[Adonthell-general] Some general suggestion

[Ingo Ruhnke]

Hiho, 

since you are searching for developers I have a few things to suggest,
if some are offending, wrong or already explained just ignore, just
shooting a bit into the blue since I don't really know much about the
current state of development. I am already rather busy with other
project (Windstille, Feuerkraft, Pingus, Flexlay, Construo, SuperTux,
...) to contribute anything of greater significance, but I might be
able to give a helping hand here and there.

Documentation:
--------------
There seems to be lots of it, however most seems to be scattered a bit
far across the webpage and hard to access, ie. the API-docu comes in
form of a tarball instead of being directly linked, some other docu
comes in form of PDF files instead of HTML and some task list stuff
comes in the form of txt files. There also seems to be some secret
repositories for story and artwork floating around somewhere not
directly linked from the webpage. To sum up its a bit hard to find out
what is going on, what the status is and what exactly is to be done. A
sitemap is missing too, so its a bit easy to miss a link deep down the
road.

I would suggest to move most or even all development documentation
into a Wiki, that way it is grouped together and easily editable by
anybody who wants to help, much easier then LaTeX files which need to
be converted to PDF. The massive crosslinking nature of Wikis also
makes it easier to get an overview over a topic. Beside from that a
Wiki would also allow a clear cut between the main gamer related
webside and the developer documentation. If needed I can help a bit
with installing, far from being an expert on the topic, but still have
a little bit experince with Wikis.

Graphics:
---------
How far are the graphics for 0.4? I have spotted a few test graphics
here and there on the mailing list, but how much of the overall
graphics have been done, needs to be done and is already planed for?
Not much a great artist myself, but I might be able to give a helping
hand here and there:

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/male9-4.png
http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/stone2.png
http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/women9-3.png
http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/women13-2.jpg

Engine/Map:
-----------
Same as above, how far is the engine in general? The TODO lists a
bunch of point which make it sound like its still mostly a blank sheet
of paper, but on the other side there is Wasteedge which is already
fully playable. So how much of the old stuff can and will be
recyclable? Is there already spec for the map format, tilesize, number
of layers and such? How about the display target, plain software
rendering or 2D OpenGL based rendering to get fast alpha blending and
such?

Editor:
-------
I know there is a dialog editor, but how much else? Has anybody
already planed anything in the case of a map editor? As suggested in
some other mail some month ago I might be interested in helping. I
have a scriptable game editor which has already proven usefull in
SuperTux, netPanzer and a custom paint app, its however not without
flaws, still quite hard to compile, based on OpenGL and really for
most part more an experimental toy, even so a usefull one, for myself
then a release ready thing:

 * http://flexlay.berlios.de/

Any work on this of course needs some spec for the fileformat first,
anything based on multi-layer tilemaps and objects can be patched
together in a matter of a few days to be basically working and then
slowly grow together with the engine itself.

Story:
------
How much is that done, how far is the character development, dialog lines, etc? 

Status of Development and the Devolpers:
----------------------------------------
In general, how far is the devolopment, what is readily usable in CVS
or close to be usable? What would be the estimated time till 0.4 is
ready for release or how long would it take to get a basic prototype
up and running? And whats the status of the developers, all busy with
school, studying and such or is there any larger free timeslot
available in the coming month?

Happypenguin's Help Wanted aka. 'GotM':
---------------------------------------
In the Happypenguin forums there is a little project running, called
'GotM', every few month 'we' (ie. whoever is interested in helping)
picks a game and we improve it by various means, new graphics, new
GUI, fixing bugs, etc:

http://happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1243
http://happypenguin.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=21

The goals are more or less clearly set before we start and once they
are reached we move sooner or later on to the next game, normal
timeframe for the development is ~3 month. The success with that
approach has been mixed, while SuperTux has made great progress in the
time and resulted in a fully playable, Pingus hasn't much progressed
at all (lack of developers/ideas/coordination), Tuxkart on the other
side has progressed a lot again, but didn't made it into a playable
release (lack of 3d and physics programmer), currently we are working
on Lincity which so far runs ok, but we are actually lacking players
who have experince with the original game:

SuperTux before: http://www.happypenguin.org/images/supertux-shot.gif
SuperTux after:  http://super-tux.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

TuxKart before: http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
TuxKart after:  http://supertuxkart.berlios.de/screenshots.html

Lincity before: http://www.games.ru/games/linux/screenshots/lincity.gif
Lincity after:  http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/lincity-2005-04-21-1.png

Adonthell 0.4 might be a good canditate for Happypenguin's Help
Wanted, however currently Lincity is still running and a bunch of the
regular 'Help Wanted' developers might be busy with SuperTux in the
coming month, so the amount of help might be limited.

IRC Meeting:
------------
To tie it all up I would suggest to have a IRC meeting, say Saturday,
30.04.2004, 18:00GMT or whenever it fits most current developers. The
IRC meeting should also be publically announced on happypenguin.org.
Channel: #adonthell, Server: irc.freenode.net

BTW. Are any of the developers around in that channel regularly these
days? I had it in my autojoin quite a long while back, but beside from
the sporadic meetings it was basically all empty for the rest of the
time, is that still the case?

Short Summary:
--------------
I have basically absolutly no idea what the actual status of the 0.4
game is, have enjoyed 0.3 a lot, and might be able to offer a little
help when it comes to graphics and the level/map editor.

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