As far as performance and compatibility goes, keep in mind two things:

1) As far as compatibility goes, the first cards to support shader model 1.1 (not sure about OpenGL equivalent) were the Radeon 8500 and the GeForce 3 (non-MX version). These days it is much less likely for someone to NOT have shading capabilities in their cards (in general - maybe the planeshift population happens to have lower end systems?). And you can always use a non-shading backup. Doesn't CS have an "effect" model now that allows you to define an effect, with backup methods where the preferred method is incompatible (or if the user has a setting to turn it off), and apply them to maps? It's been so long since I've had a look at the code. I'm guessing you'd actually want to target shader model 2 or greater (Any directx 9 card or OpenGL 1.5 I think).

2) As far as performance goes, not all shaders are designed for glowy/shiny/bumpy effects that you can see. Some shaders actually improve performance by taking some load off the CPU. There are three main areas I could see shaders being used to improve performance in planeshift without any real visible change: character animation, the terrain engine (maybe - it's pretty good already), and animated ground clutter (grass, trees, etc..). But, of course some of these things would need to have support in CS first, if they don't already. I think Cal3D at least has hardware skinning support doesn't it?

I think your base stats should be handled separately and differently from skills. To me it doesn\'t really make sense that trainers can train intelligence, for example, and also that those stats can\'t be increased through practical experience.

OK so here\'s how I think it should work:
Base stats should increase based on what you do in the world and as a result of various quests as well. Doing some things might increase multiple stats. In essence, these base stats become skills that are completely practical knowledge (don\'t need practice points), but should take longer to practice per level than other skills. Behind the scenes the base stat progress would use floating point system so that there is flexibility in awarding \"practice points\" for base stats. For example, you might award  0.14 practice points to strength out of 100 for each hit in order to level up strength. So here is a breakdown of some ideas:

Intelligence, Charisma, and Will: These attributes could be increased primarily through spell casting in ways that focus on one or more of those base stats. In addition, there could be things setup in world like books in the library that you could \"read\" to increase those stats. In addition, increasing these stats could be a quest reward. For example, perhaps a priest wants you to look up something in the library. Doing this quest would give you intelligence practice. In addition, resisting certain spells could also give you practice in these stats and also when using trade-skills that require them, such as alchemy.

Strength, Agility, Endurance: These attributes could be increased primarily through fighting. Strength would get practice whenever you hit an opponent, and the amount of practice would be based on how heavy your weapon is and the type of damage you do. A lighter weapon would train strength less than a heavier one. You would also get a small amount of agility practice each time you hit an enemy (more for a lighter weapon than for a heavier one), and more agility practice whenever you dodge a blow. Endurance, however, would get practice points whenever you are hit by an enemy and the amount of practice depends on the amount of damage and the type of damage. You would also get practice in these stats while using trade-skills that require them, like armor construction.


-Jeremy

There should be a spell cooloff time in addition to the casting time so you can play around with spells that might be too powerful to have a slow casting time but not useful with a long casting time. Touch spells especially would benefit from this, because they could have a very low casting time, but a larger cooloff time. This would make them usefull but not overpowerful.

This suggestion is also posted on the bugtracker here:
http://planeshift.oodlz.com/bugtracker/bug.php?op=show&bugid=843&pos=0

hehe I\'ve posted this error before but I guess noone seems to care about an error that only occurs on mac builds. I\'m surprised dyfrer or chaos haven\'t complained about it and had someone commit a fix, it\'s really just a very simple error:

The error is on src/updater/updaterconfig.cpp:392

It should be changed to:
#ifdef CS_PLATFORM_WIN32
        modules.Push(\"win32\");
#elif defined(CS_PLATFORM_MACOSX)
        modules.Push(\"macosx\");
#else
        modules.Push(\"other_os\");
#endif

since CS_PLATFORM_MACOSX is simply defined, it is a blank macro and not a boolean value.

