From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Fri Mar 7 17:10:31 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 01:10:31 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? Message-ID: Hi all, My name's Chris and I'm a student at university in the UK. Been very interested in MMOs for a long time now (back since the days of UO), and I really like the look of Worldforge and how it's all progressing - particularly Erik's client, Ember, which is looking pretty amazing nowadays. I wanted to contribute something to the project and considered signing up for the Google Summer of Code, but my C++ is still at the command-line stage and therefore I'm not really going to be worth mentoring at this stage. So I thought about what skills I have that might be useful and I looked at the project, and realised that there might be room for me to help you guys out with some website design. I'm not professional-grade or anything, but I can promise you I can do a lot better than the current website. If you guys are interested in having me on board, just post a reply and I can work out some specifications for the kind of site you need. At the end of the day, your existing site is outdated in terms of design and not updated often, but worst of all the screenshots don't do the current state of the clients any justice at all (certainly with Ember judging from Erik's blog, though I don't know about Sear). I think you'd get a lot more interest in the project with a better site, particularly from non-coding areas such as art, and that can only be a good thing, right? Hope you can find a place for me somewhere, Chris. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080308/ad1a01fc/attachment.html From kai.blin at gmail.com Fri Mar 7 18:50:17 2008 From: kai.blin at gmail.com (Kai Blin) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 03:50:17 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:10:31 Chris Baker wrote: > Hi all, > > My name's Chris and I'm a student at university in the UK. Been very > interested in MMOs for a long time now (back since the days of UO), and I > really like the look of Worldforge and how it's all progressing - > particularly Erik's client, Ember, which is looking pretty amazing > nowadays. I wanted to contribute something to the project and considered > signing up for the Google Summer of Code, but my C++ is still at the > command-line stage and therefore I'm not really going to be worth mentoring > at this stage. So I thought about what skills I have that might be useful > and I looked at the project, and realised that there might be room for me > to help you guys out with some website design. I'm not professional-grade > or anything, but I can promise you I can do a lot better than the current > website. Sure, very much appreciated. > If you guys are interested in having me on board, just post a reply and I > can work out some specifications for the kind of site you need. At the end > of the day, your existing site is outdated in terms of design and not > updated often, but worst of all the screenshots don't do the current state > of the clients any justice at all (certainly with Ember judging from Erik's > blog, though I don't know about Sear). I think you'd get a lot more > interest in the project with a better site, particularly from non-coding > areas such as art, and that can only be a good thing, right? I think we're all well aware of the problem. Most coders don't care enough about webdesign. I think if you could draft up a design of your own and put it on a demo site somewhere, we'll gladly provide feedback. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080308/a3ed85c8/attachment.bin From kai.blin at gmail.com Fri Mar 7 18:59:53 2008 From: kai.blin at gmail.com (Kai Blin) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 03:59:53 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. Message-ID: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> Hi folks, I've toyed with git-cvsimport a little the last day and created some sample imports of some libraries and ember. They can be browsed on the web at http://jade.worldforge.org/ You can clone your own copy like git clone git://jade.worldforge.org/kai/ember.git ember same for the libraries that are up. I've tried to dig up real name mappings for most of the cvs usernames, using the AUTHOR info provided as well as archived emails. Note that for now git-daemon isn't started automatically as I didn't get around to write a start script yet. Should we decide to use git, I'll happily run the repos for now if we can't host it on www.worldforge.org. I'd propose a model similar to the Samba git development model. One central repo per lib/client where every developer can push changes to. This is the "official" tree. Additional inofficial trees to use for work in progress, like the "kai" subdir that contains the current repos. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080308/a1248eea/attachment.bin From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Sat Mar 8 01:34:10 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 10:34:10 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02B@brun.iteam.local> All of my commit comments are prefixed by the date an my name and email address. When looking through the history it looks really strange, since the same information is mirrored in the column to the right of the comments. It would be much nicer to see the comments only. Could you alter the import script to strip the name-date-email-data out if possible? /erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Kai Blin [kai.blin at gmail.com] Skickat: den 8 mars 2008 03:59 Till: general at worldforge.org ?mne: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. Hi folks, I've toyed with git-cvsimport a little the last day and created some sample imports of some libraries and ember. They can be browsed on the web at http://jade.worldforge.org/ You can clone your own copy like git clone git://jade.worldforge.org/kai/ember.git ember same for the libraries that are up. I've tried to dig up real name mappings for most of the cvs usernames, using the AUTHOR info provided as well as archived emails. Note that for now git-daemon isn't started automatically as I didn't get around to write a start script yet. Should we decide to use git, I'll happily run the repos for now if we can't host it on www.worldforge.org. I'd propose a model similar to the Samba git development model. One central repo per lib/client where every developer can push changes to. This is the "official" tree. Additional inofficial trees to use for work in progress, like the "kai" subdir that contains the current repos. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. From kai.blin at gmail.com Sat Mar 8 02:01:22 2008 From: kai.blin at gmail.com (Kai Blin) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 11:01:22 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02B@brun.iteam.local> References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02B@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: <200803081101.23002.kai.blin@gmail.com> On Saturday 08 March 2008 10:34:10 Erik Hjortsberg wrote: > All of my commit comments are prefixed by the date an my name and email > address. When looking through the history it looks really strange, since > the same information is mirrored in the column to the right of the > comments. It would be much nicer to see the comments only. Could you alter > the import script to strip the name-date-email-data out if possible? This is because git uses the first line of the commit message as subject of the patch. This probably is true for all of Al's commits, as well. I'll see if there's anything I can do about that, I need to brush up my git-fu a little first. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080308/bde83bd1/attachment.bin From jack at mudshark.org Sat Mar 8 07:55:18 2008 From: jack at mudshark.org (Jack Cummings) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 07:55:18 -0800 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20080308155518.GV22285@ice.mudshark.org> On Sat, Mar 08, 2008 at 03:59:53AM +0100, Kai Blin wrote: > I've toyed with git-cvsimport a little the last day and created some sample > imports of some libraries and ember. I've set up the monotone server cluster ({blue,green}.worldforge.org) Interestingly enough, git was only twice as fast as monotone on an initial pull[0] (45 seconds, vs 85 seconds) of the ember branch. I thought it would be faster. You can grab ember by: mtn clone --branch=org.worldforge.client.ember green.worldforge.org Or any of the other branches: client.sear client.ember client.silence server.cyphesis lib.atlas-c++ lib.eris lib.mercator lib.sage lib.skstream lib.varconf lib.wfmath lib.libwfut proto.atlas tool.metaserver tool.wfut client.equator client.apogee server.indri tool.entityforge tool.herbiforge client.uclient client.frost lib.atlas-java --Jack [0] initial pull is what monotone is slow at -- Jack (John) Cummings http://mudshark.org/ PGP fingerprint: F18B 13A3 6D06 D48A 598D 42EA 3D53 BDC8 7917 F802 From kai.blin at gmail.com Sat Mar 8 09:20:30 2008 From: kai.blin at gmail.com (Kai Blin) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 18:20:30 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: <20080308155518.GV22285@ice.mudshark.org> References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> <20080308155518.GV22285@ice.mudshark.org> Message-ID: <200803081820.36088.kai.blin@gmail.com> On Saturday 08 March 2008 16:55:18 Jack Cummings wrote: > Interestingly enough, git was only twice as fast as monotone on an initial > pull[0] (45 seconds, vs 85 seconds) of the ember branch. I thought it would > be faster. This seems to be highly dependent on the connection. kai at blackjack:~/wf/git$ time git clone git://jade.worldforge.org/kai/ember.git Initialized empty Git repository in /home/kai/wf/git/ember/.git/ remote: Generating pack... remote: Done counting 28840 objects. remote: Deltifying 28840 objects. remote: 100% (28840/28840) done remote: Total 28840, written 28840 (delta 21825), reused 28826 (delta 21825) Receiving objects: 100% (28840/28840), 12.10 MiB | 1180 KiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (21825/21825), done. real 0m23.146s user 0m8.125s sys 0m2.920s for git, though jade is in Germany as well. kai at blackjack:~/wf/mtn$ time mtn clone --branch=org.worldforge.client.ember green.worldforge.org mtn: setting default server to green.worldforge.org mtn: doing anonymous pull; use -kKEYNAME if you need authentication mtn: setting default branch include pattern to 'org.worldforge.client.ember' mtn: connecting to green.worldforge.org mtn: first time connecting to server green.worldforge.org mtn: I'll assume it's really them, but you might want to double-check mtn: their key's fingerprint: 5907d74552ee5ccc9785309fd17ae81852f62642 mtn: warning: saving public key for public_mtn_server at mudshark.org to database mtn: finding items to synchronize: mtn: bytes in | bytes out | certs in | revs in mtn: 1.3 k | 488 | 0 | 0 mtn: bytes in | bytes out | certs in | revs in mtn: 21.7 M | 536 | 10,784/10,784 | 2,692/2,692 mtn: successful exchange with green.worldforge.org real 30m15.444s user 2m37.422s sys 0m6.004s for monotone, server is in CA, I take. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080308/55af4f21/attachment.bin From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Sat Mar 8 10:53:44 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 18:53:44 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: Okay, cool. One of the things that's currently missing from the main site is regular updates - are most of the main developers willing to write a blog entry every week or so for the site to chart their progress on their current project? As I said before, Erik's already doing this very well on his own blog, but Ember's not the only part of the Worldforge project. Would someone be willing to do something for Cyphesis, for example? And would anyone else who contributes to Ember be interested in charting their contribution too? The basic idea I have in my head is to have the front page filled with the newest blog entries from every contributor, then the side menu with the static content from your site (what Worldforge is, project aims, how to join etc), and then a section for each of the clients/servers which would give download links, aims and information on that specific program, and the dev blog entries that relate to that particular project only. It looks pretty good in my head and I've no doubt more openly documenting your progress would attract much more of a community to the project, but it does all rely on everyone being willing to chip in with blog entries... Anyway, I'll get to work banging up a prototype. