Simple Client Status

[Sakrateri]

Back on topic here. WC let me know when you have had a chance to try those zones out with simpleclient and if you will want more. I know your busy so take your time.

[Angelox]

Trying to get this thread back to what it should be: a really great project.
Teppen; stop pissing off the boat bow! you getting yourself pissed, and all the rest of us too.

[KhaN]

Originally Posted by Scorpious2k

OMG!!! KHAN!!!

So good to see you back!

We need to talk...

Yo~
Im sort of back yeah :p

[Scorpious2k]

Originally Posted by KhaN

Yo~
Im sort of back yeah :p

I won't sidetrack the thread any more than it has been, but I wanted to welcome you back. The project has missed your contributions and presence.

[Windcatcher]

Originally Posted by Sakrateri

Back on topic here. WC let me know when you have had a chance to try those zones out with simpleclient and if you will want more. I know your busy so take your time.

I tried them out in my zone explorer (see the ZoneExplorer thread) and they check out ok. I can try them in the client itself, but that requires DB work so I'd rather do that only if absolutely necessary. They show up great in ZoneExplorer, so I'm 99% confident they'll show up in the client as well (there is nearly complete code commonality between the two).

I've released the source to ZoneExplorer as there is really no harm in it. It only loads zones and lets you fly around them, as well as view objects. It's the sort of information that I think the community as a whole should have anyway.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I have been reading through the thread and I must say, friggn awesome job!

I currently am building my own MMORPG, somewhat like everquest, my graphics are better and hope to have alot more features..BUT anyways was wanting to help here in my spare time(the little I get). If you need a link to my project to see my work then PM me. I can model, Map, texture, code, blah blah and much more. I think being able to create your own worlds apon the Everquest engine is a great idea and would love to help in any way possible. I am new to the emu, set it up a while back but never really got any further, fixin to setup my own server for the devs of my project to all play on in the meantime.

Thanx for any responses and or where to get started.

[Windcatcher]

This whole discussion has made me revisit the idea of a closed beta and whether it's such a good thing. Cavedude and I worked it out informally, where he would host a server and I would send updates to his FTP site. The testing process has been somewhat spotty since it's been so informal, and perhaps we can do better. Do we want to try an open beta instead?

I'm open to suggestions (*especially* from devs), but here are my initial thoughts:

1. First, there MUST be a patcher. An open beta does us no good unless we can have some confidence that everyone is running the same version. Otherwise I foresee we'll be chasing our tails more often than not running down obsolete bugs. I know that Teppen was offering to write one -- but Cofruben already has one in the works (undergoing rewrite). I don't care either way, but if *the community* wants an open beta then a patcher is a prerequisite for it to be useful to those of us working on the client (who am I kidding -- at this point *I'm* the only one working on it...any Delphi devs out there?)

2. We'll need a server that's up all the time, and since the beta would be open it would be somewhat accountable to the community (I don't mean anything formal here, just pointing out that if it's down we would likely hear about it in short order on the forum). I can't provide this.

3. We'll have to decide on a server version, at least tentatively. That isn't too big a deal since SimpleClient supports several revisions between 0.5.5 and 0.6.0, but if we want to use something newer and/or want the beta server to evolve into a live one then we need to think it through a bit. SimpleClient requires a different netcode DLL to talk to 0.6.1 and newer servers, for instance, and I'll need help there if we want to take that route.

I've never run an open beta of anything before (and before this, a closed one either) so I'm definitely looking for guidance here. I don't consider SimpleClient all that robust yet, but it *is* a beta, after all, so it's one of those "use at your own risk" deals. In any case, I definitely *can't* manage this process as I'm swamped already as it is, but I do want this to get released to the general public at some point in a way that satisfies as many as possible. I'd especially like to hear from devs (current and former) as you probably know a lot more about managing a community project than I do.

EDIT: Since SimpleClient can talk to multiple server versions, there isn't anything saying that there has to be only one beta server, or even one beta server *version*...but the prospect makes me worry a bit about confusion among the player base. It's something else to discuss, I suppose.

I'm willing to discuss either here or on IRC, but I prefer it to be here since it's persistent and if there's one thing I've learned it's that it's best if the discussion be open. The agreement between Cavedude and I was worked out on IRC and, while we're well within our right to do that, it's led to confusion and some hard feelings that I'd just as soon avoid.

