Topics

1

Graphics / Resummoned

« on: February 12, 2014, 08:31:24 PM »

Hello everyone,

A while back, I wanted to create a separate skin for Summoning Wars. That skin is Resummoned.
At the time (january 2013), I realized that I would not be able to finish the skin anytime soon due to imminent changes
in CEGUI and the difficulty encountered in maintaining my first CEGUI skin: Glossy Serpent.

I chose to use the knowledge that I have aquired from making Glossy Serpent and adapt the already existing Summoning Wars skin.
I named my adaptation SWB, which is short for Summoning Wars Base.

As Glossy Serpent is stable now and Summoning Wars has also been updated to use CEGUI 0.8.3, I would like to restart working on the Resummoned skin. The project page is available for more than a year now: https://sourceforge.net/projects/resummoned/

There are many aspects of the current skin that I am not entirely happy with, but the biggest one is the licensing:
Resummoned will use the MIT license.
The most important difference in the MIT license (as opposed to the current license) is that the MIT license would allow someone else to take the skin, modify it and use it commercially. (The same license is also used for OGRE and CEGUI).

All the artwork will need to be created by the Resummoned team or exist already under a free enough license (E.g. CC-BY).

The long term goals are:
- create a dark themed skin (dark both as in used colours and theme)
- create / adapt the base controls used in the TaharezLook skin
- add custom widgets to handle more exotic scenarios, in variations for low and high information density.
- add icons/glyphs for generic game symbols (E.g. "gears" for options, a musical symbol for audio/music)
- Resummoned should fully support the needs of an RPG game like Summoning Wars.

If you are interested in joining the Resummoned project, contact me in this thread (you will also need a SourceForge account) if you're interessted in accessing the repository or building the sample application for it.

This will be a slowly evolving process.
So don't expect any immediate breakthroughs. :-)

2

General / Discussion points for bi-monthly meeting

« on: February 01, 2014, 08:38:22 PM »

Hi guys,

these are just some discussion points for the next Summoning Wars meeting.

Some things should be clarified with regards to the next release of Summoning Wars.

For the current release:
- Technical operation: A merge should be performed between the active branches (only 2 should be active as far as I know):
  - default
  - gussoundtest
  - (maybe material-system-056)

- A management decision: A previous branch has been left hanging (material-system-056); this branch is making use of the Ogre RTShaderLib to provide somewhat better shadows. But, while the shadows look ok in the surface levels, they look strange in the underground levels.

Preparation for the next phase of development (mostly project management decisions):
- Choose a new project tracking tool to assist the technical development
- Define how the integration between the tracking tool and the project code shall be performed (E.g. guidelines for commit messages; restrictions of commit/merge without a proper issue in the tracker, etc.). A tutorial, or guide should also be created to allow developers to set-up a working IDE rather quickly.
- Define how the resource files (music, sounds, 2D textures, 3D textures) are to be integrated for development. (E.g. A separate repository?)

(All decisions can also be postponed; but of course it would make sense to have them sooner rather than later.)

3

General / Project Tracking Tool Discussion

« on: January 26, 2014, 07:16:05 PM »

Hello everyone,

in the latest weekly meeting, the issue of the bug-tracker to use has been brought up again. As that is a significant part of any project, and will be the base of our further development, we will post here our findings, about the possible technical solutions. All solutions shall be analyzed according to the following criteria:
- license (free and open-source licenses are preferred).
- possibility to integrate with Mercurial (so that we are able to link our code commits to the issues created in the bug-tracker).
- ease of use
- ease of configuration.
- feature set for both current and possible future use cases.
If you have any suggestions, please provide information on all 5 criteria.

 Our current use cases are:
- create a bug/task/issue, etc
- assign the item to a project member
- allow the project member to analyze the item and accept it as valid, reject it, or reassign it to someone more appropriate.

