Google Summer of Code 2012 is on!

Posted on Monday 19th of March, 2012 by erik

Worldforge has once again been accepted in Google Summer of Code!

This marks the fifth year Google has allowed us the privilege to work together with students under to Summer of Code program. All previous years students have left us great impressions and we’re excited this coming summer.

The student applications have yet not opened, but will soon. If you’re a prospective student who hopes to work on Worldforge during the summer we encourage you to interact with the community. You either already have an idea of what you want to do, or you’re interested in pursuing any of the existing ideas. In either case we want to hear from you first. We provide a couple of different communication channels.

All further information you need can be found on our wiki.

The next couple of weeks will be exciting for us all!

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Browser plugin, Windows and OSX builds of Ember

Posted on Friday 6th of January, 2012 by erik

Thanks to the hard work of Péter Szücs during the Google Summer of Code 2011 we can now proudly introduce WebEmber, a browser plugin which allows you to embed Ember in a web page. We support all major browsers on Linux, OSX and Windows.

While the plugin is still in an early state, and there are a couple of rough edges, this first release gives a glimpse of the many possibilities provided by a web embeddable client.

That’s not all however, since we now also provide builds of Ember 0.6.2 for both Windows and OSX.

Although we’ve previously have provided builds for these platforms, the process of building have always been very time consuming and arcane. Thanks to the work Péter did during Google Summer of Code 2011 we now have a both much more straight forward as well as well documented way of building for both Windows and OSX.

As well as the binaries we also provide instructions for building from source for both Windows and OSX.

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Last chance to submit talks for FOSDEM Open Source Games Room

Posted on Friday 23rd of December, 2011 by alriddoch

Nils Kneuper has posted a reminder that the deadline for talk proposals for the Open Source Games Room at FOSDEM next year is less than 24 hours away.

View the original proposal here.

The idea for this room was born at a session at the Google Summer of Code mentor summit than Erik, Kai and I attended, and I have submitted a proposal to talk about WorldForge technology already.

Spread the word, propose a talk if you can, and consider coming along for the discussion

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Ember 0.6.2 released

Posted on Wednesday 16th of November, 2011 by erik

Ember version 0.6.2 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 multiple new GUI features as well as the ability to compile Ember as a browser plugin. A huge part of the new features added are thanks to Peter Szücs and Martin Preisler who both did great work during the Google Summer of Code 2011.

Changes:

  • a new configuration widget, allowing for altering client settings
  • improved conversation flow with NPCs
  • intuitive trading dialogs
  • support for compiling as browser plugin
  • animations and UI polish

This version can be downloaded from the sourceforge download site, at the following locations:

We currently only provide precompiled packages for Linux and intend to provide Windows and OSX binaries not too soon, as well as browser plugins.

Note that if you compile from source, you will need to install the content of ember-media-0.6.2.tar.bz2 to PREFIX/share/ember/media or use the “make releasemediarsync” make target.

More information can be found at the Ember site.

All bug reports should be posted at the Launchpad.

A movie showing off the awesome new UI features provided by Martin Preisler for the GSOC 2011.

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GSoC report 2011: Martin Preisler

Posted on Thursday 15th of September, 2011 by erik

Hi, I am Martin Preisler (“Kulik” on various IRC networks and forums) from Czech Republic. This year I got accepted into Google Summer of Code and had the pleasure to work for Worldforge.

Introduction
I was working on Ember’s GUI improvements. I chose this project because I wanted to work on an application and not a library (most of my work is on libraries that are later used by developers to develop end-user apps, I wanted to try to work on the apps for a change) and I felt lack of several GUI dialogs was severally impacting newcomers.

Continue reading →

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Code moved to GitHub.

Posted on Saturday 13th of August, 2011 by erik

The Worldforge project has previously hosted most of our actively developed applications and libraries on our own Git server. Since a couple of months we have however migrated to using GitHub instead.

This isn’t really such a big change as the nature of Git makes it very easy to migrate between repositories. GitHub provides a couple of useful features such as easy forking and pull requests, easier user handling and ability to comment code.

If you’ve already checked out the code, you can switch the “origin” repository with the “git set-url” command. For example, if you have Ember checked out:

git remote set-url origin git://github.com/worldforge/ember.git

Note that the Atlas-C++ repository has been changed to Atlas-Cpp.

If you are using Hammer for compilation we recommend that you discard your old version and check out the new version, as there are a couple of changes to how the build artifacts are stored.

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How to edit models in Ember on the fly

Posted on Tuesday 24th of May, 2011 by erik

Below is a short video showing how easy it is to alter the Ember models on the fly, to better fit with the data sent from the server.

Since Worldforge is built around the server and client agnostic Atlas protocol, there’s no firm connection between how entities appear on the client (for example Ember or Sear) and how they are represented on the server. We do provide examples of 2d clients too for example.

This disconnect requires that Ember knows how to present different entities to the user, and this is most often done by using some kind of 3d mesh. The following video shows how the server-entity-to-mesh mapping can be altered on the fly.

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Google Summer of Code soon starting

Posted on Sunday 22nd of May, 2011 by erik

Tomorrow is the official start of coding for Google Summer of Code 2011. Like last year Worldforge teamed up with the Ryzom project to help them with mentoring. Together we were allocated eight slots, evenly split.

The Worldforge projects are:

If you’re interested in our students’ progress you should subscribe to the general mailing list where they will be posting weekly updates.

We’re all very excited about the coming weeks, and wish our students the best of luck in achieving their project goals.

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An inspirational video from Terraria

Posted on Thursday 19th of May, 2011 by alriddoch

Terraria has just been released this week, and is a 2D game with a lot of similar elements to Minecraft. Check out the video below for some of the amazing things their world simulation can do, including blasting out the walls of caves with explosives, superb lighting and water flowing down tunnels.

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Ember 0.6.1 released

Posted on Wednesday 18th of May, 2011 by erik

Ember version 0.6.1 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 focuses on GUI polish and performance improvements. In addition, thanks to the hard work of James Lovejoy we can now provide a prepackaged Windows binary.

Continue reading →

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