Gitting up to date

Wow, I know it has been quite some time since I updated this blog.  Believe it or not, I actually am continuing to work (well, a bit on and off) on the project. As of this year, we made the long in coming move of moving to git.  Sourceforge ended CVS support back in November, and that is what prompted our decision (well, actually my decision to change.  At first I wasn't sure, should I import all the 10+ years of project history with all the *** in it or, just start over fresh with the latest stuff.  I decided to leave all the old *** out, because its just not really useful to new developers anymore.  This project has come a long way since the half-baked fork of crossfire days.  So much artwork has been replaced.  I redid some folders to make it more newbie friendly (no more separate arch folder for the server, and the new music files, are naturally included with the client.)  I realize I don't have to stick to the old and poorly thought out conventions from the old game. 
So once I switched to git, we have been making regular commits, and git isn't really that hard to learn.  Its actually easier than CVS.  I don't bother with all those separate testing directories.  I just test it right in my sandbox.  It makes it so much easier. I just simply don't include changed files that don't need to be included, and check with git status to make sure I included all the right files and none of the wrong ones before I commit. 
We have done a lot. A lot of artwork, a lot of music, a lot of code, but there is still much more to do.

Spawning New Developers

Sometimes, it just takes too long to attract new developers to the project so we tried spawning them.  Now that I look back at it, it might have actually been faster to just do it this way all along.  Its very simple, take a male and a female developer, and then mix some genetic code.  Bake in the womb for 9 months, and then train the new little nurseling to like wograld development.  Who knows though, it might not actually work as well as I hoped, because he already fusses during lectures about free software at a certain time of day.
Another problem with this though, is preparing for his arrival took a lot of time away from working on the project.  I also put my web cartoon at www.jastiv.com as a higher priority than working directly on the project, partly because I could see measurable progress every time I worked on it, and also because I ended up making graphics for the web cartoon anyway I could reuse in the game.  The lead programmer has continued to make several commits, but I've really not written much in this space in a while. 

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. 

Omg Trees!

A week ago, I made some trees and added them to the project. Now, walking through the forest, I feel like I am walking through a dream world.  Even though several other tiles still need to be replaced, game play needs to be changed, and maps need to be made, the trees themselves give it something special.

The strange part is, when I made them, I worried they were the wrong shape. I worried the trees were too round or too triangular. I spent a lot of time working on getting the colors to give it a certain feel.   I did basically 3 trees, but two of them have ground tiles attached for a total of five trees.

I think my art style has been improving and I use highlighting in different colors to get certain effects, like a gradient of different shades of green.  They look better in the game then they do here because of the way tiles all interconnect with one another.

What's my name? Java Development

For the past six months or so, I have just basically been trying to learn to code in Java. I have done the occasional upload of artwork to sourceforge as well. But mostly I have decided to focus on learning Java really well so I can modify the new crossfire java client enough to work with the wograld server. For those who don't know, Wograld originally forked from the crossfire code. Since then the projects have gone in different directions. Crossfire has the same bad game play and artwork and while fixing some bugs, while wograld fixed some ugly artwork and game play while adding new bugs and keeping only the awful messed up x11 client. That is the brutally honest assessment anyway. I understand that user interface developers are the best of the best in the world, and that you could search endlessly to find one who can make such a thing. While I can do the basic hello world, and have been learning some object oriented and graphical user interface, my knowledge isn't quite up to the level to comprehend the entirety of the crossfire jxclient code base yet.

Uploaded some Wall posters.

I found some wall posters in this folder. They were mostly of space age themes. In spite of what some people may be thinking, Wograld was not intended to be pure fantasy. I kind of liked how in Ultima 7, there was a spaceship in the farmers field. I always thought it would be fun to add a little bit of science fiction to an otherwise fantasy story. Not to go overboard with it, but to just add enough to give it a similar feel to the Ultima Series. To that end, the Paranoia areas will be heavily alien themed. I have not gone into all the alien and spaced themed ideas because I don't want to spoil it yet for people who may want to play the game. As you well know, aliens are a common source of paranoia in a lot of stories. So I will add the Ufo's and aliens from outer space. I could use the wall posters there.