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080308/98bedfdd/attachment-0001.html From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Sat Mar 8 17:23:53 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 02:23:53 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02D@brun.iteam.local> Thanks for the kind words. As Kai said, most of us coders don't have any time to devote to the web site. A visual upgrade would very much be in order. Some notes though: the most important thing is that if you do an overhaul, you must both make sure that you are available and devoted for at least a year and that all of your original media is publicly available in a usable format. We see a lot of people going through the project, and as a FOSS project we don't have any way of making sure that people follow through on their promises (unlike when you employ someone for example). We don't want to end up with an unmaintained site where we don't have access to any source material and thus can't make any changes. If you want to spruce up the web site you should start by talking to the infra team, just to get a bearing on how it's comprised. Use the infra mailing list for that. /erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Chris Baker [chris.baker2005 at gmail.com] Skickat: den 8 mars 2008 02:10 Till: general at mail.worldforge.org ?mne: [WF-General] Website design? Hi all, My name's Chris and I'm a student at university in the UK. Been very interested in MMOs for a long time now (back since the days of UO), and I really like the look of Worldforge and how it's all progressing - particularly Erik's client, Ember, which is looking pretty amazing nowadays. I wanted to contribute something to the project and considered signing up for the Google Summer of Code, but my C++ is still at the command-line stage and therefore I'm not really going to be worth mentoring at this stage. So I thought about what skills I have that might be useful and I looked at the project, and realised that there might be room for me to help you guys out with some website design. I'm not professional-grade or anything, but I can promise you I can do a lot better than the current website. If you guys are interested in having me on board, just post a reply and I can work out some specifications for the kind of site you need. At the end of the day, your existing site is outdated in terms of design and not updated often, but worst of all the screenshots don't do the current state of the clients any justice at all (certainly with Ember judging from Erik's blog, though I don't know about Sear). I think you'd get a lot more interest in the project with a better site, particularly from non-coding areas such as art, and that can only be a good thing, right? Hope you can find a place for me somewhere, Chris. From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Sun Mar 9 03:26:09 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 12:26:09 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com>, Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> I think that it's not reasonable to expect people to provide updates each week. We've talked about this before, and while we all try to keep the web site updated, sometimes long stretches of time goes by without anyone doing anything which is worth blogging about. Low level stuff and so on. I try to keep my blog regularly updated, but I'm not able to do that all weeks. Currently we don't have many active developers either. Al is the only person currently working on Cyphesis, and for a long time I've been the only one working on Ember. Just recently Sean started working on Ember too, but he's currently in the start up phase. So we really need new blood, and that's one of the reasons for applying for the Summer of Code. A nicer web site could of course also help with that. Everything that shows that there is actual progress in Worldforge is good for the overall image. The most important part of the web site is the front page. We want to communicate what we are doing and how people can get involved as quick as possible. The current setup where we start by highlighting how people can download the server and clients is good, but I think it needs to be extended with a spotlight for how people can get involved too. I don't think you should put too much focus on dynamic content such as blog entries though since I don't think such content will be regularly updated. And then there's just basic house keeping such as updating the screen shots section. As you said there's a lot of much nicer screen shots available of Ember, most of them at http://amber.worldforge.org/ember/screenshots/ . The current screen shots needs to be replaced with better versions. I haven't had time do to that so if you're willing to take care of that it would be greatly appreciated. Anyways, I'm looking forward to your prototype. sincerely Erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Chris Baker [chris.baker2005 at gmail.com] Skickat: den 8 mars 2008 19:53 Till: general at worldforge.org ?mne: Re: [WF-General] Website design? Okay, cool. One of the things that's currently missing from the main site is regular updates - are most of the main developers willing to write a blog entry every week or so for the site to chart their progress on their current project? As I said before, Erik's already doing this very well on his own blog, but Ember's not the only part of the Worldforge project. Would someone be willing to do something for Cyphesis, for example? And would anyone else who contributes to Ember be interested in charting their contribution too? The basic idea I have in my head is to have the front page filled with the newest blog entries from every contributor, then the side menu with the static content from your site (what Worldforge is, project aims, how to join etc), and then a section for each of the clients/servers which would give download links, aims and information on that specific program, and the dev blog entries that relate to that particular project only. It looks pretty good in my head and I've no doubt more openly documenting your progress would attract much more of a community to the project, but it does all rely on everyone being willing to chip in with blog entries... Anyway, I'll get to work banging up a prototype. From simon at worldforge.org Sun Mar 9 11:48:46 2008 From: simon at worldforge.org (Simon Goodall) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 19:48:46 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: <200803081101.23002.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02B@brun.iteam.local> <200803081101.23002.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: I don't think removing parts of the commit message to make the historical cvs commits more git friendly is a good idea, especially as this. Apart from loss of data, it makes verification of the repository conversion more difficult. We should keep the existing data as is as best as possible. None of the existing commits will have the correct subject line and I do not think any attempt to mangle the existing messages will work for all cases. Certainly commit messages to e.g. scratchpad are much less structured than the main modules and may only be one line. The way future commit messages are made can be changed, but we should not alter the existing data. Simon On 08/03/2008, Kai Blin wrote: > On Saturday 08 March 2008 10:34:10 Erik Hjortsberg wrote: > > All of my commit comments are prefixed by the date an my name and email > > address. When looking through the history it looks really strange, since > > the same information is mirrored in the column to the right of the > > comments. It would be much nicer to see the comments only. Could you alter > > the import script to strip the name-date-email-data out if possible? > > > This is because git uses the first line of the commit message as subject of > the patch. This probably is true for all of Al's commits, as well. I'll see > if there's anything I can do about that, I need to brush up my git-fu a > little first. > > > Cheers, > Kai > > -- > Kai Blin > WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ > Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin > Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ > -- > Will code for cotton. > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at mail.worldforge.org > http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general > > > From kai.blin at gmail.com Sun Mar 9 14:01:49 2008 From: kai.blin at gmail.com (Kai Blin) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 23:01:49 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> <200803081101.23002.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: <200803092301.56846.kai.blin@gmail.com> On Sunday 09 March 2008 20:48:46 Simon Goodall wrote: > I don't think removing parts of the commit message to make the > historical cvs commits more git friendly is a good idea, especially as > this. Apart from loss of data, it makes verification of the repository > conversion more difficult. We should keep the existing data as is as > best as possible. Ok, that part is easy. > None of the existing commits will have the correct subject line and I > do not think any attempt to mangle the existing messages will work for > all cases. Certainly commit messages to e.g. scratchpad are much less > structured than the main modules and may only be one line. I've been using a regex to make sure that I only remove lines starting with an iso date. That works in most cases. It certainly didn't break any of the older commit messages on e.g. Atlas-C++. > The way future commit messages are made can be changed, but we should > not alter the existing data. We can actually decide that repo by repo, though I agree that having a unified style has it's benefits. Taking an example commit message in the convention we used to have: 2008-03-09 Kai Blin * foo.txt: Added some thoughts about "foo" and it's social implications. removing the date will give a useful subject. I have to agree that if it's * src/somelib/somefile.c, src/somelib/subdir/subdirfile.c src/some/long/path: Changed some stuff. it's not useful anyway and there's no good way to fix that without possibly breaking other things. (Ok, there probably is, but my sed skills are limited) So the bottomline is, I can do whatever we want to have, we just need to decide. Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080309/13c0c4fc/attachment.bin From jack at mudshark.org Sun Mar 9 14:13:47 2008 From: jack at mudshark.org (Jack Cummings) Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 15:13:47 -0700 Subject: [WF-General] Sample Git repos up. In-Reply-To: <200803081820.36088.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803080359.54205.kai.blin@gmail.com> <20080308155518.GV22285@ice.mudshark.org> <200803081820.36088.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20080309221347.GX22285@ice.mudshark.org> On Sat, Mar 08, 2008 at 06:20:30PM +0100, Kai Blin wrote: > real 30m15.444s > user 2m37.422s > sys 0m6.004s Ouch. This appears to be a problem with crappy async network connection to my computer at home. Both blue.wf.org and green.wf.org are a part of the same sync cluster now, so use blue, it has a better network connection.. Cheers, --Jack -- Jack (John) Cummings http://mudshark.org/ PGP fingerprint: F18B 13A3 6D06 D48A 598D 42EA 3D53 BDC8 7917 F802 From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 04:40:20 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:40:20 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: Turns out that this web design malarky is harder than it looks. Nevertheless, I have persevered and made countless designs and themes until I settled on one that I liked - ironically, one not a million miles away from your current site. You can view a graphic here: trial.dreamhosters.com/proto1.jpg Naturally, this is just a prototype to show the layout and the colours - the actual site will hopefully look considerably better, and naturally it will be of fluid rather than fixed height. Having seen your responses to my suggestions about regular blogging, it seems sensible to leave the front page for important news updates instead, though I will ensure every project also has its own dev blog in its little sub-section. Regarding getting people more involved, I expect I could add another little module on the right of the page (under the 'Download Ember' box) that says 'Worldforge wants YOU' or something in that vein. Anyway, general comments and suggestions on the layout and colours would be appreciated. Onto logo design - I'm trying to come up with a new logo, but it's hard going. One of my previous logos that I've now rejected on the grounds it is too sci-fi is available here, in case anyone wants it as a forum sig or anything. trial.dreamhosters.com/worldforgelogo.jpg Also, as to concerns about me running off and leaving a site that can't be altered, no worries. As I'll be employing Joomla for the site, everyone can have their own login details and I don't mind having an admin super-user with a password available to the infra team. That way people can take over if I do vanish for whatever reason. Joomla's also extremely easy to use, and I'll try and put together a template for the site which means that you guys can reinstall joomla and get a fresh copy of it even if I'm not around. See what you think, Chris. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/9ad25176/attachment.html From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 06:01:14 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:01:14 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: As an addendum, I've designed something that might potentially pass as a logo for the project, see it here: trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg Any thoughts/suggestions are again welcome. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/d3ad3de2/attachment.html From zzorn at iki.fi Mon Mar 10 06:54:27 2008 From: zzorn at iki.fi (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hans_H=E4ggstr=F6m?=) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:54:27 +0200 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: <323b90d70803100754o7f52d962h412adf63216d48b6@mail.gmail.com> Link seems to be broken in html version of mail, should probably be http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg The text is maybe a bit dense, hard to read (serif font instead? Or small caps? Or more space between letters?). The anvil outline logo is ok, connects to our current sword in anvil logo, although more simplified (which is good IMHO). -- Hans (zzorn) On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Chris Baker wrote: > As an addendum, I've designed something that might potentially pass as a > logo for the project, see it here: > > trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg > > Any thoughts/suggestions are again welcome. > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at mail.worldforge.org > http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general > > From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 07:15:05 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:15:05 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <323b90d70803100754o7f52d962h412adf63216d48b6@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> <323b90d70803100754o7f52d962h412adf63216d48b6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Uploaded a couple more with slightly more spacing between the letters, see if you prefer them. Takes about five seconds to change, so no worries if not. http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo4.jpg http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo5.jpg Any thoughts on the website, as well? