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.

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

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:

• ember-0.6.2.tar.bz2
• ember-media-0.6.2.tar.bz2
• Ember-0.6.2.x86 (for Linux)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Changes:

• improved server connection UI
• improved entity creation widget
• performance improvements to the compass
• various bug fixes

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

• ember-0.6.1.1.tar.bz2
• ember-media-0.6.1.tar.bz2
• Ember-0.6.1.1 (for Linux)
• Ember-0.6.1.exe (for Windows)

We currently provide precompiled packages for both Linux and Windows.

Note that if you compile from source, you will need to install the content of ember-media-0.6.1.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.