Upcoming dev meeting - Alpha & more

[Cervator]

TL;DR: Dev meeting to discuss all the things on a date picked in part from this poll. Vote!

Been trying to get this scheduled for some time now, took going to New York on vacation for Xmas to be able to catch up enough to find the time to get this in

For some time now we've been very close to Alpha but still only drifting toward it slowly in our usual way, limited by being an open source project driven by volunteers with lots of other obligations. IMHO that's on me for not badgering more people more often - we can only really become stable if we have enough regulars to maintain a certain level of activity even with normal life impacting a good amount of us.

So to aid that I've been trying to push along various organization-type topics like Waffle/Trello, suggesting code bounties again, doing lots of prep for automating all the things better. I want to run that by a bunch of you just to make sure it all makes sense. I don't want to automate a bridge to nowhere

I also want to narrow down a set of topics/tasks we need sorted out to call ourselves officially in Alpha, then get some commitments lined up for the near future. We have everything we need now - just a question to put all the pieces in the right places and add a bit more polish/content. There's the existing Alpha incubator thread with some MoSCoW analysis in it, and I've been wanting to make a Trello version of that. One for Light & Shadow too as the most likely start-to-finish playable mode you can play over and over and actually have fun. TtA is too open ended to "finish" for Alpha, and Wild West World with Gooey is too new.

Time of day is our existing office hours, at 10 am & 5 pm Eastern U.S. / New York time. Here's a handy calendar link to which you can add your city / time zone to figure out what time your place it is. I'll make it to both sessions so if you can only make one that's fine. The date picked will in part reflect the more popular option above but also depend on a few specific people like @Immortius being able to make it. Speaking of, is Sydney time your time zone? Maybe daylight saving time is making the early session worse now (2 am?) vs the later session (5 pm US - 11 pm Euro - 9 am Aus). I might aim to be online at 4 to catch any early bird Europeans.

Topics in summary:

• Alpha - what's in it?
• Waffle / Trello / Code bounties - better organizing / motivating
• Distros & Launcher - how to deliver modules
• Java 8 - when should we switch? Alpha item if JRE bundling can be ready?
• Input bindings - should we pick some favored keys for certain types of bindings? Some basic choices?
• Volunteers for finishing up some content
• Pull requests and You - review and merge for fun and profit
• GSOC potential - issues and mentors
• Internationalization for engine?

Until the date we actually pick rolls around I'd be very happy to get some more feedback in the above feature threads + any volunteers to focus on some of the outstanding tasks - in particular activating the content in Light & Shadow.

Edit: Added in PRs as a topic as I meant to in the first place, reminded by us just hitting a conflict with world rendering work. I'd like to make it clear that more than just me and Immortius should be merging PRs, just after making sure we've reviewed and flagged anything needing more work or attention from somebody specific. Hopefully that can speed up completion time to merge PRs and help avoid conflicts / stale code.

 

[chessandgo]

Not really my place to comment, but the current stable version of the most commonly used java on linux (openjdk) is still at 7. JDK8 exists, but Debian (known as the stable linux distro) and all it's forks default repo(s) have 6 and 7.

 

[Cervator]

Not really my place to comment, but the current stable version of the most commonly used java on linux (openjdk) is still at 7. JDK8 exists, but Debian (known as the stable linux distro) and all it's forks default repo(s) have 6 and 7.

Totally appropriate comment and well appreciated

 

[glasz]

As far as L&S content goes, there's little to do for base content : a few models remain to be made, most of them need to be added some tools/weapons and related extra animations (that need to be specified according to gameplay, right now we have a mostly general idea of what it would be, we'll need to be very specific at some point), and exporting of course. Bonus would be a specific texture set, and @SuperSnark extra animals. The perspective of having all this implemented in game can be a serious motivation boost

 

[Cervator]

Edited in another topic - we're approach the time of year GSOC rolls around. Might as well throw in a note to check for potential mentors and try to update our related issues list

@Mike Kienenberger - ping

 

[SuperSnark]

@glasz - Once you've got the chogs, mibbles, cutters, rippiks and carnicupias ready to go - I'll be happy to make more ; ) If you'd like more ambient vs. interactive NPC fauna, let me know.