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/b03d3b0e/attachment.html From zzorn at iki.fi Mon Mar 10 06:54:27 2008 From: zzorn at iki.fi (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hans_H=E4ggstr=F6m?=) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:54:27 +0200 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: <323b90d70803100754o7f52d962h412adf63216d48b6@mail.gmail.com> Link seems to be broken in html version of mail, should probably be http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg The text is maybe a bit dense, hard to read (serif font instead? Or small caps? Or more space between letters?). The anvil outline logo is ok, connects to our current sword in anvil logo, although more simplified (which is good IMHO). -- Hans (zzorn) On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Chris Baker wrote: > As an addendum, I've designed something that might potentially pass as a > logo for the project, see it here: > > trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg > > Any thoughts/suggestions are again welcome. > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at mail.worldforge.org > http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general > > From zzorn at iki.fi Mon Mar 10 07:33:09 2008 From: zzorn at iki.fi (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hans_H=E4ggstr=F6m?=) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:33:09 +0200 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> <323b90d70803100754o7f52d962h412adf63216d48b6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <323b90d70803100833n5924d1fdr494e78d981f9a10b@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Chris Baker wrote: > Uploaded a couple more with slightly more spacing between the letters, see > if you prefer them. Takes about five seconds to change, so no worries if > not. > > http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo4.jpg > http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo5.jpg http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo4.jpg looks better, but at least I would read it faster if it was in Capital or CamelCase. E.g. WorldForge. Just nitpicking maybe, what do others think? > > Any thoughts on the website, as well? > The proto at http://trial.dreamhosters.com/proto1.jpg looks good IMO. Maybe a bit more saturated greens, or some patterning / borders / small details, but nothing major to complain about. The idea of a blog / latest news on the front page is very good, I think things like Eriks blog entries should be readable on the front page, and not something you have to find by accident. -- Hans (zzorn) From kai.blin at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 06:46:38 2008 From: kai.blin at gmail.com (Kai Blin) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:46:38 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> On Monday 10 March 2008 15:01:14 Chris Baker wrote: > As an addendum, I've designed something that might potentially pass as a > logo for the project, see it here: > > trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpggo.jpg> > > Any thoughts/suggestions are again welcome. I don't like this for a particular reason: It's too different. WorldForge has used a logo with sword, anvil and a globe for years. We shouldn't change the identity that much. What's wrong with the old logo? Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/c4c49e8e/attachment.bin From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Mon Mar 10 07:46:00 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:46:00 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> I agree with Kai that we should keep the three elements in the logo: the anvil, the globe and the sword. I do however think that the version on the main site is quite ugly and a nicer version, perhaps more stylized, would be welcome. /erik -----Original Message----- From: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [mailto:general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] On Behalf Of Kai Blin Sent: den 10 mars 2008 15:47 To: general at mail.worldforge.org Subject: Re: [WF-General] Website design? On Monday 10 March 2008 15:01:14 Chris Baker wrote: > As an addendum, I've designed something that might potentially pass as > a logo for the project, see it here: > > >trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpggelo >go.jpg> > > Any thoughts/suggestions are again welcome. I don't like this for a particular reason: It's too different. WorldForge has used a logo with sword, anvil and a globe for years. We shouldn't change the identity that much. What's wrong with the old logo? Cheers, Kai -- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton. From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 07:46:58 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:46:58 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> Message-ID: > > > As an addendum, I've designed something that might potentially pass as a > > logo for the project, see it here: > > > > trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg< > http://trial.dreamhosters.com/worldforgelo > >go.jpg> > > > > Any thoughts/suggestions are again welcome. > > I don't like this for a particular reason: It's too different. WorldForge > has > used a logo with sword, anvil and a globe for years. We shouldn't change > the > identity that much. What's wrong with the old logo? > In response to Kai here - which logo are you looking at? For some reason the HTML link isn't pointed to where it should be, it's pointed to a graphic I created, decided that it was too different to use, and left it up there in case anyone wanted it as a forum sig or something. I might use it myself for that purpose if I get heavily involved in Worldforge. The graphic I was referring to as a potential logo is at http://trial.dreamhosters.com/logo3.jpg and that simply has text and an anvil and would be much more in keeping with the existing project. There's nothing WRONG with your current logo, either - but with all due respect it might look a little out of place using the old graphic on the new site. I suppose I could attempt to recreate it if you are particularly attatched to it, however... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/cc1157f5/attachment.html From demitar at worldforge.org Mon Mar 10 09:17:57 2008 From: demitar at worldforge.org (Anders Petersson) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:17:57 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <323b90d70803100833n5924d1fdr494e78d981f9a10b@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803080350.21300.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013755B02E@brun.iteam.local> <323b90d70803100754o7f52d962h412adf63216d48b6@mail.gmail.com> <323b90d70803100833n5924d1fdr494e78d981f9a10b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1205169477.27538.66.camel@rose> m?n 2008-03-10 klockan 17:33 +0200 skrev Hans H?ggstr?m: > The idea of a blog / latest news on the front page is very good, I > think things like Eriks blog entries should be readable on the front > page, and not something you have to find by accident. One of the joys of rss feeds is aggregating them. Whether it should be done on wfdef.o or on wf.o is another matter. It could also be useful to have two feed categories on the frontpage (columns/blocks or similar), one being announcements/news and the other being all other blogging being done. This could avoid big news being drowned while still prominently displaying the very latest developments. /Anders From demitar at worldforge.org Mon Mar 10 09:19:59 2008 From: demitar at worldforge.org (Anders Petersson) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:19:59 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: <1205169599.27538.69.camel@rose> m?n 2008-03-10 klockan 16:46 +0100 skrev Erik Hjortsberg: > I agree with Kai that we should keep the three elements in the logo: the anvil, the globe and the sword. > I do however think that the version on the main site is quite ugly and a nicer version, perhaps more stylized, would be welcome. Indeed. The graphical format of logo3-5 is very nice but is a bit lacking in what it communicates since it's "just" an anvil. /Anders From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 11:27:00 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:27:00 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <1205169599.27538.69.camel@rose> References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> <1205169599.27538.69.camel@rose> Message-ID: I'm looking more at adding the sword and globe to the anvil, but it's somewhat tricky to pull off without looking like a logo for a heavy metal band or just ending up with a very cluttered appearence. But I'll see what I can do. In terms of blogging, there's a solution that can be the best of both worlds. The front page can be reserved only for major announcements like milestone releases of various programs, messages from the entire team and stuff like that. I'll have a box on the right hand side of the front page that displays 'Latest Devblog Entries' too, though, which means that regular visitors can clearly see if anything's been updated without losing the clarity of the front page. It also means that people won't be pressured to blog regularly, but those that do can be sure that people will be reading what they write. Sound good to everyone? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/8d049b8d/attachment-0001.html From alriddoch at googlemail.com Mon Mar 10 12:49:26 2008 From: alriddoch at googlemail.com (Alistair Riddoch) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:49:26 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> <1205169599.27538.69.camel@rose> Message-ID: <4b05edd10803101349i34c423d5s7bd85a86175f5ec3@mail.gmail.com> Chris, Welcome, and thanks for all your efforts and contributions so far. I think you are right, the web site could do with design work to bring it up to date. I like the prototype you have created quite a bit, and think it's a great starting point for working on. However the are a number of constraints and challenges to consider. As has been mentioned already, the logo for the project is long established, and iconic. We have discussed many times the possibility of a major logo change, and have decided against it, settling solidly on the long established design of a sword, over a symmetrical anvil-like shape, over a globe. The rendering on the current site looks a bit rubbish. We have better renderings around, but I can't put my hands on a URL directly. Any re-rendering should mimic the shape and proportion of the logo elements almost exactly. We are not going to create a lot of new content and updates for the site out of thin air. There are limited people currently on the team with limited time to update the site, so we can't have updated content just by wishing. The current site is full of valuable archival information, and there are enormous numbers of internal and external deep links. Changing the structure and URLs of the site is simply not an option at this point. This also makes changing the backend that runs the site a very difficult and costly proposition. We also need to look very carefully at hosting. The current hosting arrangements generously provided by SEUL are very good in terms of capacity and uptime. It may not be easy to install another CMS on our current systems, and if we were planning to move to a new hosting provider we need to be sure they can match the service we have already. In summary I think the best way to go would be for you to refine the design prototype you currently have to include a rendering of the existing logo, and maintain a layout compatible with the current site, then re-write the CSS for the current site to implement your new design. How does that sound? Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Mon Mar 10 14:09:44 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:09:44 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: <4b05edd10803101349i34c423d5s7bd85a86175f5ec3@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> <1205169599.27538.69.camel@rose> <4b05edd10803101349i34c423d5s7bd85a86175f5ec3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi Alistair, That sounds more than fair with the logo. If you can find any photoshop files or high quality images I would appreciate it if you could send me them - the best I currently have to work with is the one on the Wiki page. Right now the whole logo thing is somewhat secondary, though it appears to have become the main focus of discussion. About the site, you have raised some interesting points. About content, I of course understand that we can't make content appear from nowhere and there are plenty of constraints on the time of the various people working on the projects mean they're not going to add that much in the near future - however, I do think what is already being added could be archived better. In terms of your concerns about the URL and structure of the site - again, this is entirely your decision and if you simply want the CSS of the site updated I'm willing to do only that (in which case I'm going to have to lay my hands on the source code of the entire website). I'm not sure that I entirely understand the rationale behind maintaining the existing system, however - presumably you are concerned that if I rewrite the site then countless links across will no longer point to the intended pages? Perhaps you could clarify? You do, of course, make a good point about hosting and I need to have a look at your hosting package to see what is possible at some point in the immediate future. I'll freeze work on this for the next few days while everyone replies, as I'd like to hear everyone's opinions before I progress so I don't waste any of my time by jumping the gun and getting it wrong. Looking through the current site, while I agree that there's a lot of valuable material there that has accumulated over the last decade, a lot of it seems rather disconnected from the current status of the project. This is particularly true in reference to the material concerning how to get involved and the overall aims of the project, both of which read to me like they have been written ten years ago (perhaps with good reason). Now I understand that I'm new here and I don't want to look like I'm turning up and trying to change everything so everyone does it all my way, but I'd like to suggest that parts of the site need to be updated not just graphically but content-wise to reflect the current state of the project and to make it more accessible to new people who want to know what Worldforge is actually doing. I know the only reason I got involved was because I read Erik's blog, as I find the current site entirely mystifying and somewhat unrealistic. I'm not saying we should delete everything as I imagine it'd be easy enough to archive, but I'd be interested to see what people think about the content of the site. I think I'm more than capable of modifying the information myself, given sufficient feedback from you guys, so it wouldn't be any extra work on your part. I'll say again at this point that if you guys decide that literally all you want is me to spruce up the CSS of your existing site, I'll be more than happy to do that for you. Don't want to tread on any toes, I just want to put some ideas out there. Chris. