Back to development

I finally had a chance to get back to wograld development.  I was actually ready a couple months agotoget back to work on the project a couple months ago, but I wanted to redo my computer with a new set of distributions on it, so I did that in April.  I got that done, and then I had an awful month in May. My cat got very sick and died, and I also had my car totaled.

June is started out well, I got a chance to test some code, add and remove things from the bug tracker, and commit more artwork.  I can't believe I forgot about the bug tracker for years. I think if I had used it more from the beginning, I would not have to keep track of so many things in the development, particularly in cases where I put the project down for a bit and picked it back up again.
I've been daydreaming about writing a book on free software project development, but then I realize half the information I think should be included in the book, I don't actually know, I could ask someone else, but I'm not sure they would know the answer either.  Also I don't want it to get into too much of an argument, such as what distro is better, what desktop GUI is better or what programming language is better etc.  I know people get very opinionated on these things, I know I do.  I don't want the book to be come across as too biased even though I have strong opinions on those topics too, I know not everyone shares my opinions.

I guess you could ask questions like  Should your project use a bug tracker? Should your project use version control? I guess you can get away with not using them if its a very small project, but I've found anything more than 4-5 files it would probably be better to use version control anyway.  With the bug tracker its nice to keep track of things even if no one else ever reads it, because then you know what you fixed and what you did not fix yet.

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.

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.

Athena Widget Internet Hunt

My lead programmer decided he would prefer to work on the client user interface, so I decided I would take the other track, the map editor. The map editor is ancient, and uses the X11 Athena Widget set, otherwise lovingly known as Xaw. For those who do not know, X11 has a series of books, volumes 0-8. We have most of the books, but apparently there were two additions of Volume 4, xtoolkitintrinsics. There was the "standard" or rather not so standard edition, last published in 1993, using the Athena Widget set, and the the Motif edition. As you should all know, Motif itself is non-free software. Apparently there are other editions of motif, but that is besides the point, because the ancient crossedit crossfire map editor was written using Athena Widgets, so I wanted to understand how it was put together.


While doing a total re-write using gtk or something would probably be a good idea. I have never used gtk, so I would have no idea where to start, while the wogedit map-editor, is already part way writen. It just needs some tweaking to display tiles properly. So many games do not have map editors even when they should, that I feel a poorly written editor with a bad user interface is much better than none at all.


So, anyway, I spent all of yesterday searching the internet for clues as to where the example problems for the Standard Volume Four, X11 book could be found. I already managed to get a pdf edition (uploaded by the publisher) of the book here. http://www.archive.org/details/xtoolkitintrinsic04nyemiss


The more into the book I read, the more I wanted the example problems already coded for me so I would not have to waste hours of time typing them in wrong. That is actually what took the whole day. I asked on Freenode, the xorg chat channel. Someone commented that they hoped that the code examples were lost along with all interest in that ancient version of ancient X11 widgets.


Unfortunately, it is too late for that, I have an X11 Athena Widget obsession, and I managed to find the example code right here. http://examples.oreilly.com/9781565920132/
Be sure to download xtprog4.tar.Z for the Athena Widget book examples. You can unpack it using the regular tar command.


Admittedly, I wonder sometimes what the Goddess Athena thinks of having her name tacked to an obsolete X11 Widget set.

Adventures in CFLAGS

For those who don't know what CFLAGS is, it is a variable in Makefile, that is the file that appears in every directory of your program that lists the flags gcc uses, such as -Wall or -g . In this case, I want the debugger flag -g, but unfortunetly, I have to go and edit the 25-30 or so different Makefiles by hand to change the CFLAGS. I figure there has to be a better way to get the debugger to work, but every time I run ./configure even when I try to change the enviroment variable by adding something like ./configure $CFLAGS = "-g" or something, it doesn't work. I tried it forwards, backwards, with export, and still the configure keeps giving me the same makefiles with nothing added for the CFLAGS. I'm going to read through the entire autoconf and automake file. I've already been looking through them trying to understand what the various macros do in the configure.ac, I'm still not 100% sure what all those different configure files do yet. I'll probably have to run autotools and rebuild the configure again. I was hoping there would be some simple command line thing I could do, but for some reason this does not appear to be the case. I've also heard about changing enviroment variables, but I have no idea how to do that.

