Several developers are going to be/are/were at LCA08 in Melbourne. This page is about the topics of the developments meeting(s) help there. Feel free to add things we should discuss. It is likely that not everything will be discussed.
All discussion should go on the mailing lists. This page is for documenting things which need discussion and their results.
Vision and goals are fairly straight forward. Just need to be articulated.
The protocol and tpserver-cpp (and others) now supports a lot more features than Minisec or MTSec will use. Are we doing the right thing?
Writing a good AI is hard. The processing power needed is not trivial, and log files are huge. Do we need more AI development/framework/etc, or do we need to "eat our own dogfood" and play the games more?
Result: Discussion postponed.
This page http://blog.mithis.net/archives/tp/15-tp-protocol-overview is still quite relavent - will do an updated version.
When, what, how?
Although it is generally referred to as a research "tree", most games with unlockable technology actually implement a directed acyclic graph. A technology that can be researched is represented by a node in this graph and dependencies on other technology is represented by the edges.
See the following thread http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.games.tp.devel/720
Result: Proposal in the development, based on discussion on the mailing and at LCA. Proposal here.
When, what, how?
Leave for TP05.
Result: A simple diplomacy system (ie levels of relationship only) will be added in TP04. A proposal will be sent to the mailing list soon.
From the protocol3.php
Formatted Strings are exactly like normal strings but use the structured text method for formatting their contents. For a complete description of structured text please see the following document. This allows display of color, underline, super/subscript and much more. It is also easy to convert to plain text or HTML.
Except there is no "following document".
Result: The tags we are going to allow at this time are:
- <p> --- Begin an end a paragraph.
- <em> --- Emphas ised text, generally represented as italic.
- <strong> --- Strong text, generally represented as bold.
- <h1>--<h3> --- Headings, 3 levels.
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1826443&group_id=132078&atid=723099
Result: Reference to mod times being in seconds will be removed. Mod times will be global (to game/server) serial numbers. Significant work in tpserver-cpp will be required to support this.
When is everything going to talk it?
Result: When it's done.
Finish discussion from mailing list and get it added to the order parameters.
Result: Add the resource order parameter and the generic reference selection list order parameter.
Finish any discussion about this..
AKA features vs filters...
We now have two ways to create a secure connection between client and server, first is the ssl port, and new in TP04 is the ssl filter. Do we need both? Do we need a way for the server to force security in some form on a client before the login frame?
In general, some of the feature Ids could be removed, or made into filters. What do we do?
Result: Keep both currently. At TP05 look again. No way for server to force client to use security before login if only have filters.
Need to figure this out.
Result: Some documentation was already online on the wiki at Media.gz.
Need to figure this out.
Are we going to change it? When? Who?
Also update to metaserver-lite-rewrite?
ikiwiki - Combinding website and wiki into one.
Result: Not a high priority. Need someone to take the lead. Lee will look at updating to metaserver-lite-rewrite (sometime). ikiwiki seems the most likely wiki to be used.
(Suggested by pschulz01)
Result: Lee talked with pschulz01 at the conference. Should leave the debian directory out of the tarballs. Slightly different packaging between Ubuntu and Debian (namely version numbering). We need someone who would like to be involved in packaging for Ubuntu/Debian.
What to do with it? What about money from swag,
- Another competition?
- TP Developers conference?
- Better servers?
- Start up non-profit