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080310/79039fdd/attachment.html From alriddoch at googlemail.com Mon Mar 10 15:03:12 2008 From: alriddoch at googlemail.com (Alistair Riddoch) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:03:12 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Website design? In-Reply-To: References: <200803101546.41828.kai.blin@gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013753986C@brun.iteam.local> <1205169599.27538.69.camel@rose> <4b05edd10803101349i34c423d5s7bd85a86175f5ec3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4b05edd10803101603xba33d2u8b5ba66c3e54cab3@mail.gmail.com> On 10/03/2008, Chris Baker wrote: > Hi Alistair, > > That sounds more than fair with the logo. If you can find any photoshop > files or high quality images I would appreciate it if you could send me them > - the best I currently have to work with is the one on the Wiki page. Right > now the whole logo thing is somewhat secondary, though it appears to have > become the main focus of discussion. Ok, cool. Here is the best available image: http://purple.worldforge.org/repositories/svn/logos/worldforge/wf-logo_big.png It is high res, and transparent, so is good source material. As I am sure you are aware using transparent images on the site itself is not a good idea, so it would have to be composited onto the site background that you come up with. > > About the site, you have raised some interesting points. About content, I of > course understand that we can't make content appear from nowhere and there > are plenty of constraints on the time of the various people working on the > projects mean they're not going to add that much in the near future - > however, I do think what is already being added could be archived better. You are probably right. > > In terms of your concerns about the URL and structure of the site - again, > this is entirely your decision and if you simply want the CSS of the site > updated I'm willing to do only that (in which case I'm going to have to lay > my hands on the source code of the entire website). I'm not sure that I > entirely understand the rationale behind maintaining the existing system, > however - presumably you are concerned that if I rewrite the site then > countless links across will no longer point to the intended pages? Perhaps > you could clarify? You do, of course, make a good point about hosting and I > need to have a look at your hosting package to see what is possible at some > point in the immediate future. I think I have put more time and effort into the look and content of site than most, so I think I can to some extent speak for the project on the matter of the site. Maintaining the structure so that internal and external links are not broken is vital. Changing the CSS, the site templates and other code is all possible. You should be aware that a lot of hard work has gone into the content of the navigation bars on the left. Plenty of empirical data was gathered using Google Analytics about what links people used and what was useless. Links to useless or obsolete content were removed, and the rest were re-ordered to suit usage. The content of this navbar should almost certainly be preserved. I will be the first person to admit that my design skills are very weak. Through experimentation I was able to arrive at the current design, which almost everyone agrees is better than the train wreck that preceded it. I made quite a few horrible blunders on the way, which plenty of people were prepared to point out to me. > > I'll freeze work on this for the next few days while everyone replies, as > I'd like to hear everyone's opinions before I progress so I don't waste any > of my time by jumping the gun and getting it wrong. Looking through the > current site, while I agree that there's a lot of valuable material there > that has accumulated over the last decade, a lot of it seems rather > disconnected from the current status of the project. This is particularly > true in reference to the material concerning how to get involved and the > overall aims of the project, both of which read to me like they have been > written ten years ago (perhaps with good reason). Now I understand that I'm > new here and I don't want to look like I'm turning up and trying to change > everything so everyone does it all my way, but I'd like to suggest that > parts of the site need to be updated not just graphically but content-wise > to reflect the current state of the project and to make it more accessible > to new people who want to know what Worldforge is actually doing. I know the > only reason I got involved was because I read Erik's blog, as I find the > current site entirely mystifying and somewhat unrealistic. I'm not saying we > should delete everything as I imagine it'd be easy enough to archive, but > I'd be interested to see what people think about the content of the site. I > think I'm more than capable of modifying the information myself, given > sufficient feedback from you guys, so it wouldn't be any extra work on your > part. The honest answer is, YES! we know much of the content badly needs updating! But we are currently very short of hands, and very few of us are writers. You are currently not that familiar with the project, but we do earnestly and sincerely welcome your input. For the time being it sounds like you have your work cut out on the design. Probably when you get to know the project better, and understand how it has changed you'll be able to take a look at the site content. > > I'll say again at this point that if you guys decide that literally all you > want is me to spruce up the CSS of your existing site, I'll be more than > happy to do that for you. Don't want to tread on any toes, I just want to > put some ideas out there. > The last thing I want to do is start being territorial and discourage you. Don't worry about treading on anyone's toes, but do try and understand that there is a lot of value for the project in some aspects of the site, and we must make sure they don't get lost. As long as you keep communicating your ideas well, and make sure everything you plan is understood before hand, I am sure you will be able to go a long way. How does this sound: You continue to work on your design prototype, keeping broad compatibility with the current content and structure. Changes to the CSS, the site template (which applies to all pages), and changes to the front page design are all in scope. Once we have something we can agree on, you and I can work together to update the CSS and templates. The new visual appeal of the site should encourage more people to engage with the task of updating the content, and by then you should be in a position to work on content yourself. Does that sound fair? I added you to my google talk profile. I think this is a better way for fast turnaround discussion. If you use gtalk, add me back and we can chat there. Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Thu Mar 13 06:41:51 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:41:51 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] opensuse packages Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013C9CF833@brun.iteam.local> I saw that there are OpenSUSE packages of Cyphesis, Ember and Sear available from http://packman.links2linux.de/package/cyphesis http://packman.links2linux.de/package/ember http://packman.links2linux.de/package/sear Might be good to know. Kai: are these derivatives of the packages that you provide in the suse build service? /erik -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080313/45005406/attachment.html From urs at andonyar.com Sat Mar 15 12:29:14 2008 From: urs at andonyar.com (Urs Holzer) Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:29:14 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices Message-ID: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> Hi I finally got around compiling ember on my 64bit Linux system. It was a lot of work fixing all the problems that turned up, but finally it works. It was worth the effort, it is beauuuuuuuuuutiful! I am a newbie to Worldforge, though I watched it some years from the far. I have some questions: I wonder whether it is possible to make machines that can be manipulated by players, basically pressing buttons and moving levers. I really would like to be able to implement some riddles like they can be found in adventure games. Also, I noticed that in ember, it is not really possible to enter buildings or to stay on objects. How about that? Additionally, is it possible to make caves into the terrain? Greetings Urs From alriddoch at googlemail.com Sun Mar 16 18:54:24 2008 From: alriddoch at googlemail.com (Alistair Riddoch) Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:54:24 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> Message-ID: <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> On 15/03/2008, Urs Holzer wrote: > Hi > > I finally got around compiling ember on my 64bit Linux system. It was a > lot of work fixing all the problems that turned up, but finally it > works. It was worth the effort, it is beauuuuuuuuuutiful! > > I am a newbie to Worldforge, though I watched it some years from the > far. I have some questions: > I wonder whether it is possible to make machines that can be manipulated > by players, basically pressing buttons and moving levers. I really > would like to be able to implement some riddles like they can be found > in adventure games. > Also, I noticed that in ember, it is not really possible to enter > buildings or to stay on objects. How about that? Additionally, is it > possible to make caves into the terrain? > Most of these things are not possible yet, but many are not far away and could be echieved quite soon given the right inspiration. Machines that can be activated and manipulated would be ery possible, but we need to design a general mechanism for interacting with them for the network protocol we use, so clients don't need spscific knowledge of the machine. How about you come up with a simple idea for a prototype machine to develop around, and I can do the protocol and systems work around your idea? The simpler the better, but see if you can come up with something inspirational. The server has limited support for entering buildings. I don't know what the status of things in ember is, but if it's not done already, it does take a bit of work. I know some issues have been resolved with manipulation of the characters position as it moves in and out of containers, which is much of the difficult part of handling this. Making the camera work well inside buildings is really tricky and may require a bunch more work. Caves in the terrain is quite a bit more tricky, and is probably not on the feature radar for a bit after the rest. I think a key requirement is whether ember is able to handle cutting a hole in the terrain with a clean edge. Erik, any idea? Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ From emanuel.ey at gmail.com Mon Mar 17 01:23:31 2008 From: emanuel.ey at gmail.com (Emanuel Ey) Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:23:31 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <47DE3893.6030702@Gmail.com> Hey there, I just had an idea concerning the movement of the camera inside of buildings -one could "just" make the walls fade into transparency instead of trying to keep the camera out of the walls. This of course depends on how the engine handles the transparency and the added polygons that would have to be rendered. Alistair Riddoch wrote: > On 15/03/2008, Urs Holzer wrote: > >> Hi >> I finally got around compiling ember on my 64bit Linux system. It was a >> lot of work fixing all the problems that turned up, but finally it >> works. It was worth the effort, it is beauuuuuuuuuutiful! >> >> I am a newbie to Worldforge, though I watched it some years from the >> far. I have some questions: >> I wonder whether it is possible to make machines that can be manipulated >> by players, basically pressing buttons and moving levers. I really >> would like to be able to implement some riddles like they can be found >> in adventure games. >> Also, I noticed that in ember, it is not really possible to enter >> buildings or to stay on objects. How about that? Additionally, is it >> possible to make caves into the terrain? >> >> > > Most of these things are not possible yet, but many are not far away > and could be echieved quite soon given the right inspiration. > > Machines that can be activated and manipulated would be ery possible, > but we need to design a general mechanism for interacting with them > for the network protocol we use, so clients don't need spscific > knowledge of the machine. How about you come up with a simple idea for > a prototype machine to develop around, and I can do the protocol and > systems work around your idea? The simpler the better, but see if you > can come up with something inspirational. > > The server has limited support for entering buildings. I don't know > what the status of things in ember is, but if it's not done already, > it does take a bit of work. I know some issues have been resolved with > manipulation of the characters position as it moves in and out of > containers, which is much of the difficult part of handling this. > Making the