• Anthony Pesce, “Develop Mason game system“
• Arjun Kumar, “Automatic adjustment of graphical level“
• Péter Szücs, “Automatic mesh LOD management system“

In addition to these three students, we also act as mentor organizations for both the Ryzom and the CEGUI project. These students are

• Malik Butler, “Create an End-User Defined, Dynamic Rank Structure Within the Guild Manager“
• László Kis-Ádám, “Ryzom GUI Editor“
• Andreas Hufler, “Implement Character Achievements“
• Fabien Henon, “Camera animations and sound triggers“
• Lukas Meindl, “CEGUI Samples Framework“

If you wish to follow the progress of the students, make sure to subscribe to the general mailing list where we’ll be posting weekly results.

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!

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.

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.

What really slowed my progress as a newcomer at that time was:

• the inability to buy items without manually “giving” coins, and that only if you somehow get to know what the merchant is selling in the first place (I helped in this regard with the Merchant Trading dialog deliverable)
• I accidentally closed my inventory and couldn’t get it back – you can show it again with the /show_inventory command but I suspect most people will just get mad and restart Ember (I helped in this regard by adding an inventory icon that toggles its visibility, Jayr made the icon image)
• Ember started and I could log to any server and start moving around, however the mouse look sensitivity was very low at that time (this was improved by one of Erik’s commits later) and I couldn’t raise it up in any way (this could have been specific to my system). I later learned that I could add this setting to ~/.ember/ember.conf but I am almost sure newcomers won’t be ready to invest into research to find where the config file is and how to change it to make the necessary settings changes work (I generalised this problem and made a Settings dialog with generic representation API to remedy the situation)

So focusing on the GUI felt like an important and fun endeavor despite it not being in the “Ideas list”. I also am in the team behind CEGUI – the library that Ember uses for its GUI, so I felt I could get fairly productive with it.

Progress
I think it’s best to watch a video describing my progress over the summer because most of the deliverables are visual – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N24GVjBojs

Challenges
At the beginning of the program I found it easy to be productive and focused but my progress slowed down considerably when I hit some barrier I couldn’t solve in a matter of hours. Spending time not doing any tangible progress and instead trying to hunt down some strange issue got me of my wind and it took time to accelerate the progress back to it’s former speed. I definitely advice all future GSoC students to keep slightly ahead of the schedule because problems might arise from places they wouldn’t expect, I was 1-2 weeks ahead of schedule and that reserve allowed me to finish the Settings window on time.

New features
As part of my GSoC project I implemented the following features:

• Window activation and deactivation transitions
• Coloured chat (each entity in the chat gets a colour assigned)
• Coloured console (errors, info and warning messages are easier to distinguish)
• Detached entity dialog (with history of conversation with that paricular entity)
• Merchant trading dialog (trading without any typing or manually giving coins)
• Settings window (allows to change various options without having to read manuals and edit configuration files)
• Toggle buttons for inventory and settings window

(+ some minor bugfixes and/or smaller improvements)

Verdict
I found Google Summer of Code one of the best programs I have ever taken part in. I learned a lot (especially about lua and tolua++, though both of these frustrated me a lot over the summer :-D) and of course gained a very nice CV entry and bragging rights ;-) Worldforge was a great organisation to work for, all members were very helpful. My plan is to keep contributing, although not in such a high volume due to time constraints.

Many thanks especially to Erik for awesome mentoring over the summer. He was always on top of what I was doing and saved me many hours by alerting me of mistakes early on or advising me to go another direction when necessary.

The Worldforge projects are:

• Martin Preisler: Ember UI improvements
  Mentored by Erik Hjortsberg
• Peter Szücs: Integrate Ember into the Web Browser
  Mentored by Erik Hjortsberg
• Pronoy Chopra: Porting Wombat to Flask and integrate a 3D model viewer into the system
  Mentored by Kai Blin
• Jekin Trivedi: Develop Mason Game Systems
  Mentored by Alistair Riddoch

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.

If you are interested in applying then you should think carefully how to apply. Review the list of ideas we have posted, but don’t feel you must be constrained by it. Applications should demonstrate deeper knowledge of WorldForge, so you will need to look into how the existing system works, and how new ideas might be implemented before writing a convincing application. We are happy to review draft applications, provide feedback and help you improve your application. Post on the WorldForge forums, the mailing list or come and chat to alriddoch or kai in #lounge on WorldForge IRC during the European working day.

Get your applications in quickly as there is not long for reviews and feedback before the deadline. I am really looking forward to getting some great applications, and working with some awesome talented people again this summer.

Looking forward to your applications.

An old article on WorldForge from 2001 has recently been republished here and is well worth a read. It gives interesting insights into the ambitious goals we have had since the beginning nearly 13 years ago, and how many of our ideas which seemed so ambitious in the past have been implemented by commercial games more recently, though perhaps not always in the ways we would like to see them done.

