Guild of Writers

Well, maybe not IN the shell, but near it - better have it visible through its entrance. :9

My current exterior visregion (which may become unnecessary, should global ones be added), extends a little outside the shell, into the street, at least and I hope this encroachment doesn't offend anybody. :)
(It is also perfectly trianglular in shape, to make it as simple as possible - I'd wager a guess that all the various regions for every shell and every street, is going to add their own collison/containment detection overhead.)
I don't know about others, but I mean to have a severly detail-reduced version of the exterior parts of my shell, for viewing from the tower, or neighbouring shells with tall structures (placed in the shell's statics page...

(Hmm, just remembered another thing, should we get visregions as part of the standard city layout: I couldn't do cross-page references to my visregions, when I first started fiddling with them, so I wound up duplicating the SV:s: one copy on shell's normal page and one on the statics page. Has others succeeded where I failed? Hmm, maybe it was because I used the shell-page-number-plus-1000 convention and maybe then it would have worked, had I only not had the pages spill onto different sequence prefixes?)

The issues with cross-page references are probably something that I hacked around manually in my contrib. I remember fixing them, and fixing them again for specific reference types, and I think I also fixed them again for python references... >.>

I finished the renumbering, decompiling and recompiling of Ahra Pahts. I also added a new SDL variable, usePaging, which is set to 1 by default. You can download the latest version here:

• AhraPahts08I.zip (47.3 MB)

Caveats:
- I was unable to recompile the city page, since it seems to have references to a missing object. I tried removing the references, and that made it recompile - but it made URU crash.
- When usePaging is set to 0, there is a very long pause after the loading bar disappears and the scene appears - 3-5 minutes. Memory usage will climb above 1 GB. And yes - it is laggy in parts (which can be helped by adding vis regions as discussed above). But there are no more paging lags, and going to/from Prin Pahts is quick!
- If you do change the usePaging SDL variable to 0, be sure to delete your Pahts*.sav file before running URU again.

I will work on a renumbering script for the shell developers to use on their Blender files, and I'll send them a PM in a couple days.

Let me know whether anyone experiences any problems with this.

I guess I'll get to working on it eventually. When I can actually test what I do again.

I'd gotten the new hard drive working, set up as my home drive, got everything in, upgrade wine, and boom. Black screen when I run UruCC.

So yet again the attempt to get a working environment where I can play and test is just not happening. I'll get there. It may kill something, or someone (or me), but I'll make this wretched machine do what I want it to....

Katreeny

Hope you can figure out what's going on, katreeny. Good luck!

As many of you know, I've just finished sending a boatload of PMs notifying all the shell owners that need to change their page numbers, giving them a script to help in this process. I also sent a message to people who have not finished their shells to see if they'd either like to contribute what they've done so far to a new release, or to allow other people to have their shells if they no longer want to participate in the project.

I'll give people until 31 October 2010 to read their PMs about their shells. If they haven't read them (i.e. they are still sitting in my outbox) on 1 November, I'll free up their shells for the community. Hopefully 6+ months is enough time to check your PM.

Do you have a general sense of when the next update might happen? My shell is definitely not in a presentable state yet, but I might be able to get something together (unless the releases are in fact dependent on shell completion).

Well, actually, my shell would have an even higher chance of getting out right before the next update in that case.

D'nial wrote:Well, actually, my shell would have an even higher chance of getting out right before the next update in that case.

I race You there

Actually, a release schedule might be good for getting people motivated (myself included).

Shall we aim to have a release (with wavesets! ) by the end of August? That gives people a chance to submit whatever they've got just before school starts back up.

Shells expire in November, so perhaps another release at the beginning of January (after the Christmas break) would be good?

Paradox wrote:
Actually, a release schedule might be good for getting people motivated (myself included).

I second this.

On the other hand:

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

Paradox wrote:Actually, a release schedule might be good for getting people motivated (myself included).

Actually I already have a deadline for v1; it's january 2008!
hmm..

Paradox wrote:Shall we aim to have a release (with wavesets! ) by the end of August? That gives people a chance to submit whatever they've got just before school starts back up.
Shells expire in November, so perhaps another release at the beginning of January (after the Christmas break) would be good?

As far as I am concerned I stopped believing long ago that deadlines could be set for personnal projects, especially when several people are involved. However I do believe in the help of the all-mighty todo lists.. Getting to know exactly what's left to be done, and writing it in a public place, is a good way to move forward and motivate oneself. (So that people can point fingers at you and throw stones at you -- at least it works pretty well for me ).
Also on such a large project it's almost mandatory to have some form of project/assets management tracking. I've had a number of those on paper for AP over the years. (paper, I know; somehow I tend to work on AP a lot when I'm travelling and I didn't always have a laptop). Maybe it would be time to gather those and get them online..

Would it be useful if I put something together on the Wiki?

Deadlines only tend to really work when there's something at the end of it (which is why the RAD contest worked so well). Right now if Cyan told us "we'll start integrating fan Ages in MOULa by [insert date]" I'd put all my other Ages and Huru works on hold and work all nights long on AP..
That being said it doesn't hurt to aim for some form of date.. And several of us will indeed have more free time in the summer..

Corvus wrote:I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

I will totally nod in agreement to this.