Top Ten reasons not to play Wograld right now

Most people go about promoting their games, saying how great they are, only to be disappointed by bugs and poor game play, as well as bad "programmer art" I on the other hand, will beg and plead with you do not go to the cvs, download wograld, try to compile and run it, and worse yet, try to actually play it. I will give you ten reasons that even though the code is right there, you should not touch it, compile it, run it, or even look at it.

10. Its only been tested on Linux... trying it on the windows system like enough said.

9. You have to follow the admin install directions, if you are the sort of person who is reading this and doing it anyway, even though I said not to , you are not a person who follows directions, so you are not going to do well with getting it set up so it works.

8. Missing artwork. There is only one character class and race that shows artwork in game, otherwise you will be playing an invisible character.

7. Same poor game play as crossfire, only with some missing artwork, so you won't even know what killed you half the time. If you want crossfire, just go play it, but why would you considering how awful it really is.

6. No permanent server set up, how fun is it really going to be playing with yourself...

5. You have to play as root or it won't save your character, or you have to change the permissions on some folders.

4. Did I mention the bad game play, lets go into detail, one hit killed as a newbie sorcerer with a swinging door. Should sorcerers really be that frail? No freaking way!

3.Level system, and experience loss when you die, you lose stats too, so you can get worse than a newb fast.

2. You don't have to die to lose stats and experience, fighting certain monsters will also do this.

1. Ta Da, the number one reason not to play Wograld right now... The user interface is really bad. You won't be able to figure it out. It is ugly, has buttons that do nothing, and no way to know what macros you have easily.

Iso Crossfire

I've been working on the artwork quite a bit. I recently uploaded some new marble tiles. I also went and made a whole bunch of chairs a couple days ago. I will be finishing them from the other reversed perspective and uploading them soon. I also worked some on the classes.

I always hated the fact that it feels like I am working on iso-crossfire, and not the Wograld project that I really want. This game has my new graphics, and a new, yet lousy, user interface. Yet I can't help feeling like I am only playing crossfire in 45 degree isometric. That is because none of the game mechanics have changed including ones I hate, such a experience loss, dying from getting hit with a normal swinging wooden door, stat loss diseases everywhere, and a combat system that seem to consist of run into things and watch them die. At least they die relatively quickly compared to some boring games, so you get a chance to go through the exciting loot.

Well, horror of horrors, my wonderful lead developer actually likes that something like iso-crossfire exists. So before we fix any of the glaring game mechanic problems, take out the extra races from the start area and add a male/female of each of orc, human elf and undead, we have to trudge through and actually fork our own project into a useless, unremarkable, not in demand game. After all, if I really wanted to play crossfire, I would just play it, and not this abomination, halfway between crossfire and Wograld with missing graphics.

I'm not quite sure what is the point of useless sourceforge projects and dead branches. Frankly, I think it is a waste of disk space. After all, given a choice between Wograld and iso-crossfire, I would gladly chose Wograld. In fact, for years thinking about how I would actually have to play test some of my changes using the horrid Crossfire kept me from working more on Wograld.

Developers arn't easy to come by though, so if he wants to waste some time forking the project so what. I wonder if that is what will happen to most game projects eventually, there will be the number of game projects >= the number of game developers on the project with all the forks.
Happy forking and fork you!

Fixxed the Segfaults... BUT

Well, the segfaults are fixed. At least I think they are as fixed as a cat after neutering. As fixed as a eunuch programmer (like instead of a unix programmer with the stereotypical neck-beard)
Anyway, enough with the stupid puns. The user interface for the map editor still sucks dangling donkey parts. You still can't click on things in the pick maps and expect them to show up in the object window of the map-editor. The co-ordinates are all off. Furthermore, all the items in the pick-maps do not display properly. I tried messing with them again a couple days ago.
Instead of fixing the user interface however, my wonderful lead programmer decides to add a bunch of stuff that is in the wrong perspective and the wrong size, into the cvs arch folder. These new arches are from other crossfire forks. I told him he does not need to do that. When I saw what he was starting to do, I got horrified. Except he doesn't use the cvs add command. Now his folder is littered up with a bunch of ? marks in front of the new arches. He really should not have done that. Only one more day until my other programmer comes back from vacation. Then we really won't get any work done because she will be too busy obsessing on cleaning and telling our lead programmer what a lousy job he does wiping the floor and taking out the trash.

