Thursday, July 18, 2013

Map Editor Progress

I don't know if you are aware of this, but we are working on gridarta now. That means modifying gridarta so that it works with wograld, and not just crossfire and a couple other games derived from the crossfire source code.

Gridarta is the new map editor written in Java.  It is much nicer than the old wogedit x11 Athena widget editor that came with the server.  Furthermore, it will be able to run under any operating system.  So you won't be stuck using Linux or another Unix system to run it.

We currently have it in the cvs under java editor and intend to submit a patch to Gridarta once we have all the folders straightened out.  The current build would break the other projects, and it has a few other bugs, but it does work, so if you were dying to make wograld maps you can now do so. 

One of the major bugs is the collected arches don't work.  There are also a few display problems when using certain functions. You can import archtypes for the the wograld folder and edit maps now, however.

I haven't been doing much coding on it myself, just testing it and continuing to submit new artwork to wograld.  The last commit I did, was the skeleton, I think. 

CVS follow up

Well actually, the whole cvs thing just was the fact it took a long time to show up on the sourceforge site from when it got posted to cvs.  If you want to make your sourceforge project cvs, you can't anymore.  It is depreciated.  The ironic thing is after it got depreciated, I was looking at job ads and noticed one that mentioned cvs.  Not as old as cobol, but still pretty old stuff.  So don't feel that just becuase you are working with something old, doesn't mean it is useless.

I'm not going to switch to subversion for the project just yet though, or another version control system.  First of all with subversion, the current Linux distribution I'm using is too old to keep up with the latest subversion, and I can't install the new one because I broke it a long time ago trying to get wograld to use folder permissions properly.  Note to newbies, never ever 777 your entire usr directory.   You will no longer be able to use root!  Secondly, I'm not upgrading, or removing it yet because I'm still playing a couple games that I'm not sure will work under a new distribution.  Every time you upgrade software, something that used to work good breaks.  I want to finish my save games before then. 

I've also considered using git, of course, but I'm not sure how well the whole distributed development thing will work.  One thing I always hated about git was how could I tell who's branch was the master branch.  Sure you could just get the file release, but I like to know what branch, as a developer I should start working on rather than download some bug ridden thing that won't compile.

I think I just might put that off till we have more developers anyway, and the project is a bit farther along.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Version Out of Control

I wrote that post title cause I just got the maps and sounds committed under the README folder because no one could make new modules under the CVS folder anymore. According to google, no one else has attempted it either.  Sourceforge documentation is still crap, or maybe it was good for awhile and then got crappy again.  It doesn't help that the new platform isn't going to allow any new cvs repositories, not that anyone would want any new cvs repositories.  Do they even develop cvs anymore? Maybe not. 

Initially people had to download maps and sounds from the crossfire project, the one we forked from, but since we added the gathering skills, I felt we needed some new maps just to test them out.  How can we possiably get this thing ready for alpha without basic game play like gathering skills useable by the players?

In other news, over 250,000 players signed up for old school Runescape.  Unlike the so called "meritocracy" of free software  multi-player role playing games, Runescape and other proprietary (server and graphics) mmorpgs's got it right by having gathering skills for newbies right at the time of release.  They knew the one important way to hook people and get them to play it for years and years.

That is a problem with the free software community. They can make a microsoft office clone and a web browser, but when it comes to games (Specifically morpgs), they can't get the features right. 

I'm kind of dreading the move to the allura platform even though I know I shouldn't because after all the platform itself is free software, something free software zealots have been complaining about from sourceforge for years.  I guess I just like (hate?) CVS too much to let it go.