Speaking of which, it might be good to have a client built in 10.3 with newer tools. Ideally though it should be built on Tiger with 10.3 as the target OS, although I wouldn\'t recommend it for a couple of point releases as the early adopters find bugs.


Oh, and apparently Tiger support is a bit of an issue with a lot of games/api\'s so unfortunately you can\'t just assume things will work.

I had to remove the checks for libtoolize in the autogen.sh script. I used the fink autoconf/aclocal/libtoolize/etc.. tools and they work fine. The script just doesn\'t recognize the version for some reason (fink\'s is 1.5.something and the script checks for 1.4*|1.5* but it still doesn\'t recognize it). Everything works fine after that.

Requirements:
1) XCode 1.5  and gcc update (available at developer.apple.com)
2) Fink installed (fink.sf.net, follow all the install instructions for self update etc..)
3) of course, latest CVS of CrystalSpace, cal3d, cel, and planeshift
4) Jam. You can get it here: http://public.perforce.com/public/jam/jam-2.5.tar     Build and install it wherever you like.
5) MySQL (you can download it at http://www.mysql.com/)
6) The following fink packages:
autoconf2.5
autogen
autogen-shlibs
autogen-dev
automake1.8
freetype2
freetype2-dev
freetype2-shlibs
libiconv
libiconv-dev
libiconv-shlibs
libjpeg-bin
libjpeg-shlibs
libjpeg-dev
libogg
libogg-shlibs
libpng3
libpng3-shlibs
libtool14
libtool14-shlibs
libvorbis0
libvorbis0-shlibs
m4

OK, you\'re ready. Make sure your fink paths  are setup correctly (read the website for info on how to do that. Should do it automatically when you install fink).

Steps:
1) Build and install cal3d
you needed updated autotools in order to get cal3d\'s autogen.sh to run. You may, in addition, need to remove the section in autogen.sh relating to checking for libtool. It should be close to the top. It didn\'t seem to detect my libtoolize version correctly, but it worked.

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-debug
make
sudo make install

2) Build CrystalSpace

Ok, first run:
export CRYSTAL=${PWD}
./configure --enable-debug --enable-new-renderer --without-python

and check to see if all the required libs are detected. Also in certain cases where it checks if a library is sufficiently recent, check if it says \"yes\". The libs you want to be concerned with are libjpeg, libpng, freetype2, cal3d, libogg, and libvorbis.
You might have a problem with freetype2, because there is an older version of freetype2 installed in /usr/X11R6 that gets detected before the fink one. I\'m sure there is a better way, but I just renamed /usr/X11R6 temporarily.

build CS like so:
jam libs; jam plugins; jam cs-config
You might also want to jam walktest and run it to see if everything is working ok.

3) Build CEL
pretty straightforward:
cd ../cel
export CEL=${PWD}
export CSCONFPATH=${PWD}
./configure --enable-debug --enable-new-renderer --without-python
jam

Should build without incident.

4) Build Planeshift
cd ../planeshift
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-debug --enable-new-renderer

Now, open Jamconfig and look for the line that says CURL.LFLAGS. If this line has -arch i686 or whatever, take that out of the line and save Jamconfig. Then:

jam

Now, as of this writing, there are a couple of errors that you\'ll see in updater. Take a look at the files that are not compiling, go to the lines the errors are on and you should see #elif CS_PLATFORM_MACOSX, change all these to #elif defined(CS_PLATFORM_MACOSX). I submitted a patch to the list but it hasn\'t been committed yet. run jam again and you should have a working client, server, and updater.

5) Download the art files
if you managed to build the updater, you should be able to run it by typing:
./updater.app/Contents/MacOS/updater

It should run and a window will pop up. Click \"update\", or if the button isn\'t exactly visible, it\'s the second button at the bottom. This will download all the art files, etc.. It will also download over your client  and updater with older versions. Once it\'s done, you\'ll need to delete the psclient.app and updater.app that it downloaded and rebuild those.

6) Run the client
Once you\'ve done that, you can run the client by typing:
./psclient.app/Contents/MacOS/psclient