camera work well inside buildings is really tricky and may > require a bunch more work. > > Caves in the terrain is quite a bit more tricky, and is probably not > on the feature radar for a bit after the rest. I think a key > requirement is whether ember is able to handle cutting a hole in the > terrain with a clean edge. Erik, any idea? > > Al > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080317/10ea6549/attachment.html From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Mon Mar 17 01:52:46 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:52:46 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013C9CF898@brun.iteam.local> Ember 0.5.1 has a bug which will rotate the avatar in strange and confusing ways when entering and exiting buildings. That have since been fixed in cvs. The current implementation of houses consists of a lot of invisible rectangle blocks which will hinder the avatar from moving through walls etc.. I think the main problem here is that it's very cumbersome to author it with the current editing mechanisms. On a deeper server side level there's a need for a more robust physics model. Al knows more about the status of this. Repositioning the camera within a building isn't actually that hard, granted that the meshes aren't too complex. Ember has built in support for OpCode which is a collision detection library which uses a series of techniques to make sure that collision detection is really fast (space partitioning and so on), so you basically only have to shoot a ray from the avatar to the camera and see if it hits something (like a wall) and then place the camera there. That's how it currently works with the terrain. Making the wall fade away is quite a lot harder to do however, since we don't want to make then entire house transparent, and that might prove quite difficult to achive without some shader magic. Caves in the terrain is quite tricky too. Our terrain system is height map based, which means that there can't be any overhangs. Making a cave entrance would then almost surely involve using another mesh, like a large boulder or similar, to make it look like an overhang, or just a large rockface with an opening. This is the approach used by most other 3d games. But the other issue is then how to represent the transition between the heightmap terrain and into a cave structure. There are some issues with clipping and scene management which needs to be taken care of, as well as aforementioned camera restrictions. It's definitely something we will do sometime in the future, but it's currently not on the radar given our strained resources. We always welcome new talent of course. Regarding the machines that's certainly doable. As Al said it's perhaps best if you describe your idea in more details and we'll work from there. /erik -----Original Message----- From: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [mailto:general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] On Behalf Of Alistair Riddoch Sent: den 17 mars 2008 03:54 To: general at worldforge.org Subject: Re: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices On 15/03/2008, Urs Holzer wrote: > Hi > > I finally got around compiling ember on my 64bit Linux system. It was a > lot of work fixing all the problems that turned up, but finally it > works. It was worth the effort, it is beauuuuuuuuuutiful! > > I am a newbie to Worldforge, though I watched it some years from the > far. I have some questions: > I wonder whether it is possible to make machines that can be manipulated > by players, basically pressing buttons and moving levers. I really > would like to be able to implement some riddles like they can be found > in adventure games. > Also, I noticed that in ember, it is not really possible to enter > buildings or to stay on objects. How about that? Additionally, is it > possible to make caves into the terrain? > Most of these things are not possible yet, but many are not far away and could be echieved quite soon given the right inspiration. Machines that can be activated and manipulated would be ery possible, but we need to design a general mechanism for interacting with them for the network protocol we use, so clients don't need spscific knowledge of the machine. How about you come up with a simple idea for a prototype machine to develop around, and I can do the protocol and systems work around your idea? The simpler the better, but see if you can come up with something inspirational. The server has limited support for entering buildings. I don't know what the status of things in ember is, but if it's not done already, it does take a bit of work. I know some issues have been resolved with manipulation of the characters position as it moves in and out of containers, which is much of the difficult part of handling this. Making the camera work well inside buildings is really tricky and may require a bunch more work. Caves in the terrain is quite a bit more tricky, and is probably not on the feature radar for a bit after the rest. I think a key requirement is whether ember is able to handle cutting a hole in the terrain with a clean edge. Erik, any idea? Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ _______________________________________________ General mailing list General at mail.worldforge.org http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general From urs at andonyar.com Tue Mar 18 06:02:11 2008 From: urs at andonyar.com (Urs Holzer) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:02:11 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200803181502.12075.urs@andonyar.com> Alistair Riddoch wrote: > Most of these things are not possible yet, but many are not far away > and could be echieved quite soon given the right inspiration. Never mind. For me, the most important thing are the machines. > Machines that can be activated and manipulated would be ery possible, > but we need to design a general mechanism for interacting with them > for the network protocol we use, so clients don't need spscific > knowledge of the machine. How about you come up with a simple idea for > a prototype machine to develop around, and I can do the protocol and > systems work around your idea? The simpler the better, but see if you > can come up with something inspirational. Perhaps the first thing we could try are doors at the entrance of the houses or the castle which can be opened, closed and perhaps even locked with a key. However, the first thing that has come to my mind is a windmill. One can throw in some corn on the top of the millstones and some farina (I hope this is the correct english word) comes out at the bottom. (Instead of using wind, we can also attach a wheel to the millstones which has to be rotated by the player by hand.) These are two very basic examples. Later on, we could make the mausoleum much bigger and hide a mystery inside which can be discovered by solving a riddle. I would like to learn how Atlas works in order to get myself an idea what is possible at the moment. Can you point me to the up to date specification of Atlas and its extensions you use? The worldforge website (http://worldforge.org/dev/eng/protocols/atlas/proposals) points me into nowhere. > The server has limited support for entering buildings. I don't know > what the status of things in ember is, but if it's not done already, > it does take a bit of work. [...] I am using the Ember code from CSS. The bug Erik described is fixed, and indeed I was wrong, one can enter the houses. (By the way: I would recommend to make the houses a bit bigger.) What troubles me now is that the character is always standing on the terrain. Is it also possible for the character to stand on an object like the floor of a house or on stairs? Greetings Urs From urs at andonyar.com Thu Mar 20 03:54:20 2008 From: urs at andonyar.com (Urs Holzer) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:54:20 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <200803181502.12075.urs@andonyar.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> <200803181502.12075.urs@andonyar.com> Message-ID: <200803201254.20525.urs@andonyar.com> Urs Holzer wrote: > Perhaps the first thing we could try are doors at the entrance of the > houses or the castle which can be opened, closed and perhaps even locked > with a key. However, the first thing that has come to my mind is a > windmill. One can throw in some corn on the top of the millstones and some > farina (I hope this is the correct english word) comes out at the bottom. > (Instead of using wind, we can also attach a wheel to the millstones which > has to be rotated by the player by hand.) > These are two very basic examples. Later on, we could make the mausoleum > much bigger and hide a mystery inside which can be discovered by solving a > riddle. I forgot one important example: The boat on the water. A player should be able to use it. For the beginning we could let it just move along a predefined route on the water. The most important thing is that a character (or more generally, any object) that is standing on the boat gets moved as well, together with the boat. This is important for me, becuase it is my dream to realise a 3d simulation of my "liai" transportation system. (You won't find any information about it on the web at the moment.) Perhaps Worldforge gives me the basic tools to make my dream become true. Another interesting machine would be a steam engine. You have to fill in water and light a fire under the boiler in order to start the engine. After some time, the water is used up or the fire goes out and the engine stops. (And of course, one could attach the steam engine to the millstones ;-) So, I gave you four examples of machines. Do you think one of them is inspirational enough? How difficult is it to implement them? Of course, I don't want to drain your time resources too much. If you give me some hints how these machines could be implemented, I will try myself. If there are any introductory documents I should read, please tell me. Greetings Urs From alriddoch at googlemail.com Thu Mar 20 05:28:31 2008 From: alriddoch at googlemail.com (Alistair Riddoch) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:28:31 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <200803201254.20525.urs@andonyar.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> <200803181502.12075.urs@andonyar.com> <200803201254.20525.urs@andonyar.com> Message-ID: <4b05edd10803200628j5504f7bfu99781e9a2925c235@mail.gmail.com> On 20/03/2008, Urs Holzer wrote: > > I forgot one important example: The boat on the water. A player should be able > to use it. For the beginning we could let it just move along a predefined > route on the water. Ok, that's a really good example. The door idea works too. I'll look into designing the protocol mechanism, implement it in the server and talk to Erik and Sean about getting support into Ember. In the long run I'd like to add a mechanism that allows vehicles to be a little more directly and freely controlled. > The most important thing is that a character (or more generally, any object) > that is standing on the boat gets moved as well, together with the boat. > This is important for me, becuase it is my dream to realise a 3d simulation of > my "liai" transportation system. (You won't find any information about it on > the web at the moment.) Perhaps Worldforge gives me the basic tools to make > my dream become true. Making things in the boat move as well is in fact no problem, as any entity can potentially be a container, and the positions of any contents are stored relative to the container. > > Another interesting machine would be a steam engine. You have to fill in water > and light a fire under the boiler in order to start the engine. After some > time, the water is used up or the fire goes out and the engine stops. (And of > course, one could attach the steam engine to the millstones ;-) If you have ever played A Tale in the Desert you will have seen lots of things like this. In the long run it would be great to have complex devices like this, but I think we should start simple, and get something implemented in keeping with the fast and loose development strategy I proposed a few months back. > > So, I gave you four examples of machines. Do you think one of them is > inspirational enough? How difficult is it to implement them? > Of course, I don't want to drain your time resources too much. If you give me > some hints how these machines could be implemented, I will try myself. If > there are any introductory documents I should read, please tell me. > That is a great set of example, and I am definitely inspired. Not quite sure when I will have time to do the code, but I'll try and have a go over the easter break. Once I've done the core protocol work, implementing individual machines will be done in scripts, and I'll try and write the scripts as sample implementations which are well suited to documenting the mechanism for future developers. Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Thu Mar 20 06:01:35 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:01:35 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <4b05edd10803200628j5504f7bfu99781e9a2925c235@mail.gmail.com> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> <200803181502.12075.urs@andonyar.com> <200803201254.20525.