I started working on my web comic again and making new 45 degree 64x64 and 64x128 tile objects that we can hopefully add once lead programmer stops trying to add stupid arches and fixes the map editor bugs.

I recently read about something called "programmer art". Apparently programmer art is when programmers do quick and dirty artwork to make demos of some software project. It looks really bad like they can't draw. In most cases, they probably can't, but it is more of a case they don't care how bad it looks. Our project suffers from the opposite problem. I feel like we have a lot of artist code. Code that is just in there to show off the awesomeness of our artwork. It seems like no one on this project really wants to work on the code, and would rather be doing art. You can't play a computer game without the code, however.

Artwork commit and gdb

Recently I did a big artwork commit to the project. So for those of you who wanted to see all the new tiles, you can go ahead and access the cvs and get the latest arch. (Yes, it is working on sourceforge for now, but who knows for how long) I also edited the admin install yet again. Please let me know if the directions for installing the server and client in linux are unclear.

Also I have been trying to learn gdb. For those who are unfamiliar gdb is the Gnu Debugger. I got tired of waiting for my knight in shining armor, my prince charming (well actually my evil wizard) to debug the code. So there are two major map editor bugs (possibly more) are still there to be found and fixed. They are

1. segmentation fault crash when you move a scroll bar

2. some of the tiles do not show up correctly, they appear to be blocked out by other tiles although this works perfectly in the client.
As always new contributors are welcomed.

sourceforge CVS issues

The project CVS is down due to problems with sourceforge. I had hoped sourceforge would somehow escape some of the issues that plauged savannah. Back when I was choosing project hosting, I picked sourceforge for a couple reasons. Here is the update on the situation. http://sourceforge.net/blog/2011/02/

1. the prior project I forked it from, crossfire, is hosted there.
2. The other major free (as in beer) free (as in freedom) software project hosting service http://savannah.gnu.org/ had recently had a major outage, with people losing a days work or something. I don't remember all the details since it was years ago anyway.

And I chose CVS, because at the time, subversion was just coming out, so CVS had a lot more books and such written about it. People were just making the switch to subversion at the time, with most projects still on the CVS. Back then, I'm not sure if GIT was used, or even existed. If it did, it did not have a lot of free project hosting.

Now it looks like my reluctant project team might have to learn a whole new version control system.

Basically this means that it will be some time before you can go download and test out the project. In the mean time, we we continue to make more artwork and try to hunt down the bugs, dealing with the version control when it comes back up or we find out more information. Worse comes to worse we can already re-upload it without all the crappy version history. (meaning goodbye empty folders and misnamed files)

Crowns

Here is one of the crowns I made yesterday. I really enjoy making pixel art even though it does not always come out as the way I would like. 64x64 is not a lot of room to work with, so I try to make the best of it.
Originally crossfire had several crowns. When I forked the project, the new tiles are 64x64 instead of 32x32. I still have not tested it in game to see how it would look.

Art Tiles = Project Motivation

While the editor bug is still there and taking a long time to find, at least I am making some progress in the game. I have been working on the art tiles. The new tiles are the 45 degree isometric perspective. While many of the tiles have already been replaced, some have not. Also, some of the old perspective tiles when converted to the new perspective do not look good, although they did not look good in the old perspective either.
Our lead programmer says that seeing the new tiles gives him motivation to sit down and find the bugs.
I went back to an old message forum to read my ancient post about recruiting Wograld developers. No one there was interested. Not only that, but someone commented that only insane masochist programmers would want to work on the project. That is the wrong idea. After all, masochism is one of the nine stupidities. So it seems that all over our developers already have the qualities nessessary to complete the fool quests in Wograld.

