Though im a convinced Agnosticist and therefore don't actually belive in or denie the existence of a higher power I still enjoy celebrating Christmas with my Family. I think the "Christmas Spirit" is something created by humans not God...

Whatever, this blogpost isn't about Christmas. It's about this year. What happend, what changed and what are my effort are for the next year or decade in that matters.

I often mentioned political opinions of mine on this blog. Being a fan of free culture and the open source community gave me no choice but be a pirate. The German pirate party, however, for a long time was very inactive. In the last year this changed a lot and I ended up in the leadership of a whole district: The "Piratenpartei Oberfranken" was born.

Sadly, this hardly allowed me to code anything. And if i look at google code i see that my last release of OpenNetwork is nearly a year old. What however doesn't mean that I haven't done anthing. This entry is about what will happen. A change I mostly created a foundation for the last weeks.

Yogi

Before I will talk about my actual Project (which has been in development for like 2 yeard..gosh) I will talk about its open-source foundation. I did some work on OpenNetwork and my new baby OpenAudio.

The first thing to bring them closer is to rename them. In long-term I want to create a fully fledged GameFramework. In short-term I just renamed them to yAudio and yNetwork and added more common types and Class-Interfaces.

I will be trying to push the development of Yogi more and more forward and hope to get some acceptance from the open-source community. My goal is especially to integrated Irllicht - my favorite graphics framework - more closely with yAudio and yNetwork. In the future I eventually will fork Irrlicht by adjusting namespaces and types to fit Yogi better.

The projects are now also hosted on launchpad mainly because Google is starting to scare me but of course also because I am a fan of Ubuntu and Canoncial:

https://launchpad.net/ynetwork

https://launchpad.net/yaudio

Check aroudn these pages in a while. Soon I will upload code there. If you're interested in helping me developing, documenting, packing or testing my frameworks please do not hesistate to contact me.

Project Freedom

Now to the more interesting part - my actual project. I don't even recall anymore the last time I blogged about it. Fact is that development went a lot slower than I expected. Mainly because I am focusing on a nice design (especially server-side) but also because I have these other side projects (mentioned above) going on.

The plan is to finish a tech demo at some place that will show off how the game will eventually be like. And for this point on to get sponsors. The biggest problem at the moment is that I am desperatly looking for good artsits that can supply me with models at affordable payment. If you're interested in working with me and get paid for creating CC-licensed artwork (yeah you heard right) then just contact me.

Parallel to development we use a private wiki to discuss about the mechanics of the game but especially the world and setting. As this is a ORPG 2.0 we also use a Web2.0-style Design Document.

If you have ideas for stories, maybe your own world which could be part of the multiverse mail me your ideas. Eventually they will be included inside the game at some point.

Regarding the velocity of development in the last time I still can say that Project Freedom is going on nicely and the whole architecture is starting to mature. I belive that at one point I can really be proud of the work that I do and have done over the past months (and if i think about it, years).

The 3d engine I use to program was just released in a new version.

Irrlicht has been a very interesting way for me to learn programming. Having used it for 4 years already I still find new things I can do with it each time I use it. With this Blogpost I wan to thank Niko, Bitplane , hybrid and all the other geniouses behind it!

You can download it here.

There will also be updated packages on my PPA soon. At the moment the package still uses a SVN-copy.

I thought that my JavaScript would block all those spambots. But now I've a lot of annoying comments on my page.

Think I've got to find a better way to prevent spam.

A little Video that connects both computer graphics and politics ;)

Lately I am extremely busy supporting the Pirate Party so I didn't have much time blogging. To give you something to read on I will once again recommend a nice CC-Band.

Nayaree is a french metal band that really fits my personal taste. It doesn't seem like they're active anymore but you can still listen to their songs.

The last days were really incredible.

In Germany the Pirate Movement really started growing. Having passed 1000 members only about a months ago we now already have over 2000. Even one of our MEPs left his party and is now a pirate. It is really wonderful to see so many people fighting for a free and democratic country?

Additionally, on Saturday people in all Germany started a big demonstration in serveral cities. But see for yourself.

The anthem for our election victory :)

The blogsoftware I use finally was released stable and this blog was updated. The last bugs should have disapeared now.

You may have wondered why there was hardly any update or post on my blog the last weeks.

Thing is I've been working on the OpenNetwork for some time again now. One thing that really bugged me was the UDP port that still was too buggy an unreliable. I however wanted to port the Client-Server-Communtication of ProjectFreedom from TCP to UDP so I had to improve the UDP-Port a lot to not get into troubles there.

The first thing I changed was the way the messages where send/queued inside the port. Unreliable and reliable messages are handled the same way now. Also the port is able to split up big messages (several dozend kbs!) into small chunks and send them. The pinging of the port is now based on the latency. If its bigger resends and timeouts have bigger time interavals.

Looks kinda nice he? What I still miss is encryption and checksums. I am not sure if I should use third-party libraries for that or implent my own stuff.

Second, I forked cAudio to OpenAudio, which is very similar to cAudio but fits better into the project. So basically its just namespace changes and renames of classes and types.

Third, serveral improvements here and there in Project Freedom. The server architecture is now much more stable because I separted connection and process handling. In future it'll also be possible to have several ConnectionServers to support more players (and crashes).

Whatever I don't want to talk too much about things I am working on. I'll tell more when good results are there.

Today I want to recommend another nice framework: cAudio.

For some time I've been searching for a nice and open-source sound engine. Sadly there aren't many especially when it comes to 3d sound.

Raynaldo Rivera, a nice guy from the irrlicht forums, has created a wrapper around OpenAL that supports everythign a programmer could ask from a sound framework. It is not only object-oriented and straightfoward but also plugin-based so you can easily add own codecs.

But the best thing I didn't mention yet. cAudio is contained in my PPA as Debian package so YOU can easily install it. Just look for libcaudio.