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803200628j5504f7bfu99781e9a2925c235@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DB5656A@brun.iteam.local> I second Al that these are all really good ideas and an excellent way to start getting more complex stuff into the world. As he says it's better to start small with simple mechanisms. I'll answer some of your questions which concerns Ember: Animations such as a windmill rotating or a door opening can be achieved already by embedding animations in the client mesh and making these trigger for certain actions. This is how the aimations for the various creatures work already. Here's an example from the humanoid.modeldef file: ... ... Which plays a certain animation defined in the skeleton part of the mesh whenever the "pickup" action is performed. For a door one might make it so that the door performs a "close" and "open" action and this is then connected to a simple animation of it opening and closing. Regarding the boat it would mainly be a server issue, i.e. making sure that the boat begins to move when a certain action is performed on it, or someone enters it. Ember already has dynamic support for allowing the server define what kinds of actions a certain entity has, so as long as it's defined on the server it will be shown in the entity action drop down (say and action named "row"). And as Al said as long as the user entity is contained by the boat entity it will move along with it. Regarding the placement of models on floors etc. there's already support for this in Ember. Take a look at the market stall definition, as found here: http://git.worldforge.org/?p=ember.git;a=blob_plain;f=src/components/ogre/modeldefinitions/marketstall_canvasA.modeldef;hb=HEAD The "contentoffset" allows you to define how much contained entities should be offset. In the stall case we want contained entities to be offset heightwise so that they appear to rest on the stall table: ... The same could be applied to the jetty and houses. If I remember correctly however there was some kind of bug which made it not quite work as intended when the contained entity moved, but that's probably easily fixed. We really need some simple crafting mechanisms. I was thinking about something basic like allowing players to bake apple pies, which would involve apples, flour, water, fire and probably some other elements too. I'm personally too busy with Ember so I haven't had time to implement any of it, but it would be a perfect task for someone who would want to get more involved with the server side of things. /erik -----Original Message----- From: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [mailto:general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] On Behalf Of Alistair Riddoch Sent: den 20 mars 2008 14:29 To: general at worldforge.org Subject: Re: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices On 20/03/2008, Urs Holzer wrote: > > I forgot one important example: The boat on the water. A player should be able > to use it. For the beginning we could let it just move along a predefined > route on the water. Ok, that's a really good example. The door idea works too. I'll look into designing the protocol mechanism, implement it in the server and talk to Erik and Sean about getting support into Ember. In the long run I'd like to add a mechanism that allows vehicles to be a little more directly and freely controlled. > The most important thing is that a character (or more generally, any object) > that is standing on the boat gets moved as well, together with the boat. > This is important for me, becuase it is my dream to realise a 3d simulation of > my "liai" transportation system. (You won't find any information about it on > the web at the moment.) Perhaps Worldforge gives me the basic tools to make > my dream become true. Making things in the boat move as well is in fact no problem, as any entity can potentially be a container, and the positions of any contents are stored relative to the container. > > Another interesting machine would be a steam engine. You have to fill in water > and light a fire under the boiler in order to start the engine. After some > time, the water is used up or the fire goes out and the engine stops. (And of > course, one could attach the steam engine to the millstones ;-) If you have ever played A Tale in the Desert you will have seen lots of things like this. In the long run it would be great to have complex devices like this, but I think we should start simple, and get something implemented in keeping with the fast and loose development strategy I proposed a few months back. > > So, I gave you four examples of machines. Do you think one of them is > inspirational enough? How difficult is it to implement them? > Of course, I don't want to drain your time resources too much. If you give me > some hints how these machines could be implemented, I will try myself. If > there are any introductory documents I should read, please tell me. > That is a great set of example, and I am definitely inspired. Not quite sure when I will have time to do the code, but I'll try and have a go over the easter break. Once I've done the core protocol work, implementing individual machines will be done in scripts, and I'll try and write the scripts as sample implementations which are well suited to documenting the mechanism for future developers. Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ _______________________________________________ General mailing list General at mail.worldforge.org http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Thu Mar 20 14:40:49 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:40:49 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Hydrax for Ember? Message-ID: I came across this thread on the OGRE forums - it's a water system plugin for OGRE, and it looks pretty amazing. OpenFrag are using it too, and frankly the video of V2 (coming out Sunday week, apparently) is very impressive indeed. http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=276040&sid=ce193664e1d3d7c4af509e6f4e2718c6 Or if you don't want to check the entire thread, here is the video of it in action: http://www.emmsoftware.net/blacksphere/hydrax/FoamPrev.wmv Thought that might interest Erik/Sean a little.... Chris. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080320/149cc844/attachment.html From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Thu Mar 20 15:14:36 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:14:36 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Hydrax for Ember? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2E3@brun.iteam.local> Thanks for the tip. This is actually something that I've thought about adding now that I've updated the Caelum system in Ogre. I tried it out earlier this week and the main problem with the demo is the extremely large degree of tessellation in the demo. Just a simple water scene with no other meshes required ~150k vertices. Now, that might be totally configurable. Anyway it's well worth checking out. I plan on taking a closer look at how it can be integrated and adapted to Ember. The water in Ember currently look like shit. It's basically just the default demo water texture that came with Ogre. One thing to consider however is how we could do some occlusion culling. In 90% of the scenes the majority of the water surface would be below the ground so it would be quite wasteful to render that in all its complexity when it's never gonna be shown anyway. There's been support for reflective fresnel water in Ember before, but the implementation was based on the ogre demo which hid the below water entities by iterating through all entities and temporary hiding those under water. This wasn't a very good solution for a lot of different reasons so it's been disabled for some time. However, there's now support in Ogre for custom clip planes which could be used for a better implementation. So that's also something that we could add. I.e. having fallbacks for different setups. If you have a fast enough machine you get the Hydrax, if not you get either standard fresnel water or just plain water. /erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Chris Baker [chris.baker2005 at gmail.com] Skickat: den 20 mars 2008 23:40 Till: general at worldforge.org ?mne: [WF-General] Hydrax for Ember? I came across this thread on the OGRE forums - it's a water system plugin for OGRE, and it looks pretty amazing. OpenFrag are using it too, and frankly the video of V2 (coming out Sunday week, apparently) is very impressive indeed. http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=276040&sid=ce193664e1d3d7c4af509e6f4e2718c6 Or if you don't want to check the entire thread, here is the video of it in action: http://www.emmsoftware.net/blacksphere/hydrax/FoamPrev.wmv Thought that might interest Erik/Sean a little.... Chris. From rhymer at gmail.com Fri Mar 21 17:44:05 2008 From: rhymer at gmail.com (Tamas Bates) Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:44:05 -0700 Subject: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain Message-ID: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> I'm a Computer Science student in the Pacific Northwest finishing up my third year, and I've had an interest in graphics and games for a long time (it's what got me into the major in the first place). Another thing that's held my interest for some time is terrain generation, and I think that working on your project would help me to learn a lot about it. I haven't done much networking or graphics programming, but I am proficient with C++. I'm also minoring in math which should help my lack of experience in this area. Since you say Mercator already supports the terrain modifiers, I think that implementing them in Ember and Cyphesis could probably be done over the summer (though you guys would know better than I since you built the client and server). Do you think it would be an appropriate project for someone of my skill level? I do have a solid understanding of 3D concepts, and worked on a game mod a while back ( http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm ) which helped me learn a lot in this area. I'd like to work on extending the terrain editor, too, if its a higher priority or you find someone else you'd rather have work on the modifiers. If you need/want to know anything more about me, ask away! -Tamas Bates -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080321/5a7c7f6e/attachment.html From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Sat Mar 22 04:16:11 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:16:11 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain In-Reply-To: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> References: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2E9@brun.iteam.local> Hi, the link you posted doesn't work for me (no answer from the server). Otherwise it would be an excellent way to get to see what you've done before. The skills required for the terrain modifications bit wouldn't concern networking, since all of that is handled by base libs such as skstream, and instead revolve around how the atlas and mercator libs works, as well as how both the Cyphesis server and Ember handles the definitions and applies them to the terrain. Since the focus is on Ember we will try to keep the amount of work needed on the server down to a minimum, but this is still something that will require some alterations of the server code. If you choose to work on the terrain a minimum requirement is that you understand how Mercator handles it, how a heightmap can be used, how it's generated from the terrain definitions, both on the server and the client. As you progress you will then see how Ember uses the Mercator data to create a mesh, and how the Ogre terrain scene manager presents the mesh, using various techniques to improve performance. Working on the terrain editor will then also involve both learning how CEGUI works as well as scripting in Lua. So there's a lot of different components that all come together if you look at it all, but there's also room for focusing on a smaller set of functionality if you feel that there's too many new concepts to learn at once. The two projects that you're interested in are in some ways also intertwined; an implementation of support for terrain modifiers would surely also lead to alterations and improvements to the terrain editor. The terrain editor proposal however focuses more on the client and will involve more Lua and CEGUI code than server side code. And remember that these are all just basic outlines of project ideas and that we encourage all prospective students to expand on these ideas in their applications. Or to submit new ideas. If you could get the server for your mod back up it would be great to use as a reference. sincerely Erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Tamas Bates [rhymer at gmail.com] Skickat: den 22 mars 2008 02:44 Till: general at mail.worldforge.org ?mne: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain I'm a Computer Science student in the Pacific Northwest finishing up my third year, and I've had an interest in graphics and games for a long time (it's what got me into the major in the first place). Another thing that's held my interest for some time is terrain generation, and I think that working on your project would help me to learn a lot about it. I haven't done much networking or graphics programming, but I am proficient with C++. I'm also minoring in math which should help my lack of experience in this area. Since you say Mercator already supports the terrain modifiers, I think that implementing them in Ember and Cyphesis could probably be done over the summer (though you guys would know better than I since you built the client and server). Do you think it would be an appropriate project for someone of my skill level? I do have a solid understanding of 3D concepts, and worked on a game mod a while back ( http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm ) which helped me learn a lot in this area. I'd like to work on extending the terrain editor, too, if its a higher priority or you find someone else you'd rather have work on the modifiers. If you need/want to know anything more about me, ask away! -Tamas Bates From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Sat Mar 22 12:43:32 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:43:32 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? Message-ID: Hi all, I think I've finished my update of the website's overall design or at least graphically. There's a few niggles left to fix, but they shouldn't take long and Al can do those at his lesiure. That is, of course, unless you guys dislike what I've done for the logo and want me to change it. I've included three screenshots with this email, intended to give you an idea of what the site looked like a couple of weeks ago, what it looks like now, and what (hopefully) it'll look like after the next update. If there's any suggestions you want to make, please throw them into the ring - I won't be offended. Old site - http://trial.dreamhosters.com/old.jpg Current site - http://trial.dreamhosters.com/current.jpg Final(ish) site - http://trial.dreamhosters.com/preview.jpg Assuming everyone likes the logo, the final thing to address on the front page is the search box, because it needs some padding and 'search' needs to be made bold, and the footer - the text needs to be recoloured to be readable, and I think it needs to be shortened so that it no longer stretches below the screenshot column. Also the central text needs better formatting, 'Recent News' needs to be made a header and the links at the bottom about the RSS feeds need to be moved a bit further down to differentiate them from the rest of the links. But we're pretty much on the home straight, at least as far as the front page goes. Once that's done, I'll start to look at the rest of the site. So, please do tell me what you think of the final mockup (and I hope you think it's an improvement over the old site), Chris. