News

The Open Build Service is a pretty awesome service which allow for (fairly) easy setup of automatic builds of packages on most major Linux distributions. We’re currently using it to automate builds of all Worldforge components on OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. Our own little space can be found here. Check out the current status of the builds here. Apart from creating RPM and DEB packages there’s also support for AppImage, which is an executable format for Linux.

There’s been a couple of changes to Ember lately. I’ll try to summarize them here * The biggest one is that we now use OpenGL 3 and later. Previously we used OpenGL 2. The main reason is that OpenGL 3 has a couple of features that we really benefit from, especially when it comes to instancing techniques. Support for this version should also be solid, with all modern GPUs providing compatible drivers.

Worldforge has for quite some time used IRC for official chat. However, since a couple of years the usefulness have been steadily declined. One of the main disadvantages or the IRC system is that there’s no easy way to keep offline conversations going. If you’re not logged in you will simply miss out on questions asked and answers given. Given the global nature of the Worldforge project, with users in different time zones, this makes most conversations fruitless.

Atlas-C++ version 0.6.4 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site. Atlas-C++ is the standard implementation of the WorldForge Atlas protocol. This release is primarily aimed at developers and users who want to build the WorldForge system for themselves. Major changes in this version: Removal of deprecated C++ “throws” feature which broke build on GCC 7 Addition of a debug output Atlas bridge Source code can be downloaded from the following locations:

Recently I’ve done some work on adding proper path finding to Cyphesis. This is something we (surprisingly enough one might think) have been lacking for so many years. The work isn’t done yet, but here’s a short demonstration of the work in progress.

I’ve just pushed some changes to the Ember client which makes it conform to the XDG Basedir spec. The main difference is that the ~/.ember directory isn’t used anymore. Instead configuration files are put in ~/.config/ember while data files are put in ~/.local/share/ember. During startup the contents of ~/.ember will be migrated, and a backup will be made in ~/.emberlegacy. Many thanks to Olek Wojnar for making the bulk of the changes.

I just pushed a rather large changeset to the Cyphesis server which redesigns the mind code so that all AI code now is handled by one or many processes separate from the server. This is a big change to how the Cyphesis server works. Previously all world simulation and mind code was handled by the one Cyphesis executable, in one single threaded process. Now the server instead only focuses on world simulation and various house keeping tasks, while separate processes handle all AI code.

We’ve now merged the work Yaroslav Taben did last summer on a new entity filtering system. For a lack of better name we’re calling it the Entity Query Language. Why is this needed? A lot of the AI code in Cyphesis deals with selecting and acting on entities. Consider a “Flee” goal for example. This should be used by weak creatures to flee from dangerous creatures. As soon as a dangerous creature comes within range the creature to which the goal belongs to should turn tail and elope.

During the summer three students have worked on Worldforge as part of Google Summer of Code. With this year’s program now coming to a close we would like to highlight these three students and the work they’ve done. Céline Noël, Smartbody integration in Ember Céline has been working on integrating the Smartbody system into Ember. Smartbody is a comprehensive system for simulating human behaviour, with all of the subtle body movements that natural motion entails.

The new Worldforge site is now finally online! As you probably can see, since you’re reading this post, we now have a shiny new web site. The old one was creaking at the seams, and had been for a couple of years. The new one runs on Concrete5, a very competent CMS system. We’ll try to keep the amount of pages down, as not to incur a maintenance debt. We’ll probably also be updating the site the nearest couple of days.