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Thousand Parsec Ogre client released!

by jmtan

I would like to announce a new client for Thousand Parsec. This new, true 3d client, brings Thousand Parsec into the 21st century with eye candy galore! Based on the Ogre 3d graphics engine and leveraging the already developed python libraries, this new client provides the following features:

  • 3d models of ships and planets bring Thousand Parsec to life
  • Zoom and rotate the starmap for a better perspective
  • Sound effects

A brief history

The initial prototype for the client was first created by Tim Ansell, the project lead for Thousand Parsec. It was then used as the starting point for a Google Summer of Code project by Eugene Tan, whose job was to support the various features that are available in Thousand Parsec.

Downloading

A windows installer is available from here, while those running from source can view the documentation, for more details. The git repository tag for this release is TPCLIENT_PYOGRE_0_0_1.

Posted: 2008-10-19-1630

Summer Writeup

by Mithro

This was the second year that Thousand Parsec partook in the Google Summer of Code™ and we accomplished even more than we did in our very successful first year. For those who don't know, Thousand Parsec is a framework for building turn based space empire building games. Many different types of rulesets can be developed which have a wide variety of features.

In 2008, we had 8 students, all of whom successfully completed their projects. Together they made a massive contribution to our code base, writing more than 130k lines of code over 5 different modules. This year we were also pleased to see a great deal more collaboration and interaction between our students and Thousand Parsec's wider community.

One of the most exciting projects to come from Summer of Code 2008 is the new 3D client. This takes our existing libraries and couples them with the sweet Python bindings for Ogre 3D (another 2008 mentoring organization) and builds a rich client full of eye candy. Since the completion of the Summer of Code, Eugene Tan has been hard at work to make his first release happen, and plans are on track for him to do so this week. Check out these screenshots for a preview:

Our primary server also got a workout, with 3 students working hard on improving its functionality. All our students work has been merged into mainline and will be in our next release (which is also being preped at this very moment). Ryan Neufeld and Dustin White both added new "quick play" rulesets, while Aaron Mavrinac added ability to remotely configure the server. This gives people a choice of 4 different games to play, 3 of which were developed as Summer of Code projects.

Our prototype and backup server also got some love with Juan Lafont contributing a quick play game of his own creation called "DroneSec". This ruleset required that he also improve many of the server's features and he is in the process of preparing a release.

Aaron, who initially worked on creating the remote configuration of tpserver-cpp, has also been working hard on adding single player support. His work touched and improved all our of sub-projects and even other students projects. Aaron is currently driving the next release of our primary client, which will include a wizard letting anyone setup a local game including the server, AI opponents and other options.

Two students, Victor Ivri and Vincent Verhoeven, each worked on creating AI frameworks and testing them out on the new rulesets developed this year. Having two frameworks allows us to continually refine their abilities and skills, giving people the ability to play non-trivial game scenarios without having to find human opponents.

Zhang Chiyuan's project focused on a completely different tack: adding support for Schemepy to Thousand Parsec. His project allows Scheme to be used from the Python framework. Zhang completely rewrote the existing backends and added a bunch of new backends. In the process, he created a extensive compliance suite which allows for quick checking to ensure our backends are functioning correctly. He has also ported our Python client and servers and to the new interfaces.

Overall, we're very proud of all our student's work and it has all made a dramatic impact on the health and usefulness of Thousand Parsec. Of course, the entire community hopes they continue to contribute in the future. We would like to thank the Google Open Source Team for all their efforts in running such an awesome program.

Finally, congratulations to all of our mentors and students for their many accomplishments!

Posted: 2008-10-16-1400

TPServer-cpp 0.5.1 released.

by Lee

This release is mostly bug fixing, and a bit or refactoring. It certainly feels a lot better to have two months between releases, instead of 14 like the last one.

TPServer-cpp 0.5.1 is on the downloads page and will be on our SF downloads page soon. The GIT repo is tpserver-cpp (branch master) and the tag is TPSERVER_CPP_0_5_1. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

Posted: 2008-07-01-1245

First month of Google Summer of Code

by Mithro

With the first month of GSoC almost gone, I thought I would horribly embarrass all our wonderful students by sending this email which links to all their blogs.

Why not help out and test the students work? Please ask questions or just comment on their blogs! I encourage everyone to at least put the blogs in their feed readers.

Jphr has been working on a Risk clone. He has finally got a working Risk ruleset which he is now debugging. Hopefully he will now create a simple AI to help with his testing :) After the mid-term evaluation he hopes to add options for more interesting variations and universe loading.

