• Samuel Kogler: Replace current terrain manager with Ogre terrain component
• Louis Jencka: Dynamic Media for Ember

We’re very excited about having these two onboard the project, and expect great things to happen during the summer.

As with last year we’re also acting as an umbrella organization for both Ryzom and CEGUI. The students for these projects are:

• László Kis-Ádám: (Ryzom) Programmable shader pipeline and material editor tool
• Daan Janssens: (Ryzom) Account Management Web Application With Ticketing System And Its Integegration into Ryzom App
• Fabien Henon: (Ryzom) Environment dependent camera animations
• Timotei: (CEGUI) GUI navigation and visual focus
• Lukas Meindl: (CEGUI) Custom-shape drawing (vector-graphics ready) + SVG support

As before we’re thrilled to be allowed this opportunity to work with students on improving Worldforge.

As described on the GSoC site, now starts the period in which prospective students are encouraged to approach the projects and discuss their ideas. Please visit our ideas page, and contact us through our various channels.

As with last year we’re also acting as umbrella project for both CEGUI and Ryzom. Do step by their projects and see if there’s something you might be interested in there.

This release improves on performance through the use of automatic mesh reduction and experimental detail level adjustment.

Changes:

• automatic mesh reduction
• experimental automatic detail level adjustment
• it’s now possible to resize the main window
• various smaller fixes

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

• ember-0.7.0.tar.bz2
• ember-media-0.7.0.tar.bz2
• Ember-0.7.0.x86 (for Linux 32-bit)
• Ember-0.7.0.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-0.7.0.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.

Cyphesis version 0.6.0 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site.

Cyphesis is a small to medium scale server for WorldForge games, with builtin AI. This version includes the demo game Mason which is currently in development. This release is intended for server administrators wishing to run a Mason server and World developers developing new worlds or game systems.

Major changes in this version:

New game systems by Jekin Trivedi implementing earthworks, and prototypes of baking, rope making and other crafting.

New game systems by Elminster starting work on metal smelting.

New game systems by Anthony Pesce implementing pioneering.

New prototype game system for magic spells.

Almost all the core code has been touched in some way over the last 18 months in changes which have increased robustness, flexibility, performance and reliability.

Source code can be downloaded from here:

Source Code tar.bz2

The end result of his work is that Ember (and as an extension Ogre) now has a powerful and effective way of automatically generate low detail meshes from existing high detail ones. This feature is a boon for a client such as Ember, which always has to adapt to totally dynamic scenes. It’s expected that Péter’s work will allow us to craft even larger and complex worlds.

Péter has also written up an excellent report of the work he’s done, to be seen both online and as a PDF. It contains both examples of the improvements as well as technical descriptions.

At Worldforge we’re very proud of the work Péter did over the summer, and aim to release a new version of Ember incorporating it all very soon.

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 improves on the way the user interacts with the world, how animation are played and how items are wielded.

Changes:

• filtering of invalid servers in server browser
• mouse hover help in the world
• animations played for entity actions
• proper alignment of entities held in hands
• fixes for GCC 4.7

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

• ember-0.6.3.tar.bz2
• ember-media-0.6.3.tar.bz2
• Ember-0.6.3.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-0.6.3.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.

This short showcase video shows some of the improvements.

• 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.