Libre Planet Conference

This past weekend I went to the Libre Planet Conference. It was great. I finally discussed some of the issues the project was having with a different set of people and got some different input from what I had heard before.

I found out that the main reason our lead programmer did not want to continue the project is because he could not get x11 to display the stats in the window and I kept bugging him about it. X11 is something easier said than done, and I guess we will have to take a look at a manual instead of just guessing. The other alternative is to try using some other libraries. I am not really opposed to using libraries per ce, but there are a couple things I am really opposed to having in this project. These are, having users do dependency hunting to get the game to install, and needing to use things like proprietary graphics drivers to get Open GL to work. While I might be ok with allowing something like sdl to be separate from the game, I would not be ok with any library that is not a stable version being a separate download, because else a new version of it could break the entire game, making it uncompileable. If there is any doubt that it would lead to dependency hunt instead of a working project, I don't really want it in the game. It is always easier to just include the whole thing, even if it makes the download bigger rather than force the user to grapple with things they should not have to. Worse yet, library dependencies can be so bad that even developers have trouble getting the game to work.

Opinions varied widely as to what libraries were good to use instead of just plain old x11, I hear everything under the sun, from QT, to GTK, to open gl (although I would certainly not take the last suggestion, no matter how fast it would make the game, it just causes all those proprietary graphics driver headaches for enough users at this point that I feel it is not worthwhile.)
I heard a prominent programmer say that SDL is slow, but then again the highly successful (relatively speaking) battle for wesnoth project uses SDL, so it can't be all that bad.
Another way to eliminate dependency hunt would be to get the project into the distros, (espeacialy once we get it a bit more polished) I've heard that it can be relativly hard to get even completed games into distrobutions such as Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu though.

Developers and Obsession

One thing I've noticed about all developers, free software developers in particular, is that they tend to become obsessed with things far beyond a point that any ordinary person would take a given obsession. When this is a nessary free software project that needs to be worked on, that can be a good thing. However, it can be a very bad thing when this is applied to other areas of life so that the software project is never even started, much less reaching a stable working condition. I wanted to check up on one of our developers, because she had not contributed to anything in the project for years, yet always gave these indications that she was still intrested in working on it. Yet, when I find her, I find that working on the project is all but impossible, because she has a new obsession. Making everything immaculatly clean all the time. When ever she sits down, she sees a speck of dust. She changes her outfit several times a day, and consiquently has an awful lot of laundry. Dishes must be done immedicatly after eating. You can not even finish a nice cup of tea, because first there will be some speak of dirt somewhere that must be cleaned immediatly, and then the tea cup, still hot and half full that you are not finished with, must be tossed out and thrown in the dishwasher. It would be one thing if she just took certain times out of the day to do some cleaning, but to make a never ending constant thing that seems to know no bounds means that there is no time left to do any sort work on the project. I find more and more that people prone to obession always find stupid things to obesss about for hours on end to the detriment of anything that is good and productive and fun in this world. Having a few obsessive obsess on something so pointless like that is

Domain Names and Namecheap

Recently, I have been working a little bit on the website. I moved, but I still have not gotten a chance to get everything unpacked, between people complaining about where I move things (hey, I need my backup cds to work on this project)
I currently own wograld.org, as well as wograld.com, wograld.net and wograld.info. I figure that when my game becomes a big success, those domains will be worth a lot of money, so better buy them now. Besides, people might type in the wrong domain name anyway.

Unfortunatly, Namecheap is currently undergoing maintanance. What do you expect for a company called namecheap? Anyway, it isn't that bad, except I could never figure out how to get the pop3 email working so I gave that up. I don't understand these unix gurus and how they tell you not to use the easy emails like Yahoo mail and gmail, and say you should get off the cloud and download your own email. Not everyone has an IQ of 200 and the ability to learn sys admin stuff from the lousy man pages they have on these sites. This is another reason I don't want just anyone on the project team, no matter how good you are, if you can not commuicate with normal people, then I don't think that you would understand this project and what it is supposed to do anyway.