JLafont has been working on a totally new game called DroneSec. His progress also has been very good and will soon have a basic playable game. Already a majority of the orders needed have been implemented and combat is taking shape.

Jmtan has created a delicious meal for your eyes with a almost functional 3D client. It already supports a majority of interactions with the server and will soon allow you to easily work with orders. The screen shots look awesome and everyone should check it out. You can come and see some of our cool artwork being shown off.

Ezod has been working on splitting the console from the server. He has successfully make tpserver-cpp a real daemon and is now working on creating a client to actually do the configuration. This should make running servers much easier to run and maintain.

Iwanowitch has been working hard on a rule based AI for RFTS. He has his constraint store almost working and has had a basic client interacting with a server.

Nuleren is working on a game called Tigrus and Euphrates. A large number of orders have been created and the universe is generally taking shape.

vi1985 has been working hard on Iwanowitch's competition :). He has been working on an AI which is based around genetic algorithms. He has a basic java client working to help visualise how the AI will work.

Pluskid has been working hard on improving schemepy. Schemepy will become the backend that all our python components use for scheme parsing. He has gotten both a mzscheme and a guile back end working. He has also tested out various pure-python implementations. The speed improvements for doing scheme processing is very impressive.

Posted: 2008-06-25-1813

Starmapper 3

by JLP

Starmapper is a utility which can display a map of influences of players in space empire building games. Originally Krzysztof Sobolewski (jezuch) designed it for the 4X game but starting with version 3 it can also display nicely coloured maps for Thousand Parsec games. Yesterday beta 6 of Starmapper 3 was released and is ready for testing. You can see Starmapper in action in this video of 5 AI players fighting for the Universe:


Download the high-quality version (AVI, 2 MiB)

Posted: 2008-05-03-1030

TPServer-cpp 0.5.0 released.

by Lee

It's been a year and I've finally got everything going again. This is a huge update. This release includes:

  • RFTS ruleset by xdotx for GSoC 2007
  • TP04 support
  • New IGObject model and persistence
  • More and better control of player's views of objects, etc
  • And much, much more

This is the first release of tpserver-cpp since we moved to git (including full history). So now I have diffstat to give some details. There have been 548 commits in the release. 297 files changed, 21526 insertions(+), 7615 deletions(-). You can browse all 548 commits in the tpserver-cpp gitweb shortlog.

TPServer-cpp 0.5.0 is on the downloads page and will be on our SF downloads page soon. The GIT repo is tpserver-cpp (branch master) and the tag is TPSERVER_CPP_0_5_0. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

Posted: 2008-05-01-2221

Meet Thousand Parsec GSoC 2008 Students

by JLP

A couple of days have passed since eight students found out they will be hacking on Thousand Parsec as part of Google Summer of Code 2008. All have come to Thousand Parsec IRC channel to say Hi in and all of them posted their introductions to Thousand Parsec Development mailing list. Each and every student now also has a spot on the web where they will blog about their experiences and progress. Here’s what they will be working on this summer:

We will also make sure that feeds from our blogs are aggregated on Planet SoC. You will then be able to see all GSoC posts from our blogs in one place and add the feed to your favourite feed reader.

all of us, students and mentors, will do our very best to complete these projects successfully. Exciting months for open source 4X games are ahead of us. I hope you look forward to the results as much as we at Thousand Parsec do.

Posted: 2008-04-23-1400

wxPython Client 0.3.1 Released

by JLP

Hot on the heals of 0.3.0 is the 0.3.1 release of the primary Thousand Parsec client. This release is an incremental improvement over the previous one but it does not lack in improvement. It fixes over 100 bugs found and adds a whole slew of new features.

New features added:

  • More auto-detection around orders, meaning better support for the RFTS ruleset on tpserver-cpp.
  • Copy, paste and quick-insert context menu (on the Orders window) is back.
  • Added ability to request server end the current turn.
  • Added a help menu and some help pop-ups.
  • Added navigation icons.
  • Resource overlay now lets you chose multiple resources to be displayed.
  • Downloads all players and display their info in various locations.
  • Order arguments in Orders window now built from XRC (removes some of the last remaining legacy code).

Notable bugs fixed:

  • Added transparency to the icons used in the system window.
  • Objects on the map are always sorted alphabetically now.
  • Added support for object id order parameter.
  • Tips can now also be translated.

