JLP’s Blog

Parsek is a KDE 4 client for turn-based strategy games where your goal is to build a space empire. These games are known as 4X games (from four primary goals: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate). Specifically, Parsek is a client for games created using Thousand Parsec framework.

I’ve started working on Parsek a little more then a year ago. It was one of my ways of learning Qt and KDE programming. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to work on Parsek since then. Well yesterday I’ve imported Parsek into KDE’s Subversion repository, into playground/games/parsek.

Parsek can’t be used to actually play games yet. It can connect to the server, download properties of objects in a Universe and display objects in a simple tree and it can download the messages and display them in a simple table. Two of the main things to be done before Parsek is usable is to make it possible to view and add orders to objects and to display a nice map of the Universe. Anyways, here is how Parsek currently looks like:

If you find this interesting and would like to help in any way, you are more than welcome. The basic instructions on how to compile Parsek are on its Wiki page.

Yesterday I have also been browsing through the history of posts on Planet KDE and I found a post about lack of user research by Celeste Paul. She also put together a user research template which I will try to fill out as soon as possible and will then put it into Wiki and in plain text form also into the Parsek’s source code folder.

Tags: games, gaming, strategy games, 4x games, kde, kde4, free software, open source