 

[msteiger]

@glasz and @SuperSnark some more ambient NPC for the WildAnimals module would be great. I'd love to integrate some in PolyWorld which plays in a tropical setting. Maybe gnus, crocodiles or giraffes?

 

[glasz]

and elephants and hyenas

 

[Cervator]

Update!

Tomorrow looks solid, with two weeks from now also decent with a couple different people available. Since we have quite a few topics and it has been a while since last I'm going to try preparing for both, with different topics. I'll aim to make both sessions on both days - the early one at 15:00 UTC, the later one at 22:00 UTC. I don't expect our Aussie friends like @Immortius to make the early session (about 2 am at night then) but the late session is "only" 11 pm Friday evening for the Europeans (9 am Sydney time Saturday) so that session might draw the greater crowd. I'll summarize and bring forward anything from the early session to the late.

We meet in #terasology on Freenode IRC. Just hit the chat tab up at the top of this site.

If you just want to make it to one session aim for January 24th at 22 UTC. I just hope to get as much out of the way on earlier sessions, based on who shows up

January 10th

Focus on planning / design:

• Waffle / Trello / Code bounties. Workable interesting approach? Me putting tiny token bounties on stuff sound good? More of a quick sign-off if it sounds OK
  
• Distros & Launcher - how do we distribute modules, especially via the launcher? Poking @msteiger & @Skaldarnar
• Input bindings and general usability tweaks. What keys should we reserve for the basics?
• Content: L&S design - what exact items do we need for the first replayable L&S? Poking @SuperSnark and @glasz
  • Thinking about making a Trello board for this (actually, two already exist)
• Volunteers for helping with content? Haven't poked @Josharias elsewhere so poke! Also sent @Skaldarnar some pointers on helping with L&S and @nh_99 is still floating around on a quest somewhere

Gives a couple weeks to then prepare a bit more for the more hard core stuff

January 24th

Focus on logic / architecture

• Alpha - what's in it? How much frameworky / architecture stuff left before we increase long-term expectations of stability for the engine? Java8? Poking @Immortius & @shartte
  • Also considering a Trello board for this, if there is interest
• Content: Gameplay logic - pathfinding, behavior trees, combat, what do we need to finish the first playable design and going forward? Poking @synopia, @Florian, and @Marcin Sciesinski
  
• Internationalization for the engine. We've made solid progress on the Launcher & CrashReporter. Poking @Halamix2, @Immortius, and @Skaldarnar
  
• GSOC submissions are close - review our proposals page and call for mentor volunteers. Poking @Mike Kienenberger
  
• Pull requests & you - guidelines for having more people help review and merge PRs to speed up things. Poking @manu3d and @Limeth for recent PR fun

 

[qreeves]

While I may or may not be able to make it, I'd like to know if anyone has any parts they want help with, especially with regard to gameplay modules (the ones focused on crafting/survival, at least). Would also be good to know if any UI improvements are needed anywhere, I've been trying to test everything in order to improve the user friendliness, another pair of eyes might help uncover any remaining issues.

 

[Cervator]

Hey @qreeves - contributor badge for you now that I spot you in the forum

I think there will be a lot of straight forward tasks with L&S that we can sort out tomorrow (and if you don't make it then we'll have the tasks in a better format at least). Should have a few volunteers able to start work on it so there should be somebody to work with on something

UI - @nh_99 has been working on a tasks/quests module that'll probably use the Journal module to some degree. I don't know if we have the existing capability to show a nice quest journal. I know we've got tabs, and I think icons within a page. Maybe a mini-display elsewhere even with the journal closed that'll be able to list objectives, like in typical RPGs

Alternatively L&S is going to need some sort of score screen too. And maybe a spawn screen. Could be the same thing a la Counterstrike (been a while since I played tho!)