[Windcatcher]

Don't all reply at once...

Anyhow, here's another progress pic. I now have some fairly decent sky tinting...

Sunrise in Peshara Highlands



Also, the position of the sun/moon/sky are aware of the game day/month. This is a pic taken when it's June, so the sun rises a bit to the northeast, and will rise high in the sky. In January, of course, it rises to the southeast and never gets all that high (I have the latitude set at 42 degrees north). I added a /clouds on|off command and I turned the clouds off for this pic.

Here's another in the afternoon with the clouds on and set to high quality...



EDIT: I'm still making improvements; for instance this has a better sky sphere with increased detail at the horizon and some code to eliminate the fade-to-black at the horizon...



EDIT #2: Don't worry about the frame rates you see. I've since optimized sky-tinting and it's now in the 40's...

EDIT #3: The moon can cause sky-glow too, if it's near full...

[Sensu-Bean]

[QUOTE=1. First, there MUST be a patcher. An open beta does us no good unless we can have some confidence that everyone is running the same version. Otherwise I foresee we'll be chasing our tails more often than not running down obsolete bugs. I know that Teppen was offering to write one
[/QUOTE]

Teppen's been banned from eqemu forums. He also posted a farewell post over at projecteq forums and everyone there hated to see him leave. Dev's all posted that he was welcome back anytime, however that really depends on weither his account gets unbanned on here or not. He has been talking with mattmeck and is going to be contacting angelox soon. Until then you will have to wait on corfuben's rewrite, which Im sure will do the job nicely. Below is Teppens farewell post on projecteq, which by the way had nothing to do with your thread windcatcher.

http://www.projecteq.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3342

Nice screenshots by the way, it looks better and better with each post windcatcher.

[Windcatcher]

Thanks for the compliments. It's up to the admins to decide what to do. I'm sort of reserving judgment since I haven't seen all the deleted posts (I was away for the entire weekend and they were already gone when I got back). I'd like to just move on from the issue and see a working patcher going. At that point I may be finally able to publicly release the client, pending perhaps some preliminary discussions with devs/admins/server admins to see if they have any outstanding issues. In the meantime I'm adding this new sky code to OpenZone and ZoneExplorer. Then I might see if I can learn something about GLSL shaders (yes, KhaN, I know you're looking at me...)

EDIT: I finally got around to enabling mipmapping...

[Windcatcher]

I have a question for the server devs out there: what is the best way to handle books ingame? Currently you can't read anything in SimpleClient because I'm not sure how best to handle it. I don't know if things have changed since, but my 0.5.5 test server uses a books table in the DB for book text. Apparently the way the protocol worked then was the client would send a request to the server with a particular title, and the server would return the text in the book. I can make SC work this way, but it wouldn't be localizable. This being the case, I figure I should ask if we want to do anything else before taking this route.

[Windcatcher]

This was the last major feature I needed...now you can read stuff:

[IADarkyth]

Amazing work Windcatcher, just came back to EQEMu because it's been a long time and low and behold here you are still working like a madman on projects that no one would even dare imagine.

Something like this is one of the major stepping stones in order to truly emulate EverQuest and give it some of the updates and flexibility that it really needs.

[Windcatcher]

Thanks! I'm presently waiting to post another version to cavedude's beta-test FTP site (his provider had a problem and they need to work it). I've since redesigned the way I repaint the scene, which improved the frame rate and smoothed out movement speed. I also made the software occlusion culler more efficient which also boosted framerate, and added NumLock for auto-run. I added /clouds on|off since they impact frame rate and added settings to SimpleClient.ini for cloud fidelity (low, medium, high) and whether or not to use mipmapping.

[GeorgeS]

Regardiing books, I would just keep the format the same as the emu table struct -

name or id as varchar(30)
txtfile as text no limit

this seems to work well.
I also may have a book BMP skin you may find usefull - I'll look for it if you need something fancy like that.

On another note, I redid my PC and forgot what you use to unzip this .gz file. Tried about everything and it failed -
Load SQL: beta_team_dump.sql.gz

GeorgeS