This list is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems .
Note: there are currently 2 tracking systems available.
- Mantis, integrated already into this wiki: http://sumwars.org/mantis/my_view_page.php (alas, at the time of the initial set-up, it lacked Mercurial integration. Now there seems to be an experimental plug-in for that. Not yet tested).
- The bitbucket tracker: https://bitbucket.org/sumwars/sumwars-code/issues .

If you have any proposals, please submit them in a reply to this post.
dezGusty out.

4

Programming / Support for CEGUI 0.8, Ogre 1.9

« on: January 10, 2014, 09:07:05 PM »

Hi,

I made changes to the CEGUI resource files for the game throughout this week. The files should work now with CEGUI 0.8.
Unfortunately, I did not add support for the previous CEGUI release yet (so I only performed changes to support the CEGUI 0..

It's not ready yet. I cannot seem to get the 3D scene to be displayed, and I'm not sure as to whether this is a CEGUI issue or an OGRE issue. Anyway...

If you want to test the build, use the branch named "gussoundtest". Remember to also update the "resources.cfg" file to use the new folders for the CEGUI 0.8 resources (in the emotionsets, GUI and GUI_XML_schemas resource groups).

E.g.

Code: [Select]

[GUI]
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/configs
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/fonts
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/fonts/${ASPECT_RATIO}
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/imagesets
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/layouts
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/layouts/common
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/layouts/${ASPECT_RATIO}
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/looknfeel
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/schemes
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/animations

[GUI_XML_schemas]
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/xml_schemas

[emotionsets]
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/emotionsets
FileSystem=.//./share/resources/gui_0.8/emotionsets

5

General / Low productivity for the next 6 weeks

« on: July 08, 2013, 05:30:14 AM »

Hi guys,

I managed to break my right hand at a football match. That makes it much harder to do ... anything really. So I doubt I will be able to do any valuable contributions during this time

6

Programming / Sound engine modifications in the tests

« on: June 27, 2013, 11:15:46 PM »

Hi guys,

sorry for not being very active lately. I could not find the time. But I hope to make up for it with this:

I just wanted to let you know that I created a branch "gussoundtest" (https://bitbucket.org/sumwars/sumwars-code/commits/branch/gussoundtest) to test out a new (intermediate) sound layer between SumWars and OpenAL.
I added support for fade-in and fade-out of music tracks, shuffle, repeat.
The main menu tracks are defined in their own XML file.
The intro track is now West's "Reluctant Hero".

And the regular sounds may behave a bit differently (they can be played easier in parallel).

If you test the branch, please let me know of any issues you encounter.
dezGusty out.

7

Programming / New Deps (openssl)

« on: June 20, 2013, 11:45:33 AM »

Hi,

I noticed we have a new dependency on openssl, but we don't have a package yet for it in the old dependencies :-).
Do we really need it?

8

General / SumWars Team Status Check May 2013

« on: May 05, 2013, 12:45:25 PM »

Hello everyone,

As usual, this is the team status check for the current month (May 2013). As we're just about to release 0.5.7 this is a good time to start planning out the features for the next release

If you can help out with the game in May, please drop a reply in this thread. Thanks.
The main goals will be defined in a different thread.

I'll be active in May, but with a limited amount of time at my disposal.
dezGusty

9

General / SumWars Team Status Check April 2013

« on: April 02, 2013, 08:23:47 PM »

Hello everyone,

As usual, this is the team status check for the current month (April 2013). We didn't finish all proposed changes for 0.5.7 as a release, but we have made enough progress to be able to make a new release. So I have high hopes for this month :-)

If you can help out with the game in April, please drop a reply in this thread. Thanks.
The main goals will be defined in a different thread.

I'll be active in April.
dezGusty

10

General / SumWars Team Status Check March 2013

« on: March 03, 2013, 10:39:21 PM »

Hello everyone,

sorry for being late with the announcement. But following the idea "better late than never", here it is.

