Cyphesis 0.6.1 released

I just recently released Cyphesis 0.6.1. The official announcement is over at the Worldforge site.

This is the first release after I took over from Alistair as maintainer. The focus, as well as with the upcoming Ember release, is fully on implementing features to make it easier for world authors.

This follows the strategy I laid out when taking over maintenance duties in April. In order for Worldforge to attract new developers and world builders we must make it much, much easier to actually create worlds. A crucial part of this is making sure that any changes done on the server actually are persisted between server restarts. Previously this wasn't true, as no "minds" were persisted. That meant that all of the behaviour and knowledge of any creature or character was wiped out when the server shut down.
That of course made it quite hard to iteratively construct an interesting world. Not so anymore!

But not only that; it's now also much easier to both alter and inspect minds. This was also a source of frustration previously, as there was no good way as a world author to interact with the minds. While a crude mechanism for inserting new goals was available, this didn't really cut it. Especially when goals malfunctioned or behaved in non-intuitive ways. Trying to figure out why the woodcutter wouldn't cut down the tree one meter in front of him was nigh impossible.
All of this is now improved as it's now possible to add, delete, alter and inspect goals. The latter feature is a god send when constructing behaviour or implementing new goals, since it's now easy to see exactly what a certain NPC is thinking.

However, in order to fully use these editing feature you must run the latest version of Ember. There will be a 0.7.1 release shortly; we're currently working out some final issues. In the meantime, if you want to try these new features out you should run Ember from the Git master branch, preferably through the Hammer script.

Exporting and importing in Ember

The last couple of weeks I've been working on improved authoring capabilities in Ember and Cyphesis. One of the most important features is the ability to both export and import entities from and into servers.

This allows a world author to save a snapshot of the world to local disk, and later on restoring the world as it was in the snapshot. There are multiple usage scenarios, but one that immediately springs to my mind is the improved ability to perform iterative world editing. By being able to reset the world back to a known working state it's much easier to try out new configurations and behaviour.

All work is currently being done on separate branches of both Ember and Cyphesis. The following video shows the status of this feature some weeks ago; it has progressed even more since.

Worldforge in Google Summer of Code 2012

We've been allowed to take part in Google Summer of Code for another year. This is as always exciting and humbling. The Summer of Code is such a wonderful program which always keeps us amazed. So many different things are awesome, from the basic ideas and soul of the program, to the people at Google making it happen, to the mentors around the world, to the students working all through summer.

There's an announcement up on the main Worldforge site with more information.  Right now we're in the period where students are encouraged to interact with the community and work on their ideas.

If working on a totally free virtual world system during the summer sounds interesting, don't hesitate: run over to the Worldforge wiki, read up on the program and don't be shy about applying.