August 2, 2006 Options

[Mole]

Project Wish
August 2, 2006 Status Report
Mole, Project Manager

Summary
It has been almost a year since our last status report. Lest anyone think otherwise, PW is still very alive and very active. Large amount of hiring in the past year brings parts of the project near to fully staffed while other parts still lack proper staffing. PLSM has been integrated with DWARF, a project that is being developed completely in-house. A new website has gone live.

Flags

Severity Date Description (+=improvement, -=decline)
Yellow Jun 20, 2005 Lack of public communication
Yellow(+) Aug 1, 2005 Staffing
Red Jun 20, 2005 Gaps in Agile development process

Lack of public communication. This issue was raised by community members over a year ago. Monthly status reports were implemented before to good measure, but lack of status reports as of late has led to decline. Thanks to Jerky for posting news items on the webpage to keep community members updated. Look for other improvements to occur throughout the second half of 2006.

Staffing. Staffing levels have dramatically improved since a year ago. We now have nearly full contingent of programmers coming up to speed with Ogre. While progress on attracting programmers has been good, we can still use a few more until we can consider that team fully staffed. The art team is currently lacking in artists and modelers. Luckily, PW is not anywhere close to needing tons of art assets yet, but that time is quickly approaching.

Gaps in Agile development process. Steps identified over a year ago to close these gaps have since fallen from the list. A new review is under way and changes will roll out slowly over the rest of the year.

Programs
The programming team has spent the past year coming up close to full strength. There has been a lot of activity with various projects.

DWARF was started and continues to progress at a rapid pace. This is an in-house designed and built â??world editorâ?� that includes the PLSM project, one of the Ogre engine's scene managers. The team is hard at work trying to flush out some bugs. Look for a possible initial alpha release of DWARF next month. Also look for more information in this status report concerning DWARF.

Preliminary work has also been started on a weather engine by ghedipunk. Since this service is still in the design stage, we will just mention it to spark your interest. Look for more information to come in the following months as more decisions are finalized.

Art
The art team has been a little off lately, as members go on summer vacation and take time away to deal with Real Life issues. Sunjit has been hard at work creating animations from some of our first models and we expect to see some brief animations showcasing his work soon. Jerky has been working on various models for MV, and themes for our website.

The art team announces some new additions to the PW production pipeline. For those modelers out there looking to be legit and have a powerful tool that is not Blender (some really dislike Blender's interface), Hexagon may be the way to go. I was able to get it for $75, which is a steal for what it can do. Hexagon has almost all of the features and ease-of-use that most $500-$3000 modeling tools have. It does not do animations, but it can handle all modeling techniques and is very easy to learn, which is a major complaint against Blender. The other new tool is Google SketchUp. This powerful, fast, free tool can create architecture at a good pace. One of the community members (Honis) was able to learn SketchUp and create an arena out of it in not too much time. This means that we can have a better opportunity to get building and prop models from people who do not normally model. Any of you out there who wish to contribute and think you do not have the skills, we recommend checking out SketchUp. It may be worth the minimal effort it takes to learn. Google has also provided free video tutorials on their site.

The urls for Hexagon and Sketchup are:
Hexagon â?? http://www.daz3d.com/program/hexagon
SketchUp â?? http://sketchup.google.com

The art team has a large selection of samples to be released. Look for those to appear soon in the download area.

Other
There is now a place in the forums for developer tutorials. Unfortunately, if you are not a PW developer you cannot see them (yet). Once we have some good tutorials out there, we will open things up to the community at large. These will include tutorials on Hexagon/Blender low-poly modeling, SketchUp low-poly building modeling, creature concept art, architecture concept art, etc. There is a rather large list of things planned.

Staffing
In the past year, we have lost and gained a lot of people. To all those new team members who have joined in the past year, let us welcome you now. Welcome to njpaul, yellow, mynui, ghedipunk, and mirko27. Welcome back to mortideus, our project founder, who was away on hiatus. Congratulations to cobra, who has been promoted to the position of senior artist.