I know this is a much overdue post seeing as how my last post as was 7 months ago. Back then I had ambition with Werewolf and was working on getting some of it up and running. I was also busy with Neloid - which still sits waiting eagerly for my attention. Shortly after that post I heard from the new owners of Ryzom that they wanted to open source and 2 months later we worked together to release Ryzom in total. They released all of the source code for the servers, clients, tools, etc and all of the visual media but only a taste of the leveldesign data - enough to get you started and show you the basics of the system. Needless to say I've been very busy with Ryzom Core. We had a very great and very talented student through Google Summer of Code 2010 courtesy of the WorldForge project.
Ports and Tools
In 7 months some pretty exciting progress has been made. While I was still just a NeL coder we were pretty close to OSX support but it was kludged together using MacPorts stuff and X11. Far from native but more or less working. We also were limited to using Windows/MFC for graphics in a viewport. Todat we have a fully functioning, approved official Ryzom client running on Linux and a native OSX client that we have been using in the community as well as pending approval for use with the official Ryzom game. Through Dzmitry's GSoC object, which was to convert the legacy Object Viewer tool to Qt and ensure that it was cross-platform we have improved the accessibility of Ryzom and created a re-usable way to place NeL in a Qt widget. This has lead to another project by aquiles to convert Georges Editor to Qt where he has begun converting the core functionality of the existing MFC (Windows-only) tool as well as adding a number of usability improvements. For example when you have a sheet open with a shape it will open a mini Object Viewer to display that 3D shape if it can find it in your path.
Building Game Data and the Database
Kaetemi has truly rocked the house with his work on the replacement build_gamedata pipeline. This crucial piece of the puzzle has been broken and unused for as long as I can recall. The original form was an absurd combination of MS batch scripts, Cygwin shell scripts and Cygwin tools. The new tool is very flexible and written entirely in Python. With the exception of the export portion of the tool (which presently relies fully on 3DSMAX to export data out of the .max database) the tool could theoretically run anywhere. Just writing the code to do the job wasn't the full story. Kaetemi also worked through the full asset database to produce a list of items that were missing an needed for the tool to run correctly as well as identified files that needed to be fixed and how to fix them. This happens because much of this data was created as long ago as 2002 and in a much older version of MAX and older variants of the NeL Export plugin. He has been able to demonstrate that the tool does exactly what it is supposed to. Much work still has to go into finding the missing sheets that cause the client to not run. Tthere are families of sheets that aren't necessary for the newbieland continent but the client expects them to exist. We've been working to identify these and create placeholders in the leveldesign data.
Tutorials
There's still a lot of knowledge to work through but it's encouraging how much work we've done so far and how many great example wiki tutorials our community has produced. One of the most popular and interesting ones is the one by aquiles on Adding Creatures . The sneaky fellow put together a great wiki article while I've been dragging my feet putting together my notes on my creation creation video series I want to create. His is brief and to the point but gets you cleanly from having just yubos walking around to having armas walking around too. I plan on describing a little more in the creation sheet creation process. I'll describe proper naming form (which is optional) as well as the various "layers" of parent forms and why they exist the way they do. I'll also try and cover some of the important values you can change on the sheet with a demonstration of creating a different type of creature using Georges Editor, rebuilding the sheets and then placing them into the world using a new spawning area. For the impatient his tutorials get the job done though!
Patch Merging
Finally Kervala has been hard at work merging Ryzom patches. This is going to take quite awhile so please be patient while the builds float in and out of cleanliness. Don't worry, I sent him to You Broke The Build just for giggles. We've been getting the nightly builds working cleanly. We still struggle with one of the virtual machines that takes 200+ minutes to build the full Ryzom Core platform but I do have one that does it handily. Hopefully I can start doing continuous builds so that people can track the progress. What builds are presently working are available through our CDash Dashboard . If you have a machine that you don't mind churning on builds at midnight and throughout the day we would greatly appreciate some variety in our builds. We really need a reliable Windows machine for builds!