What's my name? Java Development

For the past six months or so, I have just basically been trying to learn to code in Java. I have done the occasional upload of artwork to sourceforge as well. But mostly I have decided to focus on learning Java really well so I can modify the new crossfire java client enough to work with the wograld server. For those who don't know, Wograld originally forked from the crossfire code. Since then the projects have gone in different directions. Crossfire has the same bad game play and artwork and while fixing some bugs, while wograld fixed some ugly artwork and game play while adding new bugs and keeping only the awful messed up x11 client. That is the brutally honest assessment anyway. I understand that user interface developers are the best of the best in the world, and that you could search endlessly to find one who can make such a thing. While I can do the basic hello world, and have been learning some object oriented and graphical user interface, my knowledge isn't quite up to the level to comprehend the entirety of the crossfire jxclient code base yet.

Java User Interface Development Woes

What is holding up the project? The User Interface development. The real problem is none of the project team members want to do it. I've written my share of hello world in Java, I even made some bad graphical applications with it in netbeans, but figuring out how to put the user interface in game together has proven to be more of a challenge than that. I looked at the Java User Interface for crossfire. It has all these folders and stuff. I don't know what all those files do and I'm having a hard time following the code to figure out what I need to change to make it work with Wograld.

Crossfire has had several revisions since Wograld split off from it. Wograld has also had several revisions since that time, so it would consist of changing the things that are different so it works with wograld. One thing, is I don't have a metaserver. I would find it difficult to justify having a metaserver when no one wants to play a buggy pre-alpha with missing artwork and most of the awful crossfire gameplay (I mean there is a reason that usually I never see more than four players logged onto crossfire right?)
I don't think the game is even really ready for alpha yet with the amount of user interface work that needs to be done.

I've considered trying to recruit project team members again, but until its really playable, that just seems like a dead end. After all, no matter how good of an artist you are, programmers do not want to work on your game until you show them the code compiling and running with a nice user interface. I hate how programers make artists feel like they are less important. If programmers cared more about artists and what they want maybe we would not still be having these stupid debates about intellectual property and artists would be making money on free culture works all over the place. Sorry, I've been getting into a rant, but its the end of the year and I hoped that the Java User Interface would be done by now.

Uploaded some Wall posters.

I found some wall posters in this folder. They were mostly of space age themes. In spite of what some people may be thinking, Wograld was not intended to be pure fantasy. I kind of liked how in Ultima 7, there was a spaceship in the farmers field. I always thought it would be fun to add a little bit of science fiction to an otherwise fantasy story. Not to go overboard with it, but to just add enough to give it a similar feel to the Ultima Series. To that end, the Paranoia areas will be heavily alien themed. I have not gone into all the alien and spaced themed ideas because I don't want to spoil it yet for people who may want to play the game. As you well know, aliens are a common source of paranoia in a lot of stories. So I will add the Ufo's and aliens from outer space. I could use the wall posters there.

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.

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!

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.

Who's Fault? Segfault

Sometimes I just get so frustrated with this project. I have been looking at the segfaults and trying to find out what is causing them. Just because I know what some x11 functions do, does not mean I have figured out how to fix the segfault errors. serpentshard fixed some of the other crash bugs, but the editor still looks as awful as ever. We never managed to change it so that it would allow you to select the proper area on the screen. The areas you select and input tiles into are still from the old maps. So, although it displays the new tile sets, when you click on them, it is mapped to the old way that things used to be arranged. I don't know how to describe it exactly. So, basically, it looks okay, but it acts like the tiles are still the old 32X32 square tiles.

Well, actually, if you want to see, just download the server with the map editor, wogedit from today's date or a bit earlier and see what I am complaining about her on the blog. If we could have fixed the tiles to begin with, we would not have this problem. I don't know why fixing it in the map editor became so hard. It just did.
I am not sure if the any of the segfaults are directly related to the major display user-interface problem that I described. Actually, one of them is not. If you left click in a box on the top of the editor. When you are over a tile, there is a top part of the editor that displays what is on the tile you clicked. (of course it maps the wrong tile) Then it segfaults on you. That is not nice. But it is what we are stuck with until we can figure out how to fix the code bugs. No one else wants to look at our buggy code, so we are stuck fixing it ourselves. I had thought that open source meant you could get better programmers to do you dirty work like fix major bugs, but I guess that is not how it works. Maybe my essay about keyboard monkeys seems a little naive now.