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Re: a new hope
posted by
Anonymous
@ 217.215.85.107
on Oct 1 2004 8:08 AM
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| ooh, one thing you could do is to have a doc on your page or whatever that tells me in what order the depends should be built, cos it isent so easy as to just build them one by one.
-please dont flame me if you allready have such a document i havent gone through _ALL_ your docs, but make it more visible so it gives ppl who arent worldforge acitve a good overview. please |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 152.78.65.251
on Oct 25 2004 9:57 AM
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I have added a paragraph to the cyphesis homepage which lists the WorldForge libraries that
it requires, and the order in which they should be built. I hope this gives you the information you need. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
grumbel
@ 83.135.69.101
on Oct 26 2004 3:13 AM
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| You can just link all the libs statically or include them in a binary release and change the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, there shouldn't be any problem with that. The only thing that might give you throuble are glibc incompatibilites, but even them are managable with a bit of extra work.
The thing Worldforge realy needs is some better release management, currently its EXTREMLY difficult to find out what the project is all about and what of it is actually playable and what not, getting it downloaded, build and up and running is then of course still a huge issue.
For example what happened with UClient? It already had a bunch of very nice Iso-gfx some years back, however I havn't heard much of it lately and now most of worldforge seems to go 3d (which looks far worse then the iso-gfx by the way).
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 152.78.65.251
on Oct 26 2004 10:50 AM
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| Whether you think isometric looks better than 3D is very much a personal choice. Many people would prefer 3D over even the very best isometric sprites. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
grumbel
@ 83.135.83.175
on Oct 29 2004 5:05 AM
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| It depends, good 3D can often look better than average 2D. However currently Worldforge has very good 2d and not much good 3d, the 3d screenshots look all rather awfull (standard boring heightmap + a few characters standanding around).
And lets not forget that one could also go mixed mode, ie. 2d iso-tiles + 3d characters, which could combine best of both and would remove the need for tons of 3d sprites and the pain of rendering them.
Overall I think Worldforge is aiming a bit to high or not aiming much at all. After all those years of development there is still nothing that is really ready to play even so the artwork and code is pretty much already there, just the glue is missing to connect it all together.
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 81.6.249.1
on Oct 29 2004 6:51 PM
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Unfortunatly we no longer have the 2D graphics you describe, as we do not have the artists permission to use this artwork with any further development.
Aside from the aesthetic issues, using full 3D graphics is much more powerful. Handling
customisable character appearance including clothes and equipment in 2D becomes an enormous
burden on artists and the size of the data required, but can be relatively simply handled in 3D. Once we have working tools we have found that people with only moderate artistic talent can produce reasonable looking 3D models. Providing the user with a reasonable interface to interact with the a simulated 3D world is far more practical in 3D than it is in 2D.
On the question of whether what we are trying to do is too complex, or too simple I will say this. I have no interest at all in implementing something significantly simpler than systems that are already available. I some of our areas currently seem too simple then those are probably the areas we
are not working on at the moment. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
grumbel
@ 83.135.73.61
on Oct 30 2004 3:31 PM
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| ### Unfortunatly we no longer have the 2D graphics you describe, as we do not have the artists permission to use this artwork with any further development.
Hu? Now I am really confused. Weren't they all released under GFDL at the time acorn was released? So all work on UClient and graphics gets flushed down the toilet for no good reason?
### Aside from the aesthetic issues, using full 3D graphics is much more powerful.
I know, thats why I suggested a mixed mode 2d buildings + 3d characters.
### On the question of whether what we are trying to do is too complex, or too simple I will say this. I have no interest at all in implementing something significantly simpler than systems that are already available.
Sure you can do whatever you want, but I as a gamer would certainly welcome it when there would be at least something playable released once in a while, you could always start simple and move onto something more complicated while people are busy with the simple thing.
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 81.6.249.1
on Oct 31 2004 4:30 AM
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There was a failure of communication between members of the team that meant the artwork was released without the artist's informed consent. Licensing of a work under a free license is invalid if it turns out that the owner of the work has not granted that license. Since then we have improved our procedures to ensure that all contributors understand and agree to the terms under which we wish to distribute our work.
When we created Acorn, we hoped that it would be exactly the simple playable release that you describe, but it turned out most people weren't interested in playing it. Whether this is because they wanted to play a combat oriented game, or whether we got something wrong with the mechanics is not clear. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
grumbel
@ 83.135.89.19
on Nov 1 2004 3:58 PM
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| Did now some research on what happened to the 2D tiles, see:
Looks like politics destroyed the by far most promising part of Worldforge.
### When we created Acorn...
The time Acorn was released I had hell of a lot of throuble finding servers for playing, compiling and getting it run in the first place was not throubleless either. And even running it on localhost resulted in extremly choppy gameplay, so it was really unplayable for me in the end, probally for a lot of other people too. There also was a lack of new releases, so those people who didn't saw it on the first release, won't ever noticed it at all, since Worldforge page itself isn't much easy to find through either.
And well, in the end there is also this "What the f*** is Worldforge all about question?" that might be floating around in peoples minds and makes it quite hard to figure out what of all of it is actually 'end-user ready'.