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)

Script Frenzy and Perl

What did I do with the month of April? I decided to just work on the quest dialog for Script Frenzy.. I figured some time to get out 100 pages of dialog would help me with the writing of the quest engine. I did get my 100 pages of dialog, but it was really hard and only managed to finish on the last day of the month. I do other things other than just work on the project, like sleep and eat and go to the bathroom. I really don't remember how I spent the rest of march, however. I can not say I ended up working on the project all that much, but probably I continued to work on the shell script. Of course, I thought that going to the libre planet conference would help my project more than it actually did. I am still having trouble finding people who want to commit the kind of time and effort this project needs to get finished before we all die of old age.

Starting yesterday night, I decided to go through all the files in the project and figure out what ever it is that they are for. In the server/utils folder is a bunch of perl scripts I did not write. I am not even sure we need some of them in that folder. I have decided to learn perl so I can figure out what they are used for. I know there are some that need to be used every time you add arches. I feel that running a server is an ordeal in itself, just figuring out how to use the software is not as easy as I hoped it would be.

Shell script - almost got it.

I have been reading this book called "Linux Shell Scripting with Bash" by Ken O Burtch. Shell Script Book I have also been reading a sed tutorial and the Gnu Awk Manual. I think I am getting closer to making a shell script. Already, I have figured out how to use pipes. In order to user pipes to pipe the input to the next command you type more nameoffile.txt | stupidcommand. where nameoffile.txt is the big list of text you want to run through the stupidcommand. The stupidcommand is a stupid shell script. It took me a while to figure this out, like several years. I do not expect it to go any faster. Either people already know it and they go too fast for me, or they still have not figured it out yet because it is hard. I like how you can substitute one word for another with sed. I also found a sed command that allows you to get the path names for everything recursivly, so that way I could get the names of all the files I need to change with sed.

Since I am going to the libre planet conference tommarow and Sunday, I will try to either finish it there (since I have a laptop now) Or when I get back. I do not really have memorized how the sed command works though.

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.

Boost yourself to hell!

Yesterday I got the brilliant (no stupid) idea to try and install licq on my computer. For those who do not know, licq is an instant messageing application that uses the icq protocol. I have an ancient version of mandrake 10.0 on that computer. I figured I would install licq so that I could get in contact with some of my old friends from ultima online if they were still using icq (who uses icq these days? anyone?)

I figured that former Ultima Online players would be in a good position to help me develop this game because I would not have to spend hours upon hours explaining the game design to them. They already know for the most part what features it is supposed to have, so I do not have to go into detail about things like banking, dyeable clothing, skill based systems or most importantly, what features an mmorpg should have that most are lacking (things such as customizable housing and being able to leave items on the ground come to mind)

Anyway, after I installed the pre-requiste boost libraries needed to compile licq, I then went a head and installed licq. It seemed to work fine. I did not message anyone because there were few people on, and I was kind of tired anyway (yes, I have a massive contact list of practically every aquentence I ever had in UO.) I got my whole contact list, and yes, there appeared to be some people online as well. I was pleased, but at the same time disappointed that there were not more people to try and contact. Before I went to bed, I turned the computer off. When I went to boot it into Linux this afternoon, I was left with a terminal login screen an a failure to get the x11 server started. I could login as root (I forgot my user password lol) and look around directories and use commands, but some things just do not work very well in the command line, so I would like my gui back.

The ultimate lesson that can be learned from this is libraries suck, dependency hunt sucks, even if you thought it works, it can just be broke and you won't find out until you reboot your computer. I wonder if I will be able to fix the issue before I die. Also the boost documentation was terriable. I did hardly know what I was doing half the time, and I had to spent a lot more time reading documentation to install it than I would have liked. I feel that the free software community does not appreciate good writers and would not know how to write documentation for stupid libraries (that they should not have anyway) if it bit them.