 

[Florian]

I created a countdown clock for the developer meeting today at 22 UTC:

https://countingdownto.com/countdown/terasology-developer-meeting-countdown-clock

 

[Cervator]

Summary from early session today:

Main speakers: @Florian, @Mike Kienenberger, @Josharias, @glasz, @synopia, @SuperSnark, @Calinou, @Halamix2

@Florian highlighted a desire for better free-form building and general playability improvements, even ahead of L&S which may still have complex prerequisites

• More simple blocks for building with, both for normal play and L&S - I poked @glasz and @SuperSnark to see about helping make more blocks
  • @Calinou brought up http://neotextureedit.sourceforge.net as a really nice block texture editor, able to make procedural textures, good for block variants and different resolutions
• Shift-click block placing
• Placing blocks near the player tricky
• Placing blocks without embedding self into blocks (especially for creatures)
• Better performance - auto save improvements may already help that along

I asked for a bigger list sometime, so we can make some issues and get to work

@Josharias suggested he could do some more BlockPicker improvements

• Might be an idea to look also at the fancy block support system, could be easy to add enough polish for destructible buildings (fun for building too), could group in the Picker

@synopia said hi

• Would think more on Pathfinding and how to deal with walls and other obstacles which isn't easy for the current system to deal with
• Working on a 2.0 for his behavior tree setup

@Mike Kienenberger came on to catch up

• No good GSOC news out of the Apache Software Foundation, they don't want to do project recommendations anymore
• Maybe we can go through the Free Game Alliance as Wesnoth is a member there and they've done GSOC stuff in the past.
• If not then Mike is up for writing us a recommendation for what it is worth, as a member of the ASF who has been in indirect contact with prior ASF GSOC efforts

 

[chessandgo]

Summary from early session today:

Main speakers: @Florian, @Mike Kienenberger, @Josharias, @glasz, @synopia, @SuperSnark, @Calinou, @Halamix2

@Florian highlighted a desire for better free-form building and general playability improvements, even ahead of L&S which may still have complex prerequisites

• More simple blocks for building with, both for normal play and L&S - I poked @glasz and @SuperSnark to see about helping make more blocks
  • @Calinou brought up http://neotextureedit.sourceforge.net as a really nice block texture editor, able to make procedural textures, good for block variants and different resolutions
• Shift-click block placing
• Placing blocks near the player tricky
• Placing blocks without embedding self into blocks (especially for creatures)
• Better performance - auto save improvements may already help that along

I asked for a bigger list sometime, so we can make some issues and get to work

@Josharias suggested he could do some more BlockPicker improvements

• Might be an idea to look also at the fancy block support system, could be easy to add enough polish for destructible buildings (fun for building too), could group in the Picker

@synopia said hi

• Would think more on Pathfinding and how to deal with walls and other obstacles which isn't easy for the current system to deal with
• Working on a 2.0 for his behavior tree setup

@Mike Kienenberger came on to catch up

• No good GSOC news out of the Apache Software Foundation, they don't want to do project recommendations anymore
• Maybe we can go through the Free Game Alliance as Wesnoth is a member there and they've done GSOC stuff in the past.
• If not then Mike is up for writing us a recommendation for what it is worth, as a member of the ASF who has been in indirect contact with prior ASF GSOC efforts

Again, not my place to comment, but I noticed you mention something about textures. First, it would be nice to have each item have its own texture, like blocks. This will allow for easier and better mod making and theming/texturepacking (as minecraft uses one sprite per texture/block, so it will be easier to convert over if we used a smiler format). And, perhaps items should have vector graphic support? I noticed some item textures bing used in the journals and they got all pixilated. One an off topic note, what would are your thoughts on have unix/linux/*nix style permissions for blocks and items. Minecraft plugins have a great deal invested into this, and is quite cumbersome to use, perhaps we could build this into core for mods and plugins to use?

 

[Cervator]

@chessandgo - you're still totally free to comment, stop with the not your place bit

Although this probably isn't quite the right thread as those topics do not really relate. There are other threads that likely relate, if not then put a new thread into Suggestions

Real quick: Textures already work that way, although they're not consistency at the same resolution and such, that'll be improved in general over time. Permissions for blocks and items - dunno, we haven't really gotten there yet. That's a Suggestions thread for sure, if you want to detail a bit what you are thinking along with some examples from MC land. I think @B!0HAX actually @t3hk0d3 (IIRC) was originally involved with one of the MC permissions plugins, but he hasn't been active here for a long time.