1) Indescretion. - this blog is prof of that.
2) Lust - I'm lusting after Wograld, I want it so bad.
3) Foolhardiness - Well, if this project kills me, my only hope is some other foolhardy adventurers follow in my footsteps.
4) Paranoia - lead programmer though someone was entering his house, but it is just the furnace.
5) Masochism - Wograld developers have already been labeled as Masochistic. Why else would we spend so much time on it.
6) Vengence - this is revenge for all those times that rpgs like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft did not live up to my standards.
7)Thievery - We copied the code from crossfire, not exactly thievery,
8) Humilation - We have humilated ourselves over and over trying to promote this pre-alpha project.
9) Skepticism - hmm, I don't believe in C programers, oh wait...

User Interface Progress

The new User interface code is being worked on, but still not ready to be committed to the cvs. It takes a while to figure out what all the things in x11 do to allow user interface options to occur. Serpentshard has already go the code going that opens and closes the buttons. It was suggested by several people to make the game take up the whole screen, and then have the windows pop over it rather than just having it take up 2/3 of the screen like I currently show in the mockup on the forums. I like this idea, but not being much of a programmer myself, I am not sure how that would be to implement. I know that some things are very hard to program.

One time I thought I would work on a voice recognition system for elderly people with dementia, so they would have a system that would talk to them and constantly answer the repetitive questions that they ask. But the software I tried would not even compile or run on my computer, so I realized I was in way over my head with the voice recognition thing. At least with this project I have been able to make progress.

Anyway, I am amazed at what the x11 libraries are capable of so far from what I have seen. I did not know it could do all that because I had not seen any prior programs written that had those features like that. The only thing missing so far is the custom widgets that I want to put in, such as my own buttons, and ideally my own scrollbars and containors. Basically, I want the custom artwork like most good looking games have that I am currently working on making now.

Code Documentation

Several people have complained that the crossfire code (and as a result the Wograld project) has poorly documented code. I realized how the functions could be much worse than they are and how the comments could be much less descriptive. The variables could be renamed so what is named monster stats is actually something like player alchemy skill or some equality inappropriate and confusing variable names. I have been reading through several of the code files. I know it is going to take me a while to get through them all.

Also, I need to finish making the graphics for the various bits of the user interface, all tweleve buttons, chat log, quest log, combat log, character stats, character skills, looting, inventory, paperdoll, macros, options, automap, party. I am still not sure how to make the x11 give the program the look of my artist view of what the game should look like.

Looking for artists

Only now have I begun to realize the extent of the artwork that will be needed for this game. All those animations of every pixel, from front to back of each piece of clothing, not to mention the paper doll artwork for the upcoming paper doll feature will take an awful lot of time to do. It would be nice to have some help on the project. That said however, there are certain things I would stipulate out of our artists.

1) Absolutely no copy-pasting from other games, yes that includes free-software games, because no one wants to look at the same artwork they have already seen, Wograld should have a unique look all its own (modified public domain and GPL art is ok, provided it fits into the game.) ,

2.) Its okay if the piece isn't up with the rest of the artwork, but there is no need to reject artwork that fits all the criteria (better than the current (mostly non-existent or old crossfire) artwork) and also nothing that breaks rule one, and it must also be in the proper perspective for the game. I won't be too much of a drag about style unless it is blatantly bad (such as too realistic, not pixelated enough etc)

3) No emotional abuse of other team members - period, this will not be tolerated. This is not a contest and artists should each work on different things to avoid walking over each others territory and turning it into a contest rather than getting the project done. I admit I started doing that with some of gnurpgs/ Serpentshard's tiles and realized that I was wasting time instead of getting the project out the door.

4) there is a limit to how much "better" a piece can really get. Often, all that needs to be done is a re coloration to make it more appealing, using intermediate colors rather than photo-realism gray and brown. I will put an end to the stupidness of "better and better art" found in some other games. When it is done, it is done, there is no "making it better."

Ego - why developers need it.

