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> So, *cough*, its been a while
Jerky
post Apr 29 2007, 11:12 PM
Post #1


Former PW Project Manager
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Posts: 1,610
Joined: 11-January 05
From: Dallas, GA
Member No.: 62



It has been brought to my attention (numerous times) that we are in dire need of an update. unsure.gif

Yeah, yeah, I know. Its been a long time coming. This one should satiate those who hunger for news on PW. So, as promised and without further ado, the update:

Since January, 2007, PW has celebrated its 2-year anniversary. In 2 years, a lot has happened. We have had team members come and go, and come and go, and ... you get the idea. There has been a lot of fluctuation over the years, which is a normal occurance for a project like this.

More recently, we lost our Creative Director, Melanthe, to real life issues. With her gone, there has been a hole to fill. With that task facing us, we decided to reevaluate some of the workflows we had been using. There was a little confusion as to what the new team was doing. The "world concepts" team has been mistaken by many people to be a design team. We decided to take the opportunity and turn it back into a more story-oriented team. The person to do that, who stepped up, has been Pandra. She has been doing some reorganiztion of our story team to get them back to a more traditional role, that of creating the world and lore concepts. At the same time, she has been doing some recruiting, so we have some new team members on the Story Team that are hard at work doing what they do best.

Another reason for us being quiet is that 2 of the leaders got new jobs in the last few months which means more RL time, and less PW time. In the long run, these new positions will only mean good things for the team members, and for the project, but things take time to work themselves out.

While all of that has been going on, work on the project has not stopped. The programming team, in particular, has been busy doing some solid design and researching some of the best ways to achieve our lofty goals. Our Programming team lead, Yellow has also been lost to RL, but our remaining programmers more than made up for the loss. Between Dwilf, Minthos, njpaul, and Grey, we have some very solid designs being made for a number of things. There is a lot that goes into a game, let alone an MMO. This is much more than the standard person knows. The short list of things we are working on are these:
  • PWToolBox- a library ready to use in all aspects of programming (from the client, game engine, to the server)
  • Server networking architecture - the networking side of things
  • Server spatial partitioning architecture - the divisioning portion of the server that will load balance and keep track of every type of object in the world. This is a key, especially considering our desire to stick with a zoneless single-server world (shardless).
  • Game engine architecture - this is the heart of the client, but also is what defines what sort of information the server will be passing back and forth. This is where the Ogre engine comes in to lead the show, but also every other library (sound, collision, input, etc) to help put it all together.
  • Scene Manager - There has been some discussion over whether or not we will make our own scene manager. For those familiar with Ogre, we had used PLSM2, but there are some downsides to it. PLSM3 is being worked on now, the codebase is old, and not current with Eihort (Ogre 1.4) and the documentation is lacking. The other reason this could be something important for us has to do with indoors. This would be things like caves, and would also effect whether we have indoors to buildings. There are many opportunities that open to us if we decide to make our own.
Among other things we have discussed is whether and how much we go open source. For what should be obvious reasons, we can't completely open all of our source and expect to have a successful game. It just opens too many doors. We do, however, want to contribute to the Ogre community wherever possible. This means our scene format, and more importantly, DWARF. We will, in the very least, share our scene format with the ogre community, and have tentative plans on releasing most of the DWARF features.

As DWARF matures, it will take on a larger role, which we cannot share with the world, so we hope to split the world editing functionality off so that it could become a world editing tool for other projects. This leads into the DWARF redesign. We are currently redesigning DWARF with some of these goals in mind. With Yellow gone, we have to rewrite some of the things we did, but while we are at it, we are going to improve some of the things that we have gotten feedback on. Our plan is to move toward Wx Widgets, which is a GUI library much more suited for a tool than CEGUI.

Not to be outdone, Dwilf has taken up working on a mesh viewer for PW. It is already functional and has a lot of what we are looking for. We decided it would be nice to have a tool other than DWARF that our artists could use to check their models in. This is meant as a lightweight tool that will match the version of Ogre that our client uses. This will allow us to know exactly what our models (assets) will look like, in game. We should be able to provide you with some screenshots in the near future. In fact, check Cobra's blog and you should see the top of a tower he is working on. That is a screenshot from our mesh-viewer.

