Nanowrimo

The whole of November was taken up by me writing a novel. www.nanowrimo.org The C++ group I was involved with got to chapter 7. After that, we kind of stopped. Something about chapter 7 in that book just got very hard all of a sudden, even though we seemed to be making progress prior to that. Well actually, each chapter just got harder and harder.

One nice thing about novel writing is you do not have to worry about having a project to large to do by yourself at all. I find that I can write a whole novels myself without any help from anyone else. I won the nano write, but I still have not finished the story, being as I got over the 50k needed to win, but my plot is not really more than halfway done. The story is about a web developer who has no social life, so she joins a cult.

I could talk more about my plotting problems here, but I think I will leave that for somewhere else, as I know not all game developers like books in the horror genre. My husband loves to read horror novels, but he would not like to see the horror stuff happen irl. So then I asked him. If you don't like it for real, then why do you read so much of it? He likes a lot of Stephan king, except for the dark tower series. I hope I did not fill up my book with too many descriptions of her dreams and nightmares. When I do the editing, my critics might insist I take that part out.

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.

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.

Wograld History, not as easy as it seems.

One of the reasons I think I initially put off the website is because I wanted some kind of world lore that made sense for the game, I had this idea of four races and nine stupidities, but then I had really no back story. For instance, I wondered, why were the stupidities important to the populace? How did the four races come to exist in the world. Try as I might, I could not answer those questions. About a year or so ago, I seemed to have written up something about a tyrant who united all the races and that the nine stupidities were a bunch of vague principles that originally tied to common sayings in the realm, but solidified into a set of principles that were used to defeat the tyrant. As far as the races went, I knew that orcs and elves could become the other race, same with humans and undead, and that undead and elves were originally considered immortal while orcs and humans were mortal, whatever the heck that meant.

One thing I have realized that as I have gotten a more in depth view of history than what i had in school. I have come to realize, that people today do not really understand the past, or even how people of that time may have thought or seen the world. I often speculated especially about ancient magic and what it must have been like. Was religion and magic always so closely interwoven? Were the gods really demons? Were the demons really gods? Why did the mysteries disappear? People can only speculated based on the writings and art that they find, but so much would not have survived the ravages of time, particularly in hot and humid climates such as Africa and the Americas. Also, a lot was destroyed by war, with a new king or tyrant removing the face and symbols of his predecessors in order to make it so that he was the only history that ever existed, and that the past did not. People like to think that certain things are or were timeless, but was that truly so? I feel it is not enough to say that is always the way it has been, one can only go further back and farther away.

One thing about the setting of Wograld, after the tyrant king, people are on an upswing. It is not falling into a dark age where people forget how to do even basic tasks, but rather, suddenly can craft new weapons and armor that they could not before. There is an enhancement in the learning of combat techniques and magic.

But the new skills and powers are not without their detractors, in fact, after the tyrant, it is almost an uphill battle to learn new things, since the races of Wograld seem to be afraid of it. This is where the demons come into play. Demons are an idea that I had after thinking about what to do about the skill system. What if, in order to raise your skill caps, you had to summon demons and ask them to train you in various skills? Wouldn't that be neat. Typically people think of demons in games as either monsters to fight, or little familiar creatures for warlocks and summoners to use in combat. But I like the idea of a whole new take on that idea. (well, actually a very old idea)

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.

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.