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080322/f788334d/attachment.html From rhymer at gmail.com Sat Mar 22 12:53:21 2008 From: rhymer at gmail.com (Tamas Bates) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:53:21 -0700 Subject: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain In-Reply-To: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2E9@brun.iteam.local> References: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2E9@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: <53da8f280803221353o612d0699m779a15421c2bc302@mail.gmail.com> That's strange the link didn't work, it looks fine to me: http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm I've mirrored the video (.mov inside of a .zip) and some screenshots here: http://myweb.students.wwu.edu/~batest3/mod/ I may be able to find some larger images in our backups if you'd like. The mod was built on the Doom 3 engine, and was based on the attack on Whiskey Outpost from the Starship Troopers movie. I was responsible for all of the scripting (particle effects, AI scripts, weapons, etc.) as well as the bulk of the level design. There wasn't any documentation available for engine at the time, so I was also responsible for figuring out how to make everything work. Some things (like material and entity definitions) were fairly straightforward, but others (like setting a model up correctly so the game wouldn't crash when you imported it) were much more difficult. We managed to complete the project in two months, which amounted to one fully playable level, two weapons, and three monsters. The one thing you can't see in the video are the sound effects we created, since we weren't finished editing them before we finished recording those shots. I was thinking the best way to learn more about Mercator would be to compile Ember and try messing around with the terrains, but I received the following error when trying to get it out of CVS: PAM authenticate error: User not known to the underlying authentication module Fatal error, aborting. cvsanon:cvsanon: no such user cvs checkout: authorization failed: server cvs.worldforge.org rejected access to /home/cvspsrv/worldforge for user cvsanon:cvsanon cvs checkout: used empty password; try "cvs login" with a real password In the meantime, I was looking at some of the source for Mercator to figure out how it works, and I was wondering: does each segment represent a single tile, or are tiles made of several segments? -Tamas On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 5:16 AM, Erik Hjortsberg wrote: > Hi, > the link you posted doesn't work for me (no answer from the server). > Otherwise it would be an excellent way to get to see what you've done > before. > The skills required for the terrain modifications bit wouldn't concern > networking, since all of that is handled by base libs such as skstream, and > instead revolve around how the atlas and mercator libs works, as well as how > both the Cyphesis server and Ember handles the definitions and applies them > to the terrain. Since the focus is on Ember we will try to keep the amount > of work needed on the server down to a minimum, but this is still something > that will require some alterations of the server code. > > If you choose to work on the terrain a minimum requirement is that you > understand how Mercator handles it, how a heightmap can be used, how it's > generated from the terrain definitions, both on the server and the client. > As you progress you will then see how Ember uses the Mercator data to create > a mesh, and how the Ogre terrain scene manager presents the mesh, using > various techniques to improve performance. Working on the terrain editor > will then also involve both learning how CEGUI works as well as scripting in > Lua. So there's a lot of different components that all come together if you > look at it all, but there's also room for focusing on a smaller set of > functionality if you feel that there's too many new concepts to learn at > once. > > The two projects that you're interested in are in some ways also > intertwined; an implementation of support for terrain modifiers would surely > also lead to alterations and improvements to the terrain editor. The terrain > editor proposal however focuses more on the client and will involve more Lua > and CEGUI code than server side code. > And remember that these are all just basic outlines of project ideas and > that we encourage all prospective students to expand on these ideas in their > applications. Or to submit new ideas. > > If you could get the server for your mod back up it would be great to use > as a reference. > > sincerely Erik > > ________________________________________ > Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [ > general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Tamas Bates [ > rhymer at gmail.com] > Skickat: den 22 mars 2008 02:44 > Till: general at mail.worldforge.org > ?mne: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain > > I'm a Computer Science student in the Pacific Northwest finishing up my > third year, and I've had an interest in graphics and games for a long time > (it's what got me into the major in the first place). Another thing that's > held my interest for some time is terrain generation, and I think that > working on your project would help me to learn a lot about it. I haven't > done much networking or graphics programming, but I am proficient with C++. > I'm also minoring in math which should help my lack of experience in this > area. Since you say Mercator already supports the terrain modifiers, I think > that implementing them in Ember and Cyphesis could probably be done over the > summer (though you guys would know better than I since you built the client > and server). Do you think it would be an appropriate project for someone of > my skill level? I do have a solid understanding of 3D concepts, and worked > on a game mod a while back ( > http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm ) which helped me learn a > lot in this area. I'd like to work on extending the terrain editor, too, if > its a higher priority or you find someone else you'd rather have work on the > modifiers. > > If you need/want to know anything more about me, ask away! > > -Tamas Bates > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at mail.worldforge.org > http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080322/d9412b22/attachment-0001.html From urs at andonyar.com Sat Mar 22 13:45:01 2008 From: urs at andonyar.com (Urs Holzer) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:45:01 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <200803222245.01348.urs@andonyar.com> Chris Baker wrote: > I think I've finished my update of the website's overall design or at > least graphically. There's a few niggles left to fix, but they > shouldn't take long and Al can do those at his lesiure. That is, of > course, unless you guys dislike what I've done for the logo and want > me to change it. I've included three screenshots with this email, > intended to give you an idea of what the site looked like a couple of > weeks ago, what it looks like now, and what (hopefully) it'll look > like after the next update. If there's any suggestions you want to > make, please throw them into the ring - I won't be offended. If I am allowed to comment this: In the final version, I have the strange feeling that there is something missing in the logo. I think I am missing the color. How about making the globe blue again? Please note that my opinion does not really count, since I am not part of worldforge. From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Sat Mar 22 14:23:23 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:23:23 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: <200803222245.01348.urs@andonyar.com> References: <200803222245.01348.urs@andonyar.com> Message-ID: Everyone's entitled to speak their opinions on this, active contributor or not. The desaturation of the logo was intentional, to make it fit in with the grey of the toolbar more effectively and stop it jumping out at you in the jarring way that the current one does. However, that is only my personal taste. I can do a mock-up of the site with a blue-globed logo if that's what everybody wants, shouldn't take me more than 10-15 minutes. But I'll wait for more people to check in with their views first. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080322/0c44c413/attachment.html From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Sat Mar 22 15:38:07 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:38:07 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2ED@brun.iteam.local> It looks much better now, great work! The composition of the text in the logo is also much better, but it doesn't look so good without the colour. Either make the blue colour return in some way, or perhaps try some other hue out. /erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Chris Baker [chris.baker2005 at gmail.com] Skickat: den 22 mars 2008 21:43 Till: general at worldforge.org ?mne: [WF-General] Final website preview? Hi all, I think I've finished my update of the website's overall design or at least graphically. There's a few niggles left to fix, but they shouldn't take long and Al can do those at his lesiure. That is, of course, unless you guys dislike what I've done for the logo and want me to change it. I've included three screenshots with this email, intended to give you an idea of what the site looked like a couple of weeks ago, what it looks like now, and what (hopefully) it'll look like after the next update. If there's any suggestions you want to make, please throw them into the ring - I won't be offended. Old site - http://trial.dreamhosters.com/old.jpg Current site - http://trial.dreamhosters.com/current.jpg Final(ish) site - http://trial.dreamhosters.com/preview.jpg Assuming everyone likes the logo, the final thing to address on the front page is the search box, because it needs some padding and 'search' needs to be made bold, and the footer - the text needs to be recoloured to be readable, and I think it needs to be shortened so that it no longer stretches below the screenshot column. Also the central text needs better formatting, 'Recent News' needs to be made a header and the links at the bottom about the RSS feeds need to be moved a bit further down to differentiate them from the rest of the links. But we're pretty much on the home straight, at least as far as the front page goes. Once that's done, I'll start to look at the rest of the site. So, please do tell me what you think of the final mockup (and I hope you think it's an improvement over the old site), Chris. From alriddoch at googlemail.com Sat Mar 22 21:17:23 2008 From: alriddoch at googlemail.com (Alistair Riddoch) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:17:23 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4b05edd10803222217s12b2061k5000a75127b6e896@mail.gmail.com> On 22/03/2008, Chris Baker wrote: > Hi all, > > I think I've finished my update of the website's overall design or at least > graphically. There's a few niggles left to fix, but they shouldn't take long > and Al can do those at his lesiure. That is, of course, unless you guys > dislike what I've done for the logo and want me to change it. I've included > three screenshots with this email, intended to give you an idea of what the > site looked like a couple of weeks ago, what it looks like now, and what > (hopefully) it'll look like after the next update. If there's any > suggestions you want to make, please throw them into the ring - I won't be > offended. > > Old site - > http://trial.dreamhosters.com/old.jpg > > Current site - > http://trial.dreamhosters.com/current.jpg > > Final(ish) site - > http://trial.dreamhosters.com/preview.jpg > I think the overall rendering of the new logo does look really good, especially now the look of the site has been improved so much. Like many of the other posters I would like to see how it looks with the blue background re-introduced into the logo. I am not sure it would be better, but would like to see it tried. Al -- Alistair Riddoch alriddoch at googlemail.com http://alistairriddoch.org/ From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Sun Mar 23 03:41:36 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:41:36 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain In-Reply-To: <53da8f280803221353o612d0699m779a15421c2bc302@mail.gmail.com> References: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2E9@brun.iteam.local>, <53da8f280803221353o612d0699m779a15421c2bc302@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2EF@brun.iteam.local> The cvs should work. We've however just recently moved to using git for version control. Information on how to get the source can be found at http://wiki.worldforge.org/wiki/Using_Git You can also get a snapshot of the code at http://git.worldforge.org/?p=ember.git;a=summary (click on the "snapshot" link for the first entry). (The cvs version should however still work.) Note also that we develop mainly on linux and while it's possible to build Ember on win32 by using mingw and msys we don't support it. Regarding Mercator, the nomenclature is as follows: The world is divided into Segments which are 64 meters in width (what you refer to as tiles). Each Segment has a height map and a collection of Surfaces. Each Surface is created by applying a Shader to the Segment. These Surfaces are basically just bitmaps which define the coverage of a certain terrain layer