Summer of Code Midterm

So the mid-term for Summer of Code has come and gone. Just to remind everyone this is what we have students working on:

• Ryzom GUI Editor
• Character Achievements
• Camera Animations and Sound Triggers
• Guild Ranks

Guild Ranks

Zyklon has been working on implementing a new guild rank system - this will be a new system that will allow guild leaders to create arbitrary ranks and associate grades to them. So instead of being stuck with static grades you can create a hierarchy of your own.

Zyklon has had an awful lot of new technology to learn and was stuck with a pretty formidable server bug for the first two weeks of his project. But as of the midterm he has made substantial progress with the server-side data structure and implementing the persistence templates. He will button up much of that code this term and hopefully implement the action handlers on the client side.

His mentor is Ulukyn.

Camera Animations and Sound Triggers

Fabien has been working hard on adding a new system for level designers to be able to animate cameras and send sound trigger impulses to the client. It's been a lot of work and has exposed him to a huge variety of new parts of Ryzom Core. He took the path of allowing level designers to create animation scripts in World Editor and added the ability to trigger them in missions. This allowed him to harness the knowledge from his previous project - implementing guild missions - as well as used existing tools that the designers are familiar with.

So far Fabien has worked with his mentor to renovate the way the sound system IDs sounds (it used to use a map based on the name and now uses the universal sheet ID), has implemented the world_editor_classes.xml changes and implemented the loader code in the EGS and has begun implementation of the client impulses for sounds. By the end of the term he should have a full functioning sound trigger setup and basic server-driven camera animations.

His mentor is Kaetemi.

Character Achievements

SirCotare's character achievement work has been around porting an existing character achievements tool to use the newly developed and open sourced Ryzom API and WebIG source code. He's taken a tool that was external to Ryzom Core and rewritten it to use the new API and then has expanded the tool by implementing it in-game as well as implementing other features such as Facebook integration.

By the end of the term he plans on replacing the existing PHP achievement tracker responsible for determining if a player-character has made an achievement with code capable of performing the tracking in real time.

His mentor is ace.

Ryzom GUI Editor

dfighter has been working hard on the Ryzom Core GUI editor. But that's not entirely honest. The first stage of this project was to separate the GUI code in such a way that it could be used outside of the client code. All of this code was contained in a sub-folder called interface_v3 and so we naively assumed that it would straight-forward but time consuming to separate it out into a NeL library. I think even the most pessimistic of us under-estimated the amount of effort required to separate the core GUI from the client. At the end of the first term of Summer of Code dfighter has achieved this goal and has successfully separated the code out into its own NeL library: NLGUI. He has demonstrated it running outside of the Ryzom Core client in the beginnings of the actual GUI editor.

By the end of the term he plans on fully supporting loading and saving NeL GUI XML files and will implement rudimentary GUI editing capabilities.

His mentor is dnk-88.

Thank You!

I'd like to thank all of the students for their hard work. It's been a lot of fun helping out, discussing their work and just seeing the cool stuff they're working on start to come together!