Wograld.org makes the most sense for the project website page, since it is the .org. What else other than an org would be making up a project? Also, this way, if I ever decide to host it someplace other than sourceforge, I can just redirect it from the wograld.org.

Buying a New Laptop

I decided to buy a new Laptop today. It is going to be an IBM Thinkpad. I want to take it to the Libre Planet Conference in a few weeks to show off the wograld project. Hopefully I will manage to get it all set up, considering all the other stuff I have to do right now, like clean out the basement and care for my grandmother who had dementia, I worry I won't get it set up. Worse yet, the wograld website is still a mess, even though I managed to make Wograld.org point to the sourceforge website now. I wish I didn't have so much other stuff to worry about and do all the time.

I have noticed that the sourceforge documentation has improved since back when I was working on Wograld a couple years ago. The vhost thing makes sense now.

Housing and Realism

I recently found out that Wograld current housing tool requires you to buy building materials, unlike the housing tool in Ultima Online that just required you to have the gold in your bank box to create the ready made additions. While Wogralds current version of the housing tool could be considered more realistic and true to life, Ultima Online's housing tool could be said to be designed to maximize fun in the game. How much fun it is to have to remember how many boards or ingots you need to finish off your dwelling? Sure it is more realistic, but the reality is people don't play these games for realism. If it was realistic, we would have a housing mortgage crisis. Players would no longer be able to afford their in game houses anymore, and would have to move back into thier bank boxes.

Even Ultima Onlines housing tool had limits however. Some of them were well deserved, such as limited the creation of houses to certain tiles already existing in the game. This makes sense, otherwise the new houses would take too much time to load on screen, making for a laggy experience. The other, unessarly limitation is that Ultima Online's houses had to be physically possiable. Since crossfire as a whole does not really support this notion (what with buildings that have maps inside maps inside maps) It does not seem that Wograld nessarly has to follow in the footsteps of the idea that the world has to obey the same physical laws of the universe. For instance, why not have housing that is an inverted pyramidal shape? Maybe that is too wierd for most people however, but the idea that it is wierd and alien would probably draw people into the game because they would see stuff they have never seen before. Too many games, once you have seen a little bit of the world, you feel you have seen it all. You feel like it is just like every other game you ever played. The world is the same, it fits the same genre of sword and sorcerey, or some poorly written sci-fi.

Even Ultima, a pretty classic medieval style world had some science fiction elements. Once players get imersed in a world however, the worldlore becomes less important and the gameplay more important. It doesn't matter if the orcs are supposed to be at war with the humans, if game mechanics make it easier for them to work together, then they will do so. These kinds of things are set more by how the hard coded programming rules of the game are writen rather than what some talentless hack of a writer threw up on the website in her spare time.

Given that Wograld is not trying to be an emulated clone of your real life (if your so called real life was so wonderful you probably would not waste hours upon hours of your time on Wograld anyway,) it makes little sense to emulate the parts of reality that you dislike. The functionality of a game mechanic to achieve a certain goal, a certain feel for the game, trumps up the nagging voice of trying to be realistic in the sense of emulating real life.

Why monster spawns must be limited

Monster spawns need to be limited in any game. Originally, Crossfire did not have this limitation. What happens, is monsters can keep spawning and fill up the entire tiled map. While this may seem like fun for players, it is a nightmare for the computer to keep up with all those objects running around the map. What eventually would happen is there would be so much spawn the computer would run out of space and it would crash the server. Therefore, limits need to be put on how many monsters can be spawned a one time. This could be linked to the monster spawn generators. Every generator could keep track of the number of monsters it has spawned and every monster could have mark saying what generator it comes from. The generators could keep track of how many are spawned at once.

I remember one very buggy version of Ultima Online I played where monsters refused to respawn because the generator got corrupted somehow. This would not happen in Wograld as long as we keep the map reset feature, since then the spawn generators as well as all the creatures on that map get completey destroyed, and then refreshed when someone comes back to that area. As long as that feature is kept, the spawn generators should not be getting bugged.