Now, on to Art. We do have more work being done, but we are currently revising our pipeline. We have lost many artists to various issues, but the main core still remains. We will have things to show in the upcoming future that should give you a good idea of what quality you can expect from PW's graphics.

We will also begin to release details on the character cusomization system we are designing. Some of the things we have planned are not in many commercial MMO's. We cannot say more at this time, but rest assured, you will be impressed. The core team of artists we have at PW will not disappoint.

As far as the rest of the team goes, we have a lot of music getting made and worked on. Between Alter, echorev and Effigydrums, there is a lot of work being done. I myself have even pitched in, as music is one of my secret hobbies. To show some of what we are working on to the community, we decided to open a music section in our download area. You can expect this to be updated fairly regularly. The thing to note is that these works are all WIP (work-in-progress). Click the following link to begin your listening pleasure:
http://www.projectwish.com/index.php?act=d...at&cat_id=5

Well, to all those who read this, we would like to remind you that we are not going anywhere. Yes, it was four months since our last update, but we are ALWAYS in irc. The server has people in it 24/7. If you ever want to just listen in to what we are up to, feel free.

'Til next time (which will be sooner than 4 months).

-PW Development Team
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echorev
post Apr 30 2007, 05:58 AM
Post #2


PW Sound Team
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Posts: 132
Joined: 29-December 06
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woo ! new news ! and a long one too

yes we are still alive !!!!

biggrin.gif biggrin.gif biggrin.gif laugh.gif


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Pandra
post Apr 30 2007, 08:10 AM
Post #3


Wisdom
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From: Missouri
Member No.: 640



Thank you Jerky. Oddly that reminds me I should get the current story team requirments up in the help wanted section. That might save some folks some time while waiting on me to get off work.


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~by Honis

Kain:: I liberated myself a copy of MS Office 2007 today.
Pandra:: Liberated??
Kain:: With my charm.
Pandra:: Does that mean you slept with someone to obtain softwear?
Kain:: >.>;
Pandra:: You're officially a program geek.
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RicoSuave
post Apr 30 2007, 08:15 AM
Post #4


Master
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Joined: 22-March 06
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Member No.: 585



Wow! Some severe bumps in the road and still progressing? We're destined to succeed. smile.gif

Great job guys/gals. It makes me wish I had talents to contribute more than just being a Frylock-faced name on the forums.
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Maxwell
post Apr 30 2007, 11:28 AM
Post #5


Master
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Joined: 11-October 05
From: Salisbury, Md
Member No.: 560



Wow this is like a breath of fresh air, Thanks for the update jerky.


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Programming is a complex blend of art, science, logic, engineering, design, and craftsmanship
-Steve Yegge
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joshpurple
post Apr 30 2007, 01:15 PM
Post #6


PW Artist
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Group: PW Developer
Posts: 790
Joined: 3-July 06
Member No.: 613



biggrin.gif biggrin.gif

How COOL! That sounds like a heartbeat to me! smile.gif Thank You Jerky, that is very good news to hear. Big points to ALL *josh dances jig* And BIG points to Dwilf on the PW Mesh Viewer! Right ON! biggrin.gif The screen shot looks outstanding!


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John
post Apr 30 2007, 01:21 PM
Post #7


PW Artist
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Group: PW Developer
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Joined: 20-April 06
Member No.: 593



Thanks for the update. Hopefully this will inspire the project to make a few more steps towards its goals, and give people like me a well deserved kick up the arse.
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effigydrums
post May 1 2007, 02:12 PM
Post #8


PW Composer
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Group: PW Developer
Posts: 77
Joined: 22-August 06
From: Milwaukee, WI
Member No.: 624



There's always progress being made, even if it isn't outwardly obvious. I think big things will really start to happen very soon...


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