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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Squashed Bugs or Sqaushed Egos?

Every so often it gets tempting to start doing something else instead of the difficult Wograld project. Even to this day, I do not consider myself a very good programmer. Sure, I did some C programming, and I have written some text based programs, that were mostly made of other programs stuck together with the variables renamed. Unfortunately, when it comes to basic things like understanding how C reads and writes to files, as well as how to use the x11 libraries in the code, I still lack understanding. Instead, I have been relying heavily on my lead programmer, a man with an ego problem (his problem being a lack of ego rather than, like most programmers, having a giant ego) to fix the bugs.

He has been stuck for a long time on the editor bug.
The editor crashes when you use it and try to scroll down. Also, some of the tiles do not appear like they should, instead they blank out the other tiles when they try to appear on the screen. Instead of having my describe it to you, you should actually just download the latest cvs release, as well as the old crossfire maps, and test it out to see what I mean.
I would like to put the bug out there for others to solve, but I worry it will hurt his poor ego. I'm sure he does not want to read this blog where I talk about him and his problems with self esteem.

I love BOTS

I found this bot blog. Apparently artifical inteligence hasn't gotten much smarter. It is goofy how my post about food on a CVS book ends up pasted to something about CVS coupon books and gets labeled as ontario antique book dealer. When I read it I really LOLed. Then I showed it to some other wograld developers. Do people really make money from sites like that?

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.

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.

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.

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 .

Food on a CVS Book

A pristine book is a book that has not been read. That is my motto. Unfortunatly, some other people do not get it. If you need your books perfect, don't read them. They can look nice on a shelf and take up space. However, I do not believe that books should be used that way. I care about one thing and one thing only when I get books, that is the contents of the book.

One of our developers was complaining that her book had food all over it. I do not notice or care that books are not perfect. I do not get distracted by pencil marks, doodles, crumbs, fingerprints, blood smears etc on a book. In fact I like the fact that it feels well used and worn, Some how it gets me more involved in the material. When a book is perfect, it feels like it is a harder book to comprehend with more difficult material that no one has understood before. When it is old and worn out, it feels like territory other people have gone through, so I can always ask some one else about the material if I do not understand it. Also, the more I read a book and practice with it, the better I understand the text. That is probably why I always feel more comfortable with old books rather than new ones. The other nasty thing about new books is they are more likely to lead to paper cuts if you are not careful. Certain kinds of paper is worse at this than others, and not that the book has particularly sharp paper, but I have learned that I have to be careful with paper because it could hurt me.

What does this have to do with wograld project development? I realized that we did not know what version of the game we were using. Our lead developer said he fixed it so the crash bugs are gone, and it seems to work fine on my machine. However on our other developers Solaris system, the thing crashes just like it used to, not the same crash bug actually though, because it doesn't get as far as loading the maps that were not finished. It doesn't even get to scorn. Just walk a few feet and the whole thing crashes. I realize that we need some way to keep track of different version of the game, and using tags in CVS seems to be the way to go. I brought up subversion and how people think it is better, but that would require either waiting for the book or reading the pdf files, neither of the other people on the project are particularly interested in version control. It just seems like a nessesary evil. The thing is how to use it effectively, something I don't feel that we are doing.

I read that some newbie developer on some other project team messed up the CVS. I hope we don't end up having that problem. Then again, I feel if someone does not want to learn version control, they should not be working on a project, because it is something that has to be done.

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.

Shell Hell

I like the title Shell Hell because it rhymes. It describes my feelings about trying to fork a free software project by using shell script to rename every instance of "crossfire" to "wograld". I thought, oh, free software project, what more do you need to know besides how to program in the language the project is written in right? Wrong. I did not know all the stuff I would have to learn, and as embarrassing as it is now to admit it, I didn't even know THAT MUCH, when I began the project. But, still even with that one little problem, I didn't let it stop me from creating a project. I figured if someone could design without knowing how to program at some of these big game companies (or rather they programed or something for a few years and then moved into management), why couldn't I do the same thing? Besides I did start out with a couple programmers, one of whom didn't do very much work, and the other decided grad school was more important
Mostly I struggled with the other aspects of the project, learning how to properly use the source forge website was an undertaking in itself. First I needed to learn CVS version control. Then I had to learn other things like website uploading, html etc. I made foolish errors like thinking I need a fancier website than I actually did, using Drupal rather than plain html or html with css. I just found ways to make things hard on myself, trying to do everything myself.

Even though the lead developer seemed to be enjoying himself writing C code, the shell script was something he “didn't want to learn.” Now, I've heard stories of people trying to contribute to a project, but if you don't want to learn something like that, it is not tolerated. I now know the reason for that. You can't get away with “just writing the code” or thinking that you can somehow avoid learning things that you don't think are interesting at first glance, even though they are needed to get the project done. Sometimes things don't seem like very much fun to begin with, but that is because we go about them all wrong, not because they are inherently uninteresting. It took me a while to find a C programming book I could actually read and understand.