HOWTO Contribute to Cube and the Community

I was attracted to the Cube Engine for two reasons; the awesome freestyle editor, and the open source code. This is not unlike many other people who discover this amazing technology and decide they want to do something with it, and like them I attempted to do this in the open source "spirit" by attempting to contribute back to the core project; Sauerbraten. Now, this came as a shock to me when I finally figured it out, but although the Cube Engines are indeed released as open source so that they are free as in beer - the project itself is not run accepting contributions from every developer that comes along. This project has tight control over what can and can't be done, there are rules which were set down a long time ago which results in the compact engine you see today.

As I did when I first came along, there are would-be contributors that would like to see a certain ("advanced") feature in the engine, and attempt to create and share this with the developers. Unfortunately, in almost all cases what could be a good idea with good intention goes unwanted and unused, through no real fault of either the developers or the person trying to contribute. There is simply a miscommunication about how things are really done, and nobody explaining how to do it properly. Cube Engine and Cube Engine 2 (Sauerbraten/Eisenstern) is and always will be the property of Wouter "Aardappel" van Oortmerssen, he came up with the original idea, design, and goal of the project. To this day it adheres closely to that which it sets out to be, a simple and compact engine with fast and generic gameplay. Over the years the map format and rendering technology may have improved, but it remains one of the smallest engines with the largest range of useful features, plus the fact anyone can make a map sure is cool!

So, you may notice that when you do come upon the project and give a suggestion or contribute a patch, it will be passed over. Don't take offense, as the gameplay and feature set in Cube Engine 2 (Sauerbraten) is what it is, and won't be advancing any further as it already does everything it sets out to do. The future of advancements within the engine are in the projects that make use of it, and participate in a more open source collaborative atmosphere, as well as content for Sauerbraten such as maps, models, and textures. Like most gaming communities, we suffer from an abundance of code, with a severe lack of artists and content. Projects (not only in the Cube Engine communities) everywhere need more artists and people making content that allows the developers to present their respective games in a more polished manner; this is demonstrated in both AssaultCube and Blood Frontier, where the Total Conversion ends up looking alot better than the original because of a few dedicated people who give it heaps of tender loving care. The Cube Engines themselves though rarely live up to their true potential because of the limitations on development progress, which in turn scares off contributors.

So when you do come to the decision you want to help out, I'd just say stop and think about what you would really like to accomplish. If it's a gameplay or code feature, does Blood Frontier, AssaultCube, or Sandbox already do that, or would it suit them and you help them do it? If it's artwork or content, you simply need to decide which game suits the style you like, the variety between the different Cube Engine based games is diverse, so there should be something for most people's tastes. With all that said, there is more than just developing code and art when it comes to making awesome games which look and feel great. The community softwares that drive content sharing (like Quadropolis) suffers from a lack of web designers, as do other projects and their websites/communities, some may even have a lack of documentation or another barrier which stops new users from instantly liking it. Have a look around and see what could be better, then offer to fix it or provide a better alternative.

At the end of it all, when you've got something set in your mind and you want to see if you can go through with it, contact the respective project. If it has to do with the community, Blood Frontier, or Sauerbraten/Cube, both eihrul and myself (quin) are on IRC at all times, and within each channel there is usually someone who can answer your questions if one of us can't get to you straight away. As open source developers who spend the bulk of our time invested in making a better product for everyone else, IRC is our most reliable and effective form of communication. If you don't have an IRC client, you can always use a web interface like Mibbit.

• Cube Engine/Sauerbraten: #sauerbraten on irc.quakenet.org (Mibbit Gateway)
• AssaultCube: #assaultcube on irc.quakenet.org (Mibbit Gateway)
• Blood Frontier: #bloodfrontier on irc.freenode.net (Website)
• Sandbox: #sandbox on irc.oftc.net (Mibbit Gateway)
• Intensity Engine: #intensityengine on irc.freenode.net (Mibbit Gateway) (new!)

I also keep a fresh and more elaborate list on the Blood Frontier Collaborate page, with pointers to stuff in the community, and be sure to check this blog for new project announcements, more people are realising what they can do with this engine every day. Hope this helps you get started, and in the right direction, there's something for everyone, even if they don't know it, so get started working with this great technology and community today!

