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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

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

by JLP

4Xmas Thousand Parsec community wishes happy holidays to everyone, especially all the fans of turn-based 4X strategy games. We hope the past year has been as successful for you as it was for us. We will try our best to make the year 2008 even more stellar. To find out what cool new features are coming through a wormhole near you, be sure to check the website again in a few days. Until then keep 4X-ing the Galaxy.

Posted: 2007-12-27-2008

Summer of Code results!

by Mithro

I have been meaning to do a Summer of Code round-up/results report for a while now, but had been putting it off until I could get some statistics from Ohloh. As they have now fixed the problem they where having with git branches, there is no excuses. I have previously mentioned my thoughts about the program on my own blog but I'm going to provide a more comprehensive wrap-up of our Summer of Code.

If you have a good memory (or just look through our history) you will remember that we had 4 students participating. By the end of the Summer 3 students has successfully completed their projects. According to Oholo, over the summer the students made a total of 371 commits to our public repository, changing a total of 39,050 lines of code. As well, over the next couple of months most of the code that the students have written will be released for everyone to use. The successful projects are listed below.

Participating in the Summer of Code has meant that students from around the world have started trying to figure out how to make Thousand Parsec part of their course work.

One such student is Nathan Partlan aka greywhind who is doing a full year internship with Thousand Parsec. He is helping me to make some much needed improvements to tpclient-pywx and has already pushed multiple changes into the incoming branch.

Over the next 6 months, it is likely that students from the University of South Australia will be working on developing a Java MIDP client. This should allow anyone to login to a server from their Java enabled mobile phone!

If you are a student (or just anyone!) who wants to get in on some of this cool action, feel free to send us an email, jump on IRC or join the mailing lists. We have a todo tracker which lists some ideas which you could get started with, feel free to suggest your own ideas. There are both coding and non-coding tasks!

As you can see the Summer of Code has been really great. Not only have we have had some cool code produced the program has opened up opportunities we had not even considered before. Hopefully Google will let us participate again next year!

Posted: 2007-10-20-1302