I was asked recently about the priorities of the engine department, so here they are as of Feb 2015.

The highest priority is to identify causes of crashes and correct them...also the hardest to work on as crashes are often caused by state changes that we cannot capture or reproduce. The client "breakpad" crash reporting system will help immensely!

The projects that are currently in work :

-- NPCClient stabilization. (in progress, Jilare)
-- Crafting system rewrite (in progress, Eredin)
-- Character customization with supporting GM and script commands (in progress, Eredin)
-- Mail System (on hold, Natoka )
-- Evaluate Greatshift for features to roll into PS official client (with Neeno)


Projects that are awaiting work, in rough priority order :

-- PS#6606 - GM Notes Facility
-- Scriptable entities
-- Refactor mechanisms to properly persist/share state information.
-- refactor character change capabilities to 3 layers : in-memory,persistent,base.
-- allow GMs to set "lockpickable"
-- MiniGame reset button
-- make guild chat tab appear automatically when a new member joins, or a guild is created
-- NPC ability to make key copies
-- need periodic events table and poller process (adapt from npcclient??)
-- Develop 2D drawing and graphics widget
-- Dynamic loading of special locations, character creation data, quests, rpg rules, scripts and etc at runtime
-- Enhance the current Artificial Intelligence of the Tribes and single NPCs controlled by the server
-- House building
-- Dynamic Economy
-- Autogenerated dungeons
-- Special volumetric areas to define different rules of motion, skills and animations. (example - water/swimming)
-- UI to view and edit the parameters and placement of items, NPCs, locations, natural resources, etc

IF you are interested in working on any of these then don't worry about the priority order. Just let me know and we'll work it out.

I do hope my long posts didn't kill this topic. 

1. Switch to SVN to git.

The biggest question is, given the size of our team, would we get enough benefit to make it worth the time and effort to convert ?

With our current approach each dev/prospect/contributor essentially takes an informal branch to build their local environment then the changes are merged back in manually by the reviewing dev. I'm not sure how formal branching would change things and my experiences with anything other than manual merges have been disastrous.

One final consideration, admittedly minor : we get a lot more project starts than completions. If we did a formal branch for each project we'd have a great many dead branches. I guess that's not really an issue for any source control system. It just feels untidy to me.

2. Separate repositories for client / server applications, libraries (like Cal3D), game content (restricted?), website, related projects (dev tools, default skins, etc.) - the smaller, the better.

Considering the high degree of sharing betweent the client, server and npcserver...how would we accomplish this without creating more work for ourselves?

Something I neglected to mention in my last post is that we do have seperate repositories for art, content, GM console, dev console, and other assets that are not open.

As for the libraries we depend on I think I addressed that in last post, but yes, what eonwind said:

Remember we're a little team and there's no way we can maintain forks of CS, we have PS devs with commit accesses in the CS repository and that's all we need right now.

3. Issue tracker, integrated with code repositories.

This would be very nice. I have begun referring to the flyspray issue number associated with the bug in commit notes. It's a poor substitute. Do you know of anything that integrates with SVN ? Better yet, would you be interested in investigating the possibility of tying our current bug track to our current sourc control system?

4. Unit tests, at least for some code parts.

This could be very helpful in detecting and preventing new bugs as well as driving stability into the code base. It is also an area in which I am very weak. If you would like to help us implement this, please, please, please apply as a prospect. I will be overjoyed to enable your work on it.

5. Automatic build system for main development platforms (simplifies testing).

(addressed in my last post)



So of the 5 issues: agree and already moving on 1, agree and open to help on 2 others, lack resources and recognition of benefits on the final 2. Hey, we agree on 3/5, that's a winning score!

It's not as good as the first writeup I did (and lost) but I think that's a pretty thorough basis for further conversation. Thoughts?

Aha! I had only a small part of the idea.

My final sentence of the last post was intended to apply to the code-object, not its impact to the game or RP. Sorry if I was unclear. In terms of RP this is a fabulous idea and I would love to see it in game!

Now lets talk purely at an abstract code-object level. I'm going to describe my current understanding of your idea and you can tell me how far off I am until we're at the same point. Then I'm going to put those results in a feature request and kick it about within the dev team.

    The player would define a starting state, a series of "triggers" -- actually let's call them "qualifiers"-- controlling a custom menu of "actions" that may be taken on the object.
    Qualifiers could check attributes, skills, possession of an item, or internal counters.
    Each action could execute one or more commands, for example /shout, /say, or /tell to the person who acted on it, or update its description or internal counters.
    All descriptions and internal counters would be shared to all clients within range as well as persist.

How's that so far?

Three times I have started to post a reply to this describing our internal processes and movement toward anew agile-like methodology . The replies have been long and detailed and I have gotten pulled away and lost the post. I'll try to put my reply in here in smaller chunks in the next few days.

Have you already tried a fresh install? When I ran into a similar problem that allowed me to work around it.

Here's a little screen recording showing the new Active Effects bar, with icons for all the items, maintaining its shape when a new effect begins (Thanks Shkirr), and showing the timer with warning and danger level colors, and flashing. (note the flashing irregularity is a recording artefact you won't see in game) :

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j6i0zaa5o50kj7l/AETimers-20141015.ogv?dl=0

Here's the tooltip over an Active Effect, showing the countdown :

https://www.dropbox.com/s/991mbff35hxc2k9/AETooltipTimer-20141015.ogv?dl=0


Here's the Info window updated to have warn, danger and flash settings for HP and Mana :

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ph0avvkjq4za0ix/InfoHPandMana-20141015.ogv?dl=0

Thank you, Pierre, for the unexpected apology.