News

Recently I’ve done some work on adding proper path finding to Cyphesis. This is something we (surprisingly enough one might think) have been lacking for so many years. The work isn’t done yet, but here’s a short demonstration of the work in progress.

I’ve just pushed some changes to the Ember client which makes it conform to the XDG Basedir spec. The main difference is that the ~/.ember directory isn’t used anymore. Instead configuration files are put in ~/.config/ember while data files are put in ~/.local/share/ember. During startup the contents of ~/.ember will be migrated, and a backup will be made in ~/.emberlegacy. Many thanks to Olek Wojnar for making the bulk of the changes.

I just pushed a rather large changeset to the Cyphesis server which redesigns the mind code so that all AI code now is handled by one or many processes separate from the server. This is a big change to how the Cyphesis server works. Previously all world simulation and mind code was handled by the one Cyphesis executable, in one single threaded process. Now the server instead only focuses on world simulation and various house keeping tasks, while separate processes handle all AI code.

We’ve now merged the work Yaroslav Taben did last summer on a new entity filtering system. For a lack of better name we’re calling it the Entity Query Language. Why is this needed? A lot of the AI code in Cyphesis deals with selecting and acting on entities. Consider a “Flee” goal for example. This should be used by weak creatures to flee from dangerous creatures. As soon as a dangerous creature comes within range the creature to which the goal belongs to should turn tail and elope.

During the summer three students have worked on Worldforge as part of Google Summer of Code. With this year’s program now coming to a close we would like to highlight these three students and the work they’ve done. Céline Noël, Smartbody integration in Ember Céline has been working on integrating the Smartbody system into Ember. Smartbody is a comprehensive system for simulating human behaviour, with all of the subtle body movements that natural motion entails.