). For most of the activities, that is, those that draw their interface based on the BOARD_WIDTH and BOARD_HEIGHT constants, this works just fine. Some activities have hardcoded coordinates or use images that are explicitly 800x520. Usually the bottom 40 pixels just get cropped away, and often this is not a big problem. I'm trying to modify the activities where it is a problem though. There are a lot of activities so this will take some time.


I also finally found a solution for the screen blanking problem. Turned out it was caused by the touchscreen "mouse" causing multiple button_pressed_event signals for a single click, which caused the exit button to be pressed twice, which put GCompris in a state where it essentially quit the main menu without knowing it itself. I fixed it by using the button_released_event signal instead.


The main annoying issues are now fixed.

 

[Neelix]

I noticed that GCompris created a folder for itself in my home folder on the NAND. It didn't seem to have anything in it but it obviously isn't looking to the $HOME environment variable for the home folder location.


- Neelix

 

[_wb_]

I noticed that GCompris created a folder for itself in my home folder on the NAND. It didn't seem to have anything in it but it obviously isn't looking to the $HOME environment variable for the home folder location.

This will be fixed in the upcoming update. I already did most of the stuff in the appdata directory, but I missed one that was hardcoded to use g_get_home_dir() instead of g_getenv("HOME").

 

[aRTee]

Thanks for the good work!


My problem is, I don't want my kids to claim my pandora all the time... ;-)


Anyway, what about having one pnd with the top 5 languages, and allowing for language addition in the appdata folder?

 

[mcobit]

I think thats the plan.


Edit: And of course: Thanks a lot for your dedication to get this running nicely! You invest quite some work here

 

[_wb_]

I just uploaded the new version to the repo. There are 3 editions:

• all: includes all available languages
  
• many: includes all languages that got at least one vote in the poll
  
• few: includes only English, French, German and Spanish, but also non-voice (text strings only) support for the other languages of the "many"-edition
  

I did it this way because most people can save about 30-50 MB by downloading "many" or "few", without having to do individual language add-ons which would be more work for me and would probably still be less user-friendly.

 

[F_Slim]

Nice. I may try to use this to practice a few languages ^_^

 

[_wb_]

If that's what you intend to use it for: good news, there is an experimental activity (work in progress) exactly for that purpose. It's not shown in the menu, but if you run gcompris with the --experimental command line option, it will show up. I dunno how to do this easily with the PND (looks like pnd_run does not have a way to pass arguments, or does it?), and it is probably rather glitchy at the moment (I didn't really test it), but I guess in some future version it will be mature enough for the main menu. With that addition (and given that some of the reading/counting activities are also quite suitable), GCompris will become pretty useful also for adults


(actually it already is, e.g. for playing sudoku or chess or 4 in a row etc)

 

[konqithedragon]

GCompris has always been great software.


This is a good port some of the activities don't work quite right with the touchscreen.. such as the "control the hosepipe"... but it's mostly because Gcompris hasn't been designed for touchscreen use.. Hopefully that will change as time progresses.


Also been a long time since I used the program.., and I had a suprise to find a sound effect I made for another open source project many years ago was used in this.

 

[dimag0g]

Please help! It's an emergency - I've got a kid to entertain

gcompris starts with an error message and shows no activities. Logfile and screenshots attached.

logfile.zip