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.

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. 

Gathering Skills

The time has come to make this game fun, and by fun, I mean not just some beautiful fork of Crossfire, but rather it's own game with its own game mechanics.  One of the major things missing from Wograld, that was never in Crossfire is gathering skills.  By that I mean things such as fishing, lumberjacking, and mining.  Other rpgs have had other various gathering skills such as farming, herbalism (or the picking of herbs), hunting (for animal parts) and skinning (animal and monster hides) and enchanting (removing magic essence from items).

We simply have to make maps that allow players to use the skill on certain spots and gather resources, then, when the skill gets high enough, they can gather different resources.  The resources could be used in crafting, but for now, we could have ways to sell them to npcs.
The crafting system is sort of a separate system and could use parts from gathering skills and parts from other things gotten elsewhere.

jwogclnt now connects to the sever but..

I figured out what was holding development up.  We were having some trouble importing the project into netbeans until I figured it out. Unit tests on jxclnt do not work in netbeans.  The orginal developer of jxclnt suggested using Intelej IDEA instead.  So I tried that.

We found some bug with the server as well, probably better not to blog about it here. 


so now, the new client connects to the sever, but does not display the tiles yet properly.  I hope to have that fixxed in the next few days.

Meanwhile, I wonder if our CVS version control is holding us up.  One of the things that concerned me is sourceforge is moving to the allura platform.  At first I worried CVS would not be supported, but it looks like it will be supported on allura.  Also, later versions of netbeans require you to download a plugin for CVS rather than it coming out of the box.



I've been looking at distributed version control systems, both git and mercurial are under consideration.  At first I was kind of leaning towards git, but it looks like mercurial is easier to use, espeacily for windows users, probably the main platform with lots of gamers who want to be developers. Of course the server probably does not work all that well on windows, but I havn't really tried it, not being a windows user myself.  One of the reasons I choose a java client is the fact it will just work regardless of the underlying platform os.

The thing I don't really like about mercurial, is it is written in python. Python is a fast moving language that changes to fast, so I worry if its going to break future releases, although I don't really think that's highly likely as I would think for smaller projects.

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.