For shorter development cycles, we should see who can help out with the game each month. Seeing who can participate in the development in each month would help us set some more realistic goals :-).
If you can help out with the game in March, please drop a reply in this thread. Thanks.

I'll be active in March.
dezGusty

11

General / Development tasks for february 2013

« on: February 01, 2013, 06:27:24 PM »

Hello, the team that applied for february is as follows:
- dezGusty
- Pappe
- Psycho
- fusion44
- Dratz-_C
- turan

The development tasks that were discussed so far, and which I would like us to focus on are:
- UI refresh (start integrating a new skin: http://sumwars.org/forum/index.php?topic=438.0)
---> assigned to: dezGusty, Pappe

- minimap rework (http://sumwars.org/forum/index.php?topic=387.msg3086#msg3086)
---> task reactivated by turan

- testing, building: highly important for the material-system-056 branch (which should be renamed anyway), as we still have no merge of GPU based shadows into the default branch.
---> assigned to: fusion, Dratz, Psyhco.

(if you have anything else you would like to contribute, feel free to let us know) 

12

General / SumWars Team Status Check February 2013

« on: January 26, 2013, 12:24:15 AM »

Hello everyone,

For shorter development cycles, we should see who can help out with the game in February. This doesn't necessarily mean that we need to make a release each month. But action items should be defined within the confines of the calendar month.
Seeing who can participate in the development in february would help us set some more realistic goals :-).

I'll be active in february.
dezGusty

13

General / SumWars Team Status Check 2013

« on: January 26, 2013, 12:22:22 AM »

Hello,

this is a simple thread meant to check who thinks they can help out with the game during this year. So, for long term goals.

I'll add myself to the list :-)

14

General / Some fixes to the build process

« on: January 18, 2013, 04:46:57 PM »

Hello sumwars developers. As I was trying out to synchronize my development environment with fusion's, I noticed 2 things that have been bugging me for some time now:

(For the time being, all items are currently modified only on the [material-system-056] branch... I know, we should have a separate branch for the configuration changes. I will set-up one and perform the merge after I finish the tests.). For anyone willing to test the changes in advance, look on the [material-system-056] branch.

1. ogre boost dependency.
When building Ogre, as a thread lib provider, I use boost; fusion uses poco, others may prefer tbb. However, boost is still linked when building the sumwars project, even if you don't need it. I managed to get the configured dependency from Ogre and limit the linking to the scenario in which you actually need the boost libraries.
In addition to this, as a side-note: 2 more boost dependencies have been added for compliance with Ogre's dependencies with boost 1_50+.
Additional details here: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=70475&hilit=boost

So, I will add 1 new file in the configuration: [DetermineOgreThreadProvider.cmake] and update [FindBoostOGRE.cmake]

2. vorbisfile dependency.
I went over the issue with the vorbisfile dependency again, and I still seem to need it on my machine.

And I can't understand how it works on other configurations, especially since we have in the code for [ogg.cpp] :

Code: [Select]

if((result = ov_open(oggFile, &oggStream, NULL, 0)) < 0)but ov_open is defined in [libvorbis\include\vorbis\vorbisfile.h] which seems to end up in libvorbisfile.lib (or libvorbisfile_static.lib).

I'll update the FindVorbis.cmake file and the dependency to take the static library as a first option

Cheers,
dezGusty

15

Graphics / UI refresh

« on: January 06, 2013, 01:33:47 PM »

Hi Jorge,

I know you had some plans to update the Summoning Wars GUI before things got... quieter. Are you still interested in updating the UI?
I can help this time, as I played around with CEGUI in the mean time. Maybe you've seen one of my works (http://www.cegui.org.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6006).

I would like to create a new theme taking design elements from the current Summoning Wars theme, some from the GlossySerpent theme, changing others to make it more consistent and releasing it to the world for use (and also using it in Summoning Wars).
Are you interested ? You can PM me, reply in this thread, etc.

See you around
dezGusty