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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

Bug and Features tracker on Sourceforge

I added some tasks to the bug and features tracker on sourceforge. I will add more as I assign tasks to people. I also added the ability to post commits to the cvs list, but I have not tested out its usage yet. It is supposed to mail the mailing list subscribers every time a commit is made to the project just like I have seen on other projects. I do not know why it took me so long to get to that or realize how it worked, but it did.

Also, another project admin felt that she could improve the website so that is being worked on now as well.

Flustrated with my project team

I know the rest of the projects memebers will not like to hear this, but I am flustrated with my project team. I know I have written about this numerious times in several posts before hand. I just feel that nothing is getting done because

I am thinking about kicking the last two people off the team. All they do is argue with each other and with me about things that have nothing to do with the wograld source code.
The first is a guy. He makes piles of notes and no one else can read about the code and refuses to explain them to anyone else. He is also very difficult to work with because he worries other people will see him as inadiquite. I guess the whole free software culture of "quality" has gotten to him and taken away his ego even though he did over 90% of the code work on the project, in fact all of it. I took care of all the adminstration things like, figuring out what we needed to know, setting up the sourceforge website, etc.

The girl, I'm not sure if I should call her a "girl" at her age, is so obsessed with stupid stuff like cooking for her husband and exercise. Then, when I tell her to get on it, she makes some excuse about not being able to concentrate. Not able to concentrate. What kind of B.S. is that. If you look in the project history, you would see she had no contributions except to add this person we did not even know as a project member. I had to remind her these are real people on sourceforge, and not just test identies. People wanted to know why they should not have two or three accounts at source forge, and why they should learn to use version control. Okay, yeah, it might not be apparently obvious, but I feel that both of these people insist on too much hand-holding.

I'm thinking maybe I should take the advice of a former IT manager I talked to, and just get a whole new team. A team that does not need their hands held. A team that will be just as passionate about the aims of the project as I am, a team that will take over and practically run the project for me while meeting and exceeding all of the goals of the project.

Every time I suggest it to the current project members, they get themselves in gear for a couple days and attempt to make some progress. Invariably, they get sidetracked by issues like the fact it does not compile on solaris. Then they just forget the whole thing.

Admittedly, last month was bad, with car troubles and the fact I worked on it less than I normally do, due to Nano-Wri-mo I'm still working on the novel, but at a less frantic pace now, since I got over 50k words in last month, I would be happy with just 30k words this month and some editing. Of course, writing the novel probably will not fix the project team even though the novel is about a free software project developer.

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.