WorldForge Developers Journal

The final students for the Google Summer of Code 2008 have been announced. We were really pleased with all of the applications we got and had a really hard time selecting the top three to fill our three slots. The three lucky ones are:

Student: Alexey Torkhov
Mentor: Erik Hjortsberg
Project: Implement advanced entity creator in Ember client

Student: Tamas Bates
Mentor: Kai Blin
Project: Terrain Modifiers

Student: Rômulo Fernandes Machado Leitão
Mentor: Erik Hjortsberg
Project: Implement a sound manager to allow Ember to have sounds

We’re confident that this summer will bring very good things to the whole project, and we’re really looking forward to working with the students! The coming month will allow them to get better orientated within both the project, the code and the community until May 26 when coding officially starts.

Ember version 0.5.2 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site.

Ember is a 3d client for the WorldForge project. It uses the Ogre 3d graphics library for presentation and CEGUI for its GUI system.
This release adds a totally rewritten foliage system which allows for addition of efficient and natural looking foliage such as bushes and plants. In addition to that a new imposter system has been added, allowing for scenes with large forests. A lot of smaller bugs and glitches have been fixed, and the gui has been tweaked to behave more intuitively. Note that if you compile from source, you will need to install the media too, either by using the “make releasemediarsync” make target or by installing the content of ember-media-0.5.2.tar.bz2 to PREFIX/share/ember/media Also note that this version requires CEGUI 0.6.0 and libwfut 0.2.0.
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libwfut 0.2.0 has been released and is available from the WorldForge download site. WFUT is a content distribution system initially intended to provide media updates for WorldForge clients. libwfut is a C++ implementation of the client side functionality.

This release contains a swig generated python interface, download mirror selection, improved error reporting, control over the number of simultaneous downloads and numerous other bug fixes and improvements.

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For quite some time we’ve been looking at replacements for the ageing CVS setup we’ve been using. After considering and testing some of the newest distributed versioning systems available we’ve settled for Git for Ember. Note that this only affects Ember; other components of the Worldforge projects still reside in CVS.

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WorldForge has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008.

If you are a student interested in participating, see our project ideas list, visit us in the #lounge channel on irc.worldforge.org or say hello on the general mailing list. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

We would like to thank Google, Leslie Hawthorn in particular, for this great opportunity.

I’ve just committed some updates to Ember which should help developers with getting the correct media. These consists of a new rsync service installed at amber as well as some new make targets for easy media installation. Read the rest of this entry »

I think it’s time for another Ember progress report. Since the release of 0.5.1 I’ve spent some time fixing a large number of bugs, many of which were discovered through the public release of 0.5.1, and reported on the Launchpad. So far I’m very pleased with the Launchpad, since it’s actually being used for bug reporting. However, I’d like to highlight some of the new features in Ember currently being developed.

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A binary package for Ember 0.5.1 is now available from here. DirectX 9.0c needs to be installed for it to work.

All main development of Ember occurs on Linux, so the Win32 port is not guaranteed to be as stable. If you experience any problems, please report them, preferrebly to the bug tracker.

Here is a proposal for a powerful mechanism which I think will allow is to do neat dynamic things without having to add lots of special case code, scripts or data to the client.

Everyone who works with graphics should be familiar with the concept of tiles images or textures where the same image is repeated in order to cover an area large than the original image.

The concept of tiled models aims to do something similar, but by rendering multiple instances of a 3D model adjacent to each other to represent a larger entity. There are a few example cases to which this could be applied, both existing and new.
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The ember-0.5.1.x86.package file hosted on Sourceforge and released together with the source release for Ember 0.5.1 was corrupt, a newer non-corrupt version have now been uploaded. It can be downloaded from here.

Merry Christmas!