Sometimes people make out developer egos to be the big evil in a software project. They worry about things like the quality of the work and give harsh critics to developers of their contributions, be it code, documentation, music or artwork. Sometimes a person may want to work on a project, but feel that no matter what they do it is not good enough to get on any project and that they will not be recognized for what they contribute. Many of these people just give up, feeling that the lead developer will not be happy with their work no matter what they do.
They feel they have just wasted all that time working on things that will not be used for the project. I know, because I have been there along with several other people. It was one of the things that motivated me to start my own project rather than try to work on some one else's project.
I know that a lot of projects wish they had more people developing on the project, but at the same time have such high expectations for the quality of contributions that they do not find what they are looking for. Wograld is more of an entry level project. The art and code needed is pretty simple. Just a semester of C or the equivalent experience is all that is needed for programming. For art you just need to be able to use a simple editor like the gimp. A lot of the artwork is simply editing some sprites so they look better. The code also has a lot that is fairly simplistic. The time consuming part of the code is getting up to speed on the current code base and what it does, and then making some modifications. That is much easier than trying to write the game from scratch.
I think too much critic can turn otherwise good developers away from a project. Many people have their self-confidence sabotaged at work. They do not need more of this when they come home to do a hobby project. I believe developers should receive a lot of praise for the things they do right. It encourages them to work harder on the project, putting in more time and effort and producing more results.

Maps and hunting down bugs.

I finally got the lead programmer to do some work on the project again. Maybe it was because I took away his big bag of chips and soda pop, as well as two certain people being away for a week. Anyway, we finally got the major crash bug fixed. You can now walk around on the scorn map and not crash just because you try to enter places like the scorn school. I heard those areas were never finished even in the original crossfire. I also started working on the graphics again. I have completed an undead lady from four different directions with two frames each to replace the same 8 frames that all crossfire characters have. I also did a few terrain tiles. Map changes are still tedious and the map editor could use some work to fully display the new tiles. It would be nice to have some more help on the project, but I really only need someone who is dedicated since the project requires a lot of getting up to speed, figuring out how the code and maps work etc. Unlike the artwork, the code seems to take a lot of getting up to speed on it, rather than just making things of a certain size and copying them in, and then running some scripts. The directories are still the crossfire directories. It should really have separate directories for wograld. You also have to run the server as root, otherwise it will not have the permission to write to certain folders and you will not be able to save your characters or maps.
The reason the map and editor is so critical to fix, is because I need it working so I can see how my new terrain tiles look before putting them in the game. Not that I have not already done some of this work in the gimp. Also, Wograld is not crossfire. I want it to be a completely different game with different areas and maps.
There are many things I would like to add such as wearable clothing, but I think it is important to get the basics down first, by that I mean things like the menus and maps not crashing when you teleport into them. For some reason, our lead programmer found a bug where if you walk into nevar, it crashes. There is also buffer overflow errors. I don't want to add tons of new features over that kind of serious buggy code.

Updates for the last couple weeks

I have been very bad about updateing this blog the past couple weeks. Our lead programmer did order the X11 books, and will begin workinng on a fix for the menu issue that is shown in the screenshots on the website. I have unfortunatly been busy with a lot of real life stuff that I will not bore you with here.

Suffice to say, I did go to take a look at an art school. Not that I think a lot of formal art training is nessesery to make this game look good or anything like that, but when you have degrees in something then you can thrown your weight around. There are a lot of people in this world that only care about prestiege and letters after your name. Not that any of those types would want to look at or work on this project anyway.

I have to say I was really impressed with the student works. They seem to understand, just like the developers behind World of Warcraft, that the concept is more even more important than the execution. You have to make it appealing. The old "lets try to make everything realism" is dead. You don't just make graphics "better and better" by increasing technical skill, machine hardware demands and realism, like some physics major would like to believe. What is ultimately more important, espeacially in games of this sort, is to communicate a certain feel to the player of the game. Artwork is supposed to evoke emotion, not just try to be a blind copy of something that has been done beforehand by someone else elsewhere.

Eventually, I do plan to have other artists on the project, the look and feel of this game is pretty easy to create for so that I think even a newbie could make good looking tiles. I'm not trying to overdo the shading to make it seem like you just stepped into a photograph. If I was going for that, I would just photograph the stuff I wanted in game rather than waste time drawing it out, cut it, resize and paste it. Why go through all the drawing trouble anyway then?