Open Jumpgate / News: Recent posts

We decided that the time of svn has come and replaced it with Git. It provides a gread benefit to our workflow and finally reduces the long time used to commit a few changes because everthing is local and fast (until you push it).
I can only recommend all projects using svn (or even worse CVS) to switch to Git (or any other dvcs you might prefer).

Until recently the main development happened in a branch named "ogsector" while "trunk" was pretty much dead. We decived to clean the situatuin and move the stuff from trunk to a branch and move the stuff from ogsector to trunk. On the move the autotools stuff was cleaned and we are working on getting "make distcheck" working. We will start cleaning the data directory next, since there is some stuff that needs to be removed or replaced.

Gary provided some great sounds and Carsten got inspired and implemented sound support based on OpenAL. It's not perfect yet, but looking good. On windows it seems to cause a slowdown. We will continue working on that.

I just can say: THANKS GARY AND CARSTEN!

Opengate, out beloved spaceship MMORPG, is currently targetting for it's inital release. The current status is that you can fly around in space, dock at a station, chat with each other, attack each other, play against an AI player, choose your ship, etc. We are working on support for the meta-server to authenticate against and to clean up the code.

All in all it looks very promising!

After the initial tries of creating a working game and the second tries of getting the CEGUI based gui working we ended up with a third attempt to create this wonderful game.
If you take a look at our screenshot section[1], you will see an unimpressive screenshot of impressive work.
To sum up what we now have:
* free flight and basic movement
* collision detection
* very basic AI
* simple HUD
* realistic acceleration
* some nice graphics... read more

Opengate found some helping hands for development. His name is "Louis Jacques" and he will try to help bringing opengate forward.
Welcome aboard!!

If anyone else is interested, the Job will remain open for a short while at https://sourceforge.net/people/viewjob.php?group_id=163481&job_id=26636

I've chosen a new and upcoming network library named "grapple" from LinuxGamePublishing to build the network functionality upon. So far my inital experiments show that it's robust and powerful. So it really fits the needs of the game. It supports grouping of users connected to a server, which should enable faction-based and squad-based chat really fast. I hope I can show a working version of an initial chat soon.... read more

I'm currently workin on a simple (but powerfull) account management website for opengate. Currently it's developed in PHP. It's meant to be used as an informational database about the game and the players account. The player should be able to get the latest information about the game itself (like events in opengate), look at his stats, read user stories and even manage his account. For example a user deciedes to sell his ship if favor of a better one. That should be possible in the game AND in the management website.... read more

As of today the loader is able to load ships from xml files (after validating them against the opengate.dtd). This means the "loader branch" which I developed seperately was merged completely into the main branch. Next steps are to load the xml-files from OGRE-vfs, cleaning up the loader for memory leaks and showing the loaded ship in the game. All the code is in SVN so have fun and play with it.

I finally got the time to continue the development of Opengate. This time I started working on a simple XML-reader based on libxml2 to read and validate the existing XML files. This lead to an DTD which I uploaded to the website and can be found at http://opengate.sourceforge.net/opengate.dtd . It's my first DTD so be gentle with me.

The new version of the website is coming up slowly. The PHP/MySQL based "backend" (meaning functionality) is working quite smoothly. We are currently working on creating a cool design. Want to see the new Website? Look at: http://opengate.ontheserver.de/

Recently a guy contacted me and told me he wanted to help with the website. As you can see [1] our current website is neither professional nor really usefull. So I'm glad to announce that Gary Luck (Ultrasick) is working on a (really great) website. Ahh, and: "No, you can't see it yet".

[1] http://opengate.sourceforge.net/

As you can see in the screenshots section of the project page[1] and the homepage[2].

[1] http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=163481
[2] http://opengate.sourceforge.net/

The first version where a ship can be moved by the player just entered svn. It is possible to freely rotate and move the ship. To do so, you need the following keys:

I/K : pitch
J/L : yaw
,/. : roll
U/N : move forward/backward

Give it a try by doing:
svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/opengate opengate

The screenshots of the Liar and the S-W-28 (both weapons manufactured by T&P System) can be found on the website. The models can be found in the subversion tree.

I reworked the screenshots section on the website to use thumbnails. This eases browsing a lot. Next to that I added some screenshots of a (partially) textured Qunatar Storm.

Take a look at it at: http://opengate.sourceforge.net/

I finally managed to set up the website for this project. Currently it only hosts a few "screenshots" (done using Wings3D during modeling). Thanks to MagpieRSS the news submitted in sourceforges news system are visible on the webpage, too.

Look at it at: http://opengate.sourceforge.net/

As promised I present you a screenshot of the result of my approach in texturing:

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=163481&ssid=30653

As of yesterday I started texturing the first ship. It's working out quite well using Inkscape. I will post screenshots to the website once I've set it up (hopefully during this weekend).

Opengate, an open source version of Jumpgate (a 3D space MMORPG) started it's work.

Currently I'm working on creating the content. Sourcecode will follow soon.