Pathfinding in Ember

I've recently done some work on adding proper pathfinding to Worldforge. For this I've chosen the Recast/Detour library. While this approach, using voxel rendering to create navmeshes from arbitrary geometry, is both complex and resource expensive, I'm convinced it's absolutely required to allow us to properly support the dynamic and changing worlds in Worldforge.

I've done the initial implementation in Ember, mainly because it's easier to visually debug. But the main benefit will come from integrating this work into Cyphesis, so that it can control AI movement.
This is an area sorely in need of improvement. See, currently there's no path finding or obstacle avoidance at all for the AI characters. The result of this is that NPC characters always move in a straight line towards their target, causing them to inevitable become stuck on other entities. No good. No good.

With proper path finding and obstacle avoidance we can instead implement more advanced AI behaviour.

Ember 0.7.2 binaries for Linux and Windows available

We now have binaries for Linux and Windows available for Ember 0.7.2.

They can be downloaded from here:
Linux (64 bit)
Linux (32 bit)
Windows

Binary packages for Ember 0.7.1 available

Just a quick update that we're now providing binary packages of Ember 0.7.1.

We're currently providing these for 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Linux and Windows.

To run the Linux packages you must first make sure that the file is executable.

Ember 0.7.1 released

The Worldforge 3d client Ember version 0.7.1 has been released and is now available from the WorldForge download site.

Ember is a client for the WorldForge project. It allows you to both play in and edit virtual worlds.
This release focus on improving the editing capabilities, allowing for much easier world creation.

• Export and import of entities and worlds.
• Much improved entity editor.
• Ability to edit and debug entity minds.
• Detect local servers and connect as admin directly.
• Many bug fixes, improvements and optimizations.

This version can be downloaded from the sourceforge download site, at the following locations:

• ember-0.7.1.tar.bz2
• ember-media-0.7.1.tar.bz2

At this time we do not provide precompiled packages.

Note that if you compile from source, you will need to install the content of ember-media-0.7.1.tar.bz2 to PREFIX/share/ember/media or use the “make releasemediarsync” make target.

More information can be found at the Ember site.

All bug reports should be posted at the Launchpad.

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.

Missing files

I had some people try to build and run the Ember source by themselves. It turned out that apart from some missing media files (such as the whole gui texture file) some of the xml files for CEGUI wasn't conforming to the schema specification. The reason I haven't noticed this before is that CEGUI can use many different backends for parsing xml. It can use either expat, libxml, xerces or tinymxl. Very nice component design there and all. But I had always compiled it with tinyxml, which as the name implies is very tiny and don't have any validation support. All incorrect tags are just read as they are. However, if CEGUI was compiled with Xerces instead, which is quite large and has schema validation, the loading would fail since Xerces would throw an exception when encountering invalid xml. And this is precisely what happened when other people tried building Ember, since they had CEGUI compiled with Xerces support. I've now fixed the issue and committed. I have to do a 0.5.1rc2 release soon though, since the modeldef format has changed, disallowing the use of the 0.5.0 media with cvs ember.

On the icon front I've gotten even further with the drag-n-drop functionality. There are some small usability bugs still left, but overall I think it's quite usable. I've been starting to think of how to improve the entity context menu. Currently it's just a regular menu that pops up, but I'm thinking of having a radial menu with icons instead.