 

[msteiger]

Sorry, I missed the meeting.

• Bounties: Did you guys get to an agreement on how to proceed?
• Launcher Version: What's stopping us from releasing 2.0? It's been at least 100 commits since 1.4.2.
• Launcher mod-dist:
  • It's more effort than I thought to release module jars to our Bintray repo: https://bintray.com/terasology. Maybe someone want to take a stab based on the examples here? https://github.com/bintray/bintray-examples
  • Listing already works and downloading module jars should be easy. We could go with Artifactory for now and switch to Bintray later (when traffic increases)

 

[Skaldarnar]

Launcher Version
We need to make sure that the basic functionality of the launcher still works with the new module distribution/bundling, and check the active issues:

• Does the changelog match the fetched versions? Do we need to support more than one log?
• Does the download work, and what is included in the downloaded package?
• Do we want or need to show the user a message/warning about new packaging?

List of related issues: #118, #195, #258, #286, #304, #309. Probably some of them can be discarded due to the new bundling, or are not relevant for version 2.0.

Finally, I think we should merge this big PR with translations

 

[Cervator]

Yeah main launcher thing in my mind now is that I went and changed packaging so that really should be tweaked now, at least the quick hack in 309

Maybe now that we have the new font we should add that to the launcher as well?

Bintray - still on my list to look at further, but not quite near the top. Need to finish up with Jenkins already first.

Bounties - no objections, nor any real details. I'll just try to hook it up and throw a few bounties out there for testing, then post some more details.

 

[Cervator]

Update here before tomorrow's meeting. Since last we've had some good activity in particular on pushing further with the behavior trees and AI - thanks @synopia and @Florian ! We also hooked up a new font, woo. I've been unusually busy again, so as always more to do. Might try to push the office hours in general more, keep up the momentum, for whomever can make it

Still need:

• Updated GSOC list with the things we've tagged as GSOC since last year.
• A CONTRIBUTING file for the engine repo including PR guidelines (both for making them and reviewing them for merge)
• Write-up on issue tracking etc - me (sounds like @Josharias is having fun with Waffle!)
• Enable Bountysource - me
• Look into Bintray some more for distributing modules

Last meeting (the later session in the day - log):

• Spent a solid chunk of time covering module registry topics. Lots of ideas floated up, but more research needed, big task.
• Input mappings resulted in#1511 and agreement to attempt to minimize the amount of custom hotkeys in favor on in-game interactions (opening workstation windows and such) and more comprehensive basics like inventory / character sheet.
• Auto updates and module fetching should be supported in both the engine and launcher, with some differing features.
• JRE bundling is still a desirable target, and yeah we still should support 32-bit

Topics for tomorrow:

• Internationalization for the engine - what are our options? Are we ready to work in support soon?
• Alpha - what big pieces remain? Java 8 - are we there yet? Can somebody get the Launcher some initial distro (and 2.0) love?
• Gameplay - what do we need the most? Another round of volunteer poking for logic and assets

Delaying for now:

• PR guidelines. Need a nice write-up, in the meantime it isn't very involved anyway. If you're on the Push Team(Uh, I don't know if you can see that link even if you're on the team but not an admin?) feel free to merge PRs if they looks small and simple, just test them first. Try not to merge your own - we want a second pair of eyes. If they could at all be controversial then wait for more comments, especially if they impact the engine architecture.
• GSOC. Apps start in two weeks, I did it last year, not a lot of work. Just need to update the ideas page. If I can update that bynext weekend (or the next one) I hope to ask for volunteer mentors

 

[Cervator]

Quick update: Still working through follow-ups from this. Got a few things out of the way like a Tools thread, other stuff still pending more free time to finish.

Interesting stuff happening in RL these days, today I turned in my official resignation at work, never done that before

As I've mentioned here and there, mainly on IRC, I've been putting in some extra work in preparation for all this. I leave my current position in two weeks and start the new one after that weekend. Good news: no real web filter! So I should be able to catch up from work. But until I get stabilized there I should probably focus on, you know, actual work

So I'm hoping not but my time might be a tad more limited and erratic for a few weeks.