LinuxTag 2000
June 28th - July 1st in Stuttgart, Germany.
The LinuxTag for the first time took place outside the
University of Kaiserslautern, where the LinuxTag was born five years
ago - and originally it had only be a single day, thus the name.
The previous year had shown that the University could not afford enough
place for over 7000 visitors, also many interested companies had to be
rejected because of the lack of space for exhibition stalls. So this year
the LinuxTag was held in the congress center in Stuttgart which offers
enough space. Since years the concept of the LinuxTag is to let the commercial
companies pay a fee for a place at the exhibition and to use this money
to sponsor stalls for all open source or free projects. 
This year, in contrast to the last year, the calculation did not work
out as expected because many companies had not been too gracious. So Worldforge
got a big stall (roughly 4 meters wide), but we had to bring our own computer
hardware.
Very probably the next year we will be better, since Pegasus was very
active on the exhibition in searching and finding companies which are willing
to provide us with hardware and support the next year. (namely Transtec
and HP)
Well at least we have now some phone numbers were we may kindly ask
for sponsorship.
We
set of to Stuttgart around 1:00 am at Wednesday night as Karsten had been
away the days before. It was not too bad to arrive in Stuttgart in the
middle of the night, because driving in Stuttgart city at days time is
a nightmare !
After a short sleep in our hotel we reached the exhibition center in
the morning and met Stefanus who was already there, a bit tired as well,
because of his 12 hours flight from Brunei.
Then the usual fun of plugging together the PCs, installing Linux,
compiling UClient and configuring the network started.
We had brought our own PCs in addition to the machine of Meinrad Fiedler,
a colleque of Karsten. The installing of everything took nearly the whole
day, but the first UClient showed up at about 1:00pm and Pegasus had decorated
the stall with her posters even earlier ! During the day James arrived
as well, so our Worldforge team was complete then.
The
next days could be summed up by:
- getting up early (ignoring the headache)
- representing Worldforge *
- enjoying Stuttgart's nightlife
The
interest for Worldforge was quite high. Mainly we showed Acorn, because
we though it would be important to present a "product", something
that people are able to get hold of and once we had arosen their interest
we could explain the project's intension more detailed.
We
think that this concept worked out well because many visitors asked
much more then "When will it be playable and how can I get it ?"; most
people were interested to understand who we are and what we are aiming
at.
Many RPG fans were fascinated about the idea to have access to a free
system which allows them the creation of online RPGs. Strange in some way,
however, was the fact that we had to explain to many irretated visitors:
"No, we do not directly earn money with this. Yes, it is free. Yes, most
of us do it for fun."
From this and from the fact that more commercial companies than open
source projects were present at the LinuxTag, one can tell that the LinuxTag
has become quite commercial.
Besides
this PR work, which also involved the distribution of roughly one thousand
flyers, the days had been very productive: Stefanus, James, and Karsten
coded on UClient and Atlas while Pegasus reworked the Agrilan map which
got showed inside UClient for the first time on the LinuxTag.
Even a simple collision detection had been temporary added to cyphesis.
We should not forget to mention that Shaman and Beosil showed up. Shaman
and Stefanus installed our webcam which we mounted on a rotating fan in
order to provide live images from Stuttgart in the web.
But
LinuxTag was not only an exhibition; there were several lectures and talks
covering product presentations, tutorials and general talks. The most interesting
talks were surely those held by Richard Stallman and Alan Cox (see him
inside the red circle).
Summed up we think that our presentation at the LinuxTag was a success
and we hope to have arosen many people's interest. We are looking forward
to the next year.
Spiel 2000
October 26th - 29th in Essen, Germany
A
general games exhibition showing mostly board games, where RPGs were mainly
associated with Pen and Paper games. We went there for a day because of
general interest but mainly in order to meet the people from FOGI, who
had rent a stall there. Clement Knoell from FOGI had offered on @general
to lay out some of our handouts on their stall, which we did. We
had a long discussion with the FOGI people about the different aims of
FOGI and WF. The people from FOGI want above all to create a MMORPG (where
the emphasize lies on GAME) and for a faster development they do not code
the tools themselves but use existing solutions, namely 3D-Gamestudio (TM
Conitec). This tool is a complete 3D online game engine which offers
a proprietary scripting language for the actual game implementation. With
this FOGI managed to create a demo with some simple NPCs and environment
interaction like tree cutting within two months. Worldforge needed
for a comparable product about one and a half years, but WF is not bound
to the options offered by a single product. Not to forget that you do not
need to pay for special software if you want to contribute to WF.
Very interesting were the discussion about the used 3D engine and the
used models. The FOGI people are using comparable low polygon models for
their player characters, as it cannot be controlled how many players are
at one spot - in contrast to NPCs. So if using high polygon modells for
the characters the number of polygons to display in one scene could explode
in case of a grand come together. FOGI uses models with a about 500-700
polygons.
They also restrict the texture size to 256x256 pixels in order to also
support low end 3D accelerators; from their impression most RPG players
do not own high end machines.
Currently the future of FOGI is unsure; regarding to Clement FOGI lacks
active developers. Besides this the interest in a common media archive
is high. FOGI has already collected lots of 3D models fitting into a fantasy
world; these could be useful for WF as well. In return FOGI is interested
in our texture collection.
Pegasus Karsten
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