There are also numerous fixes for both Mac and Windows which improve the look and feel. For example, shortcuts now work on Windows, pop-ups no longer steal focus on Mac, etc.

For details see the complete changelog.

The new version is available from our download page. Packages for Debian and Ubuntu will be updated as soon as possible (thanks to bddebian). One of our candidate students for Google Summer of Code, ezod, has also for the first time prepared an overlay for Gentoo. Expect updated ebuilds soon.

Posted: 2008-03-25-2020

Thousand Parsec accepted into Google Summer of Code 2008!

by JLP

Google has just published the list of accepted mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2008. We are extremely happy to report that Thousand Parsec is one of the projects which will have the opportunity to mentor aspiring open source developers.

A few words about us for people who might be interested into Thousand Parsec. Our project is all about turn-based 4X space strategy games, where the player gets to build his very own space empire. We mostly use Python and C++. There is also some code written in Java and PHP. Of course people who know other languages are most welcome too.

If you are interested into having fun developing an open source game and don't mind US$ 4500 of encouragement to go with it, be sure to check these two webpages:

We're sure we will all be as successful as we were last year. Let the fun begin!

Posted: 2008-03-17-2121

Primary Thousand Parsec client version 0.3.0 released!

by Mithro

It's been a long time since the last release of the primary client for playing Thousand Parsec games. Now, the wait is finally over and it was well worth it. Large parts of the client have drastically changed. If you downloaded a previous release and didn't like it, please give this new release a try!

In the version 0.3.0 you will find a lot of new features, such as:

  • Finding servers is now easy! With support for the metaserver protocol the client can get (and display) lists of both remote and local servers.
  • The user interface has been rewritten so that it now uses the wxWidgets AUI interface (like found in Microsoft Visual Studio IDE) and takes advantage of XRC (an XML-based resource system).
  • The client now supports internationalization (under Windows and Linux) and has been translated to Slovenian.
  • Downloading the universe is significantly faster, less likely to get stuck and more informative.
  • The star map has been drastically changed and you can now,
    • Choose how objects are coloured, either on a per player basis or on own versus enemy basis.
    • See the resources availability using the resource pie-chart overlay.
    • Quickly see what is in a star system with new information pop-ups for objects.
    • Issue move orders painlessly with a new waypoint mode and context menu for quickly issuing single orders.
    • Use shortcuts to manipulate the star map using the keyboard.
  • The interface has been drastically improved on long latency links through the ability to see the pending status of orders. The client now works correctly when there are many outstanding changes of any type.
  • You can now filter the systems panel to quickly find the objects you are looking for.
  • You can easily find objects which are idle with new "Object without Orders" window.
  • Quickly changing orders is now much easier with the addition of keyboard shortcuts for order manipulation.

Of course there are thousands of bugfixes, support for easy Debian packaging, better integration on Mac OS X and loads more!

Download of sources and binaries are available from this web site.

I would like to thank Nathan Partlan who has been extremely helpful and is responsible for a number of these new features. Jure Repinc for putting up with the constant headache of translation and helping prepare these release notes. All the people who tested the client and those who put up with the stable client while the development version was being developed.

Posted: 2008-02-18-2107

Project wide progress report

by Lee

Hi all

The main developers thought we should update everyone with what is happening, especially since we haven't had a release lately.

I guess first I should say that there are releases in the works. tpclient-pywx is shaping up (along with the the python libraries) for a release soon. tpserver-cpp is slowly getting closer to release, I'm just working out the last of the TP04 support and getting the database backend to work again. Galaxie client will be released soon too. The first test version of Parsek client is expected to be around the release of KDE 4.0 on January 11, 2008.

One of the cool things lately has been a musician called remaxim doing some space themed music, and adding music and sound effects to the intro video. There is plenty of media yet to be done, include music, sound effects, models and images.

Here are a few things to look forward to next year:

  • New website will help keep all the information together and be easier to navigate
  • MTSec game completed and running on tpserver-cpp
  • New protocol features being used by new games
  • Improved metaserver for finding games

More developers and artists are always welcome to help out.

Another way you support Thousand Parsec is to buy Thousand Parsec things from our cafepress shop: http://www.cafepress.com/thousandparsec. The new TP calendar is available, using the concept art we have so far and it looks fantastic.

We hope you have a happy holiday season and new year.

Regards
Lee (llnz) Begg with mithro, JLP and nash.

Posted: 2007-12-30-1015