type such as grass, rock, snow and so on. There are a couple of different types of Shaders available; some of them use the terrain slope to determine coverage (such as the grass shader) while other use other parameters, such as the height (the snow shader which shows snow for all positions above a certain altitude, or the silt shader which shows silt for all positions below the water level). The Shaders in turn are globally defined for the whole world on the server. When logged into the world you can see the Surfaces by bringing up the Asset Manager (/show_assetManager) and looking at the textures with "terrain" in their names. Now, the heightmaps for the Segments are generated by an algorithm which takes the height of the corners of each Segment as input. So the only thing sent from the server for the terrain is a series of heights with 64 meters distance. You can see how the terrain is changed by altering these Base Points in some of the movies found here http://wiki.worldforge.org/wiki/Ember#Ingame_movies They are quite old however (version 0.4.1) /erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Tamas Bates [rhymer at gmail.com] Skickat: den 22 mars 2008 21:53 Till: general at worldforge.org ?mne: Re: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain That's strange the link didn't work, it looks fine to me: http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm I've mirrored the video (.mov inside of a .zip) and some screenshots here: http://myweb.students.wwu.edu/~batest3/mod/ I may be able to find some larger images in our backups if you'd like. The mod was built on the Doom 3 engine, and was based on the attack on Whiskey Outpost from the Starship Troopers movie. I was responsible for all of the scripting (particle effects, AI scripts, weapons, etc.) as well as the bulk of the level design. There wasn't any documentation available for engine at the time, so I was also responsible for figuring out how to make everything work. Some things (like material and entity definitions) were fairly straightforward, but others (like setting a model up correctly so the game wouldn't crash when you imported it) were much more difficult. We managed to complete the project in two months, which amounted to one fully playable level, two weapons, and three monsters. The one thing you can't see in the video are the sound effects we created, since we weren't finished editing them before we finished recording those shots. I was thinking the best way to learn more about Mercator would be to compile Ember and try messing around with the terrains, but I received the following error when trying to get it out of CVS: PAM authenticate error: User not known to the underlying authentication module Fatal error, aborting. cvsanon:cvsanon: no such user cvs checkout: authorization failed: server cvs.worldforge.org rejected access to /home/cvspsrv/worldforge for user cvsanon:cvsanon cvs checkout: used empty password; try "cvs login" with a real password In the meantime, I was looking at some of the source for Mercator to figure out how it works, and I was wondering: does each segment represent a single tile, or are tiles made of several segments? -Tamas On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 5:16 AM, Erik Hjortsberg > wrote: Hi, the link you posted doesn't work for me (no answer from the server). Otherwise it would be an excellent way to get to see what you've done before. The skills required for the terrain modifications bit wouldn't concern networking, since all of that is handled by base libs such as skstream, and instead revolve around how the atlas and mercator libs works, as well as how both the Cyphesis server and Ember handles the definitions and applies them to the terrain. Since the focus is on Ember we will try to keep the amount of work needed on the server down to a minimum, but this is still something that will require some alterations of the server code. If you choose to work on the terrain a minimum requirement is that you understand how Mercator handles it, how a heightmap can be used, how it's generated from the terrain definitions, both on the server and the client. As you progress you will then see how Ember uses the Mercator data to create a mesh, and how the Ogre terrain scene manager presents the mesh, using various techniques to improve performance. Working on the terrain editor will then also involve both learning how CEGUI works as well as scripting in Lua. So there's a lot of different components that all come together if you look at it all, but there's also room for focusing on a smaller set of functionality if you feel that there's too many new concepts to learn at once. The two projects that you're interested in are in some ways also intertwined; an implementation of support for terrain modifiers would surely also lead to alterations and improvements to the terrain editor. The terrain editor proposal however focuses more on the client and will involve more Lua and CEGUI code than server side code. And remember that these are all just basic outlines of project ideas and that we encourage all prospective students to expand on these ideas in their applications. Or to submit new ideas. If you could get the server for your mod back up it would be great to use as a reference. sincerely Erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Tamas Bates [rhymer at gmail.com] Skickat: den 22 mars 2008 02:44 Till: general at mail.worldforge.org ?mne: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain I'm a Computer Science student in the Pacific Northwest finishing up my third year, and I've had an interest in graphics and games for a long time (it's what got me into the major in the first place). Another thing that's held my interest for some time is terrain generation, and I think that working on your project would help me to learn a lot about it. I haven't done much networking or graphics programming, but I am proficient with C++. I'm also minoring in math which should help my lack of experience in this area. Since you say Mercator already supports the terrain modifiers, I think that implementing them in Ember and Cyphesis could probably be done over the summer (though you guys would know better than I since you built the client and server). Do you think it would be an appropriate project for someone of my skill level? I do have a solid understanding of 3D concepts, and worked on a game mod a while back ( http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm ) which helped me learn a lot in this area. I'd like to work on extending the terrain editor, too, if its a higher priority or you find someone else you'd rather have work on the modifiers. If you need/want to know anything more about me, ask away! -Tamas Bates _______________________________________________ General mailing list General at mail.worldforge.org http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general From demitar at worldforge.org Sun Mar 23 03:30:47 2008 From: demitar at worldforge.org (Anders Petersson) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:30:47 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1206271847.22275.6.camel@rose> l?r 2008-03-22 klockan 20:43 +0000 skrev Chris Baker: > So, please do tell me what you think of the final mockup (and I hope > you think it's an improvement over the old site), Very shiny indeed. While I agree that the lack of color in the logo makes it less effective I myself side with your assessment that the alternative is worse (ie it would steal too much focus). There's a snag with the logo outline (may be intentional) that it's has a small square on the right side. It annoys my eye a bit (and thus steals focus) and I'd prefer a perfectly round outline. And finally the search box way down on the page. Assuming searching is accurate it should be more prominently displayed, perhaps even on the top bar to the right of the "downloads" link. And again, great job. /Anders From chris.baker2005 at gmail.com Sun Mar 23 11:54:00 2008 From: chris.baker2005 at gmail.com (Chris Baker) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:54:00 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: <1206271847.22275.6.camel@rose> References: <1206271847.22275.6.camel@rose> Message-ID: Okay, I've created a mockup featuring a full color logo. Personally I still prefer the desaturated one, but it's up to you guys. View it here: http://trial.dreamhosters.com/previewcolor.jpg Chris. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.worldforge.org/pipermail/general/attachments/20080323/cdf18fec/attachment.html From urs at andonyar.com Sun Mar 23 12:07:20 2008 From: urs at andonyar.com (Urs Holzer) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:07:20 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: References: <1206271847.22275.6.camel@rose> Message-ID: <200803232107.20656.urs@andonyar.com> Chris Baker wrote: > Okay, I've created a mockup featuring a full color logo. Personally I > still prefer the desaturated one, but it's up to you guys. Perhaps you are right, but I think it is a little bit better. However, I especially like the glow of the logo. Also, the font you use for the logo is a very good choice. I think you did a really good job. From erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se Mon Mar 24 07:27:43 2008 From: erik.hjortsberg at iteam.se (Erik Hjortsberg) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:27:43 +0100 Subject: [WF-General] Final website preview? In-Reply-To: References: <1206271847.22275.6.camel@rose>, Message-ID: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DBBC2F4@brun.iteam.local> That does look better than the one totally without colour. There's the box artifact to the right of the circle though. Did you try with some more subdues blue colours? The rest of the colours on the site are quite subdued, except then for the quite glaring blue colour of the logo. /erik ________________________________________ Fr?n: general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org [general-bounces at mail.worldforge.org] för Chris Baker [chris.baker2005 at gmail.com] Skickat: den 23 mars 2008 20:54 Till: general at worldforge.org ?mne: Re: [WF-General] Final website preview? Okay, I've created a mockup featuring a full color logo. Personally I still prefer the desaturated one, but it's up to you guys. View it here: http://trial.dreamhosters.com/previewcolor.jpg Chris. From zzorn at iki.fi Thu Mar 27 01:45:19 2008 From: zzorn at iki.fi (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hans_H=E4ggstr=F6m?=) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:45:19 +0200 Subject: [WF-General] Summer of Code - Terrain In-Reply-To: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> References: <53da8f280803211844o6fadacaak933b0943a01f249@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <323b90d70803270145r6df9a346m8c28b603bcf6091@mail.gmail.com> Hi Tamas, If you want some ideas for various terrain modifiers, I collected an overview of various terrain (and other landscape related) generation algorithms to my thesis. It's one and a half years old, but should probably give some solid background research and links. http://www.iki.fi/zzorn/landscapegeneration Good luck! -- Hans H?ggstr?m (zzorn) On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 3:44 AM, Tamas Bates wrote: > > I'm a Computer Science student in the Pacific Northwest finishing up my > third year, and I've had an interest in graphics and games for a long time > (it's what got me into the major in the first place). Another thing that's > held my interest for some time is terrain generation, and I think that > working on your project would help me to learn a lot about it. I haven't > done much networking or graphics programming, but I am proficient with C++. > I'm also minoring in math which should help my lack of experience in this > area. Since you say Mercator already supports the terrain modifiers, I think > that implementing them in Ember and Cyphesis could probably be done over the > summer (though you guys would know better than I since you built the client > and server). Do you think it would be an appropriate project for someone of > my skill level? I do have a solid understanding of 3D concepts, and worked > on a game mod a while back ( > http://www.jessbates.com/pages_levels/st_mod.htm ) which helped me learn a > lot in this area. I'd like to work on extending the terrain editor, too, if > its a higher priority or you find someone else you'd rather have work on the > modifiers. > > If you need/want to know anything more about me, ask away! > > -Tamas Bates > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at mail.worldforge.org > http://mail.worldforge.org/lists/listinfo/general > > From alriddoch at googlemail.com Thu Mar 27 14:13:57 2008 From: alriddoch at googlemail.com (Alistair Riddoch) Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:13:57 +0000 Subject: [WF-General] Manipulating Devices In-Reply-To: <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DB5656A@brun.iteam.local> References: <200803152129.14935.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803161954h5c731e95l1a212fe7b1cc0a34@mail.gmail.com> <200803181502.12075.urs@andonyar.com> <200803201254.20525.urs@andonyar.com> <4b05edd10803200628j5504f7bfu99781e9a2925c235@mail.gmail.com> <93BE8A5F0814E64D8CEDC34CA57B764A013DB5656A@brun.iteam.local> Message-ID: <4b05edd10803271413s5ea5af5wa9189434080ef6cb@mail.gmail.com> Here is the draft client API for manipulating devices: The operation you send is an Actuate operation, FROM the character, as is normal for IG operations. The form is pretty much like the Use operation for a tool, but in order to determine the operations that can be actuated, you need to look at the target and see if it has a "actions" attribute, which should be a list of strings. The argument of the Actuate operation should be an instance of the type of operation chosen, and the argument of this operation should be an entity specifying the ID of the entity being actuated. So to actuate an device that looks like this: { parents: ["lever"], id: 23, objtype: "obj", actions: ["push", "pull"], } you would send an operation like this: { parents: ["actuate"], objtype: "op", from: 42, args: [ { parents: ["pull"], objtype: "op", args: [ { id: 23, objtype: "obj", }