To me WorldForge is just as relevant now as it was back then. As the bigger games become more and more like well managed themeh parks, there is a huge gap for games which feel like living worlds where players have real influence and a sense of ownership in the world they are helping create.

Since I introduced both services over five years ago, keeping spam comments under control has proved very difficult, and for a a while all forum registrations had to be vetted manually, and blog comments were disable completely. Thankfully spam control technology has come on leaps on bounds, and I have now been able to make both sites much more open.

A few days ago I migrated the forums to running new software with more advanced protection, and as a result user registrations are fully automated. As an additional bonus the discussion interface is much simpler, and I hope it will be much easier for people interested in WorldForge to discuss things and help each other.

Spam protection on the blog has been fully updated, and now comments are open once again, including anonymous comments. I am not sure how well this will work, but I’ll leave it open for a while and see how things pan out.

Al

It’s the middle of winter, so what better time for a beach party? A bit cold for that? Perhaps I’ll write up what happened last year then.

For me 2010 was pretty quiet as far as WorldForge was concerned, but for the rest of the community it has been a busy year with lots of great progress. Below the cut are some of the major achievement broken down by month.

January
I started a new job, and with it got a temporary non-compete agreement which meant I had to take a break from WorldForge coding for a while. Just before I started the new job I managed to push 0.5.23 of Cyphesis, which added support for configurable spawn points, and tools for saving world state to a file, and restoring. Kai and the Wombat team released 0.5.0 on the 8th of the month, with new support for uploading artwork which Wombat then checks into svn.

February
February was a quieter month, but was notable as a new member joined the mailing lists, and expressed an interest in becoming a developer. We’ll hear more about Manohar later.

March
On the 18th Kai announced that WorldForge had been accepted into the excellent Google Summer of Code program. In fact we had quite a few inquiries and proposals in anticipation of this announcement already. Student applications opened at the end of the month, after which applications started to arrive in earnest.

April
During April the mailing list was thriving with discussions about GSoC proposals. Proposals were written for GUI improvements for Ember, automatic adjustment of graphics level, integrating Google Breakpad, enhancing Wombat and teleporting between servers. Early in this month the numbers of downloads from the WorldForge software download area on SourceForge surpassed a quarter of a million downloads.

May
In the first week of May we had introductory emails from the three selected GSoC students. Josh’s proposal to add 3D proviews to Wombat, Manohar’s proposal to implement linking between servers, and Tiberiu’s proposal to improve the Ember GUI were all accepted. Erik released version 0.5.8 of Ember with multi threading, a new entity type manager shown above, and many other improvements. Erik also reported that Ryzom had been released as Free Open Source Software, which was a great boost to the FOSS MMO development community.

June
June was a month of heads down GSoC coding. Simon released 0.2.2 of the WorldForge Update Toolkit library to fix some compilation issues.

July
GSoC development work continued with some of the results now becoming more testable, and we had a welcome message on the mailing lists from the Talesdev MMORPG Open Source team.

August
In August GSoC came to a close, and the students got their contributions ready to be integrated. I finally worked out how to use GLC to record OpenGL videos, and uploaded the above video demonstrating some Mason gameplay. Cyphesis 0.5.24 was released after a lengthy hiatus with some minor improvements and important build fixes.

September
As autumn arrived Tiberiu posted a great report on his GSoC project; one video portion is show above. The number of WorldForge servers known to the Metaserver exceded 150 for the first time recorded. This is a great achievement, but sadly it was only immediately noticed because it broke the server listing code in Eris due to bugs in the handling of fragmented server list packets. Some urgent bug fixing was needed to ensure Ember was able to view and log into any of the running servers.

October
In early October I gave a short informal talk on WorldForge at Barcamp Brighton. Otherwise it was a quiet month on the mailing list and news site, though a quick glance at the anachronistically named CVS mailing list archives showed there was still activity in the background.

November
By contrast November had a flurry of interesting news. Kai worked with the Ryzom project to put together a joint application for Google Code-In, which was accepted. Cyphesis 0.5.25 was released with support for improved terrain modification in the gameplay. Ember 0.6.0 was released integrating Tiberiu’s GUI improvement work. The new features in both Ember and Cyphesis can be soon working together in the video above, and a video showing support for deeper delving in Cyphesis is shown below.

December
In December, Dean Bouvier announced that he had set up a Public Sandbox Server which anyone could log into with admin rights using the username “admin”, password “admin”. This provides an excellent opportunity for everyone to try out the world building tools in Ember, and a number of people immediately logged in and started trying things out. The video below demonstrates logging into the sandbox, and shows a sweep around some of the areas that have been built already.

Thanks everyone for a great year!