I got accepted!

Looks like once you get into the Google Summer of Code, your e-mail is added to a private student's mailing list, where a few hundred students are currently making their introductions...

So, after an hour of reading and clearing e-mails, I wondered whether anyone from my university also joined in. Nope, perhaps no one applied in the first place?

Anyway, I'm gonna list a few things on my todo so I don't forget when exams are over:

1. Replace the Taharez look in the GUI.
   
2. Create layouts of all the gui elements.
   
3. Document the class structure of the current client and the client library, so I can get an overview and some idea of how to proceed.
4. Explore ways of making the universe look prettier. I want to look into writing shaders and particle effects. Make the GUI look good as well. Transparency and animation?
5. Explore how Python-Ogre wraps libraries, in case I need to wrap something e.g. update CEGUI to 0.6
6. Add an in-game console. I'll figure out why later :)
   

Quickie git-daemon

Git-daemon is a mini-server for git repositories. It is small and cute, and suitable for sharing repositories within a local network or small groups.

Steps to getting it running

1. Clone your existing git repository with "git clone --bare current_repo new_repo"
2. Create an empty file called "git-daemon-export-ok" within the new repository
3. "git-daemon --base-path=parent_of_new_repo"

In step 3, base-path should not end in a slash.

Now, you will be running git-daemon on port 9418 on your computer. It's address is git://server-location/new_repo

To get commit access, this method requires ssh and is very easy.

Converting Mercurial to git

I tend to forget how to do these one-time operations, so I'm listing it here for reference (taken from the readme).

1. Grab hg-fast-export from here
   
2. Make an empty directory for the new git repository
3. From this empty directory, run the following commands:
   
4. git init
   
5. hg-fast-export.sh -r "location of mercurial repo"
   
6. git reset --hard

If you're lazy like me, you can copy the files in hg-fast-export over to the new directory, run hg-fast-export.sh and then delete them afterwards (before step 6).

So far, it seems to be a very clean transition, all commits are in place. Of course, the repository is very small with no branches so no issue was expected.

Oh yeah, Mercurial and Git are distributed version control systems which greatly lessen the dependency on the old subversion client-server model. As to which one is better, I'm totally not qualified to make any judgement, but git does take 3 letters to type, while hg takes just 2. :)

Slow Sunday

I put up a simple client based on the old pyogre client in Thousand Parsec here. It's a source code dump, because I couldn't get the py2exe version to work. To get it to work on Windows, three requirements are python, python-ogre and numarray. After that, rename "tpclient-pyogre" to
"tpclient-pyogre.py" and double-click on it.

The fact that py2exe couldn't work in this case is slightly troubling, especially it simply doesn't run and shows no error whatsoever. But at least it's worked for me before with other python-ogre stuff, so I know the problem is in this project itself.

The client can connect to a server (specified by the user or from the metaserver) and display the map of stars, and not much else. :)

Crazy Eddie

Looks like a new version of CrazyEddie's GUI System was released just a few days ago. I just found out that CrazyEddie's name isn't actually Eddie (it's Paul Turner).

The changelog states that they added a Tree widget. Excellent!

Starmap with stars

So it turns out that the stars were just too far apart to appear. Scaling down the distances lets everything appear, and the starmap is a lot less lonely.

Now, since they are so close, it's hard to read their names. Anyway, it's a little progress.

On a different note, I hope to make a few Arch PKGBUILDs for the various thousand parsec sub-projects and so far I've done tpserver-cpp which uses the current 0.4.1 release. I've since found that the git version is a lot more stable and featureful though. Hopefully there will be a new stable release soon.