Learning Gnu Autotools

I recently began learning more about how to use Gnu-Autotools. I found out that unfortunately, we filled up the CVS with stuff that should not be there, including makefiles. Now that I understand Autotools better, I see how we did not know what we were doing. It took me a while to figure out how to use autotools and what they were good for. I got so wrapped up in learning how to program in C, that I did not realize that the things I really wanted to change were in the shell script for compiling and running. The scripts have what the program is named and where it is installed. It took me a long time to understand what all the configure and makefiles are. Including but not limited to config.ac config.guess, Makefile, Makefile.am Makefile.in etc. I had a book on Gnu Make, but did not realize that what I really needed was the books on Autoconf and Automake. You can download them from www.gnu.org .

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.

Working on the Project Website

A long time ago, I started work on the project website. I managed to upload the first page. Then I got the brilliant (actually stupid) idea that I should make it look nice with CSS or something. That simply led to it not getting done as I tried to fool around with how it was supposed to look in CSS. People don't really decide to play or not games based on how great the website is. The main thing is find the information you need and go download and run a copy of the game.

I had wasted a lot of time prior to that trying to figure out how Drupal works. Drupal is this really bloated content management system that you don't need to display basic information about a game, but one of my friends used it extensively for his website and recommended it. This is before I ever heard of CSS. Of course his website is a whole different animal from making a game website. A game website is just basically information thrown up on the web and organized in some kind of manner. In fact, I just went to a website today that was basically just a wiki for this game engine I was looking at. Wiki's make it look like it is very in progress and anyone can just add anything. However, wikis don't really have the polish of a more traditional website.

Learning C the hard way

I thought that the C coding job was just something I could assign to another project member. I was wrong. I also though that you could read C programming books and then dive right into the code. I was wrong about that to. Apparently, unlike things such as version control and ht ml, learning the C programming language is going to take a long long time. Part of it is because the books written about programming in C are very bad. And the other part is unlike other things, there is just so much to learn before you get a working knowledge of C. Every semi-colon, every comma makes a difference in being able to compile and run the program. Also, functions don't necessarily work the way you think they should. Take scanf for instance. The whole deal that spaces meant a new entry with scanf took me a while to figure out. Also, you have to be careful that you are not inputting things in that you don't mean to. String processing doesn't work like you think it should. And I haven't even done an in depth study of structures yet, something I will need to do to be able to understand the wograld code. The problem with most programming books is this. they give you examples, but when you try to build something on your own you are left in the dark. Then, other books have algorithms in them, but those algorithms will give you no way to implement that in the C code. You end up spending your time hunting down syntax errors because you can't implement the algorithm.

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.

First Post

This is going to be more like a journal than a blog, really. I know that people want to know how the project is coming along and that it is not vaporware like so many other games that don't exist.
So, if this project is so great, why don't I have the sourceforge website up yet. To put it in blunt terms, sourceforge documentation sucks. If you ever wonder why there are not more games for GNU/Linux, why the games that are for GNU/Linux seem to be trivial, boring or require evil 3d drivers, now you know. The sole reason for this problem is the absolute suckage of sourceforge documentation. Sourceforge is the big site everyone thinks of when they try to think of a place to get free hosting for there brand new look at me I can write some great code massive project.

I've already tried to get the other developers on the project to read the awful sourceforge documentation, one hasn't gotten to it yet as far as I know. This is partly because sourceforge documentation does not look like a fun read. The other developer tried to read it, logged into the ssh shell, but could not figure out how to put a website up on the server. I even asked my local LUG (Linux Users Group) The problem is, either people don't know how to do it, or if they know how, they are incapable of communicating it.

Ultimately, the real thing holding back the games, is the bad documentation. It isn't finding programmers of C or any other popular language, it isn't finding artists, no matter what programmers would have you believe, art is so easy anyone can do it except for some programmers. It isn't the sounds or music, because the game would play just fine without that and you could add it later.
In the end, it is the whole herding cats problem, getting the programmers and artists to use the version control system, for example, or setting up the website or just simply communication that holds projects back.