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Re: a new hope
posted by
Anonymous
@ 216.49.228.4
on Nov 22 2004 8:29 AM
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| Wow, now that's just plain wrong.
It's impossible for the author to take the GFDL off of art that I downloaded back when the GFDL still applied. Anyone who downloaded GFDL artwork from that project can still use and apply it as if it still has the GFDL intact (because it does). Open source licenses by their nature do not allow this to happen. After all, why I would I want to invest a significant amount of my time/business into a software if the developer can get pissy and take it away? Can you imagine if someone who contributed major portions of the Linux kernel could do this?
Besides that, even if it were possible it certainly isn't fair or the right thing to do. That Uta Szymanek person is a real pathetic peice of s$#@$.
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Re: a new hope
posted by
trick
@ 80.203.57.187
on Nov 22 2004 9:40 AM
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If the author him/herself put the artwork under the GFDL he/she can't revoke it. That would be like if someone released some program under the GPL, and a year later changed the license and told everyone they couldn't use it anymore. It just doesn't work that way. If you give something to someone as a present, you can't come later and expect them to give it back just because you don't like them anymore. Of course, using something without their permission, no matter how legal it is, creates bad blood, and you might not want that.
If, however, someone else put the artwork under the GFDL without the author's permission or knowledge, it can be revoked, because it was never valid in the first place. If you buy and pay for something from a thief, that doesn't change the fact that it's stolen goods.
(I don't know which applies to the Worldforge situation) |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 152.78.65.251
on Nov 22 2004 2:14 PM
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The artitst did not know the terms of the license we were using for the release, so had not given permission for the artwork to be released under those terms. In effect the material had never really been released under those terms, but the author decided not to try and withdraw the files, and instead to permit their use only in Acorn. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
Anonymous
@ 216.49.228.4
on Dec 21 2004 7:11 AM
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| That sounds extremely dubious to me, and I doubt the author has a legal leg to stand on. But in the end I guess it's probably not worth fighting over... still, I hate to see petty bastards win. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
Anonymous
@ 88.96.94.193
on May 10 2006 5:33 AM
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No legitimate open license ever justifies copyright violation, and no legitimate license creator, or free software organisation would defend the right of people to "use the small print to retain unlicensed copyright works".
As a matter of fact, open licenses are the absolute stanchion of people's right to stipulate *exactly* the terms under which they release their copyright materials, and they protect that right firmly. Open licenses are the friend of legitimate copyright-holders, just as software patents are their enemy.
Even the suggestion that an open license should be used to do such a morally wrong thing is damaging to licenses, developers, artists and supporters of Free Software everywhere.
If people adhere to the license they agreed to, then they haven't done anything wrong, but if the copyright-holder did not give permission for the release of said materials at the time they were released, then the license can absolutely be considered invalid.
FYI, even the GPL gives the copyright-holder the right to deny or withdraw the opportunity to enjoy licensing under the term
s of the GPL if there's wrongdoing. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 152.78.65.251
on Oct 26 2004 10:59 AM
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Providing a downloadable binary of cyphesis is far more complex that just static linking, and putting it in a tarball. Embedded python doesn't work with static binaries - it needs symbols to be dynamically exported for binary python modules. Its also necessary that the exact same version of Python is
available on the target system as cyphesis was built against, or the python lib directory won't be found
and won't be compatibie. Cyphesis also needs to be able connect to a PostgreSQL database which
is the right version.
I try to make rpm pacakges available for all our software, and our debian maintainer does debs when he has time. Would a sincere attempt at creating a stand-alone binary package be of real use to anyone? It could include all the necessary Python code, but would still require the database to be set up.
Let me know your thoughts. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
trick
@ 80.203.57.187
on Nov 22 2004 9:57 AM
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Static linking isn't all that great anyway. See "Static Linking Considered Harmful". Sometimes it may still be the best option, but you should at least be aware of the issues.
For a game I'm the Linux porter of, I solved the problem of offering system-independent executables without dependencies by linking dynamically and including the required dynamic libs in the game's installer. The game itself (and all its dependencies) are built in a chroot environment with only the things it needs to build, with arch optimizations for the least arch I want it to support. Users are free to replace the included libs with their own versions if they want to.
This method works great. In over a year I've not received a single system-incompability bug report. |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
Anonymous
@ 218.76.46.158
on Jan 28 2005 5:47 AM
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| Help me!! When I run the game cyphesis,it print errors:
ERROR: Database connection failed
CRITICAL: Critical error opening databases. Init failed.
INFO: Unable to connect to the RDBMS.
INFO: Please ensure that the RDBMS is running, the cyphesis database exists andis accessible to the user running cyphesis.
What can I do for it ?? |
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Re: a new hope
posted by
alriddoch
@ 81.6.249.1
on Jan 30 2005 8:02 AM
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| The README file included provides details of the steps required to get PostgreSQL set up so that
you can run a server. Try following the steps described in the README files, and if you have problems
contact me using the email address in the AUTHORS file. |
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MMORPG server for the WorldForge project with embedded AI.
