Looking for artists

Only now have I begun to realize the extent of the artwork that will be needed for this game. All those animations of every pixel, from front to back of each piece of clothing, not to mention the paper doll artwork for the upcoming paper doll feature will take an awful lot of time to do. It would be nice to have some help on the project. That said however, there are certain things I would stipulate out of our artists.

1) Absolutely no copy-pasting from other games, yes that includes free-software games, because no one wants to look at the same artwork they have already seen, Wograld should have a unique look all its own (modified public domain and GPL art is ok, provided it fits into the game.) ,

2.) Its okay if the piece isn't up with the rest of the artwork, but there is no need to reject artwork that fits all the criteria (better than the current (mostly non-existent or old crossfire) artwork) and also nothing that breaks rule one, and it must also be in the proper perspective for the game. I won't be too much of a drag about style unless it is blatantly bad (such as too realistic, not pixelated enough etc)

3) No emotional abuse of other team members - period, this will not be tolerated. This is not a contest and artists should each work on different things to avoid walking over each others territory and turning it into a contest rather than getting the project done. I admit I started doing that with some of gnurpgs/ Serpentshard's tiles and realized that I was wasting time instead of getting the project out the door.

4) there is a limit to how much "better" a piece can really get. Often, all that needs to be done is a re coloration to make it more appealing, using intermediate colors rather than photo-realism gray and brown. I will put an end to the stupidness of "better and better art" found in some other games. When it is done, it is done, there is no "making it better."

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.

Maps and hunting down bugs.

I finally got the lead programmer to do some work on the project again. Maybe it was because I took away his big bag of chips and soda pop, as well as two certain people being away for a week. Anyway, we finally got the major crash bug fixed. You can now walk around on the scorn map and not crash just because you try to enter places like the scorn school. I heard those areas were never finished even in the original crossfire. I also started working on the graphics again. I have completed an undead lady from four different directions with two frames each to replace the same 8 frames that all crossfire characters have. I also did a few terrain tiles. Map changes are still tedious and the map editor could use some work to fully display the new tiles. It would be nice to have some more help on the project, but I really only need someone who is dedicated since the project requires a lot of getting up to speed, figuring out how the code and maps work etc. Unlike the artwork, the code seems to take a lot of getting up to speed on it, rather than just making things of a certain size and copying them in, and then running some scripts. The directories are still the crossfire directories. It should really have separate directories for wograld. You also have to run the server as root, otherwise it will not have the permission to write to certain folders and you will not be able to save your characters or maps.
The reason the map and editor is so critical to fix, is because I need it working so I can see how my new terrain tiles look before putting them in the game. Not that I have not already done some of this work in the gimp. Also, Wograld is not crossfire. I want it to be a completely different game with different areas and maps.
There are many things I would like to add such as wearable clothing, but I think it is important to get the basics down first, by that I mean things like the menus and maps not crashing when you teleport into them. For some reason, our lead programmer found a bug where if you walk into nevar, it crashes. There is also buffer overflow errors. I don't want to add tons of new features over that kind of serious buggy code.

C code and the overwhelmingness of large projects.

I remember the first time I looked at the wograld code. It was like reading Chinesee. Gradually, it has started to make more sense. I found all those c and h files to be overwhelming as well, seeing as there were so many of them. The lead developer somehow managed to change things so that it would do different things, but at the time, I just wanted to leave it to him because I couldn't see how I was going to figure out how to read it. I think that part of the reason there are not more good free software games is there is such a long time from the newbie who has never written a line of C code, to a good working game that does what you want. The intermediate steps can seem so tedious and painful, particularly when you don't know how to include libraries and it takes months to find a person who can answer a simple newbie question.

Once I found the resources, my learning of programming became much faster, and I was able to make headway where I had not made it before, and also to make better use of the resources I did have.

Some people think that programming and programming talent is like an inborn skill. Either you have it or you do not. I do not agree with those people.

Anyway, in case newbies in C programming have not found this resource, I will list this message board here since it has been a tremendous help in learning C programming.

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/
http://www.cprogramming.com/

The problem with Leveling in games

Many typical RPGs and like games, such as Crossfire, have a level system. This system frequently has levels that can go as high as in the 100's or as low as ten (but frequently this number is scaled up and up in order for the developers to create more content without doing any real work). When a character gains a level, she also gains stats. She might gain in strength, dexterity, intellect, or whatever other attributes are put into the game. The problem is she has 100 levels, so say she starts with 20 strength, and then gains a point in strength every level, now at level 100 she has 120 strength. The newbie character logs in with his 20 strength newbie. The problem is she is going to really be 6 times more powerful, so then, what happens if she decides now that she has maxed out her character, her new mission in life is to grief newbies. The newbies don't really have much of a chance against her.

But the real issue is that instead of 100 levels, there might be thousands of levels. By the time you get a maxed leveled character, that is several years of work. No lifers play day in and day out to get max level, and some games don't even really have a cap on levels, so the no lifer has this character that is several times more powerful than that of the casual player. The no lifer then dominates everyone, and everyone else realizes they will never get that powerful, so they quit. This is bad for the game, because eventually the no-lifer realizes that he is the only one left playing it, and he would rather rank up on a chart where he has some real competition, not just who had no life for so many years.

Ultima Online did it well. Swing a sword, gain points in dexterity and strength, cast a spell, gain a point in intellect, up to a reasonable cap for your total stats. I think it was something like 255 total, with a max of 150 in any given stat, and up to 25 more points with stat scrolls. But this way there were no uber l33t character with thousands more hit points than the newbie. Sure, maxed our characters were more powerful than the newbies, but anyone could easily get a maxed out character with just a little bit of time and effort, so most people had maxed out characters. The games focus was not on character development, beyond tweaking your template for a given game play change. The focus was on actually playing the game, going to dungeons, finding loot, crafting, and finding resources, socializing, and trading. People did not think of it as a grind game where the primary focus was character development. How you played your character mattered far more, as did customizing your template and equipment for your play style.

Useless Slashdot Articule

Today I read a useless slashdot article. It was about developers and motivation. I thought it would be worth a look. Turns out, all the comments were completely useless. I don't know why that someone would ask that of the wonderful "community" The RTFM crowd is not a place to find motivation, its more like the community of do not even bother. No, they will not help you with your project. I don't know what it is about the mean nerd community, but they tend to enshrine the tenants of "how to ask smart questions" and other stuff like that, encouraging others to be discouraging. I saw quite a lot of reply s promoting obviously useless things like the over-advertised prescription drugs and giving up on the project (either temporarily or permanently).
Other communities are not like this. It seems that nerds have a lot of time to tell someone useless dis advice, and not enough time to actually program anything useful.
I wish now that I had not wasted my time reading that article. As if I don't have enough to deal with learning C then having to read something nice like that. For those who don't listen and like to waste time, here it is.
Slashdot Timewaster

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)