Status of Sandbox - December 2008

It has been extremely quiet on this blog, and I just thought I'd blab on for a bit on what I've been up to in sandbox, we're allowed to do that right? ;)

Since the last blog post, sandbox has gained a fair amount of smexy new stuff including Blendmaps, fixes to some very critical and old bugs, and highly improved stair physics, which are all imports from upstream cube 2.
On our end we've added several new textures from OpenFootage, I've made lots more myself, specially in those related to snow, the normalmaps for the OF ones and improvements to some of those in our last test release :)
We've also added.... SNOW!!!
needless to say eihrul was not happy with the code :P
We've also completely rewritten our skies menu, with recently imported floating point math functions being in use all over ;)

Last but not least, I've been working on a Side Scrolling Platformer module for sandbox
for those living in caves/basements for the majority of their lives, and don't know what SSP is, think of some of the older sonic/mario games.... but in 3D :P
I've been hard at work, but at the moment we feature...

• full 360 degree camera movement


• dumb monsters that do little more than fall, interact with entities and give/receive booboos


• pickups, which are all defined in script


• booboos by landing on something's head


• jumppads with relative motion (ie, adds onto xy movement, doesn't replace)


• cool little particle splashes when landing in water/lava


• creatures flicker when hurt, phasing in and out 10 times a second

There's still a lot of work to do on Sandbox's SSP, but progress is coming along very nicely, I'm aiming to have it ready by 2.4.
As I already mentioned, there's still a lot to do; armour, weapons, projectiles, monster waypoint navigation, player axis switches, head butting boxes, monster inflicting damage or touch, event images, equipment icons, powerups, end level triggers are just naming the tip of the iceberg, and completely ignores all the art we're going to need

Now for a random screenshot from before monsters did anything!

I'm also going to see if I can get calimer to make the next release on christmas.
till then, if anyone wants to check it out, just download our SVN and run sandbox with -gssp, I'm also trying to pressure ZKAT into adding a few buttons for -g in the launcher, so using our SVN may be a bit inconvenient till he does.

~Hirato Kirata

Your Thoughts

The question: "What do you think about the idea of a development blog?"

The response: 44 votes.

Okay, I guess.	12 (27%)
Awesome!	28 (63%)
Doesn't really interest me.	2 (4%)
Don't know..	2 (4%)

Well, I must say that I am overwhelmed at the interest expressed by this poll. It seems like we have a nice handful of people who are truly interested in seeing more information sharing surrounding the Cube Engines. You all know my take on what needs doing around here from my first post, but now I turn the question to the community: What kind of information do you want to see published here?

I am tempted to post tutorials and information snippets along with the general community development news, but feel that this may very well duplicate efforts on documentation or wiki's - we haven't had alot of luck teaching people the Cube way of thinking in the past and a major barrier to some people is the lack of documentation. I maintain my efforts to keep this community collaborating by a thread at best, we're an ad-hoc bunch of rogues who seem to have all ended up here. Comments, suggestions, ideas? Y'know the drill.

Universally Speaking

Overall production on projects for me has slowed alot since the Alpha 2 release of Blood Frontier, I've been recharging and playing Sauerbraten way more than usual. During this time, I gotten a feel for the lay of the land out there in the community, as well as a general idea of what people are wanting the most; one of my first steps in providing a better method of collaboration was setting up this blog. It is all well and good to set up a blog, but how useful is it without anything on it?

I'd like to take some time to outline the projects that are coming up, have been pending or in demand within the community. With all the projects forking the Cube 2 codebase for their own purposes, there is little hope of flawless interoperability of code - and while we can exchange code or ideas, one of the biggest things we have in common is the type of content or assets we are producing. Recently, I spearhead a task alongside eihrul to make a universal tool that converted a TrueType font into one that is usable in Cube Engine based games, called TTF2Font, and hopefully it will not be the last of its kind of utility.

There has been some requests to help and others for help, as well as ".. X kind of thing would be nice .." sort of talk for as long as anyone can remember, but currently there has been a particular focus on content distribution and creation. It is not hard to understand why this is on the tips of everyone's tongue, part of the attraction of the engine is the stuff we can make with it. Quadropolis, our community site for content circulation has served a decent enough purpose but has always been riddled with problems, the most common of which is packaging; this has spurred discussions from creating a universal packaging format for Cube Engine games to using Quadropolis itself to create the packages appropriate, and even for Quadropolis to serve content to users inside the game environments.

While these may be very well good ideas, we need to start looking at the practicality of doing each task, and I feel the need to highlight one key issue; the lack of community control over the Cube Engine 2 project itself. Things need to be designed with this in mind - anything created must not depend on something being added to any individual project - because it will most likely not happen due to communication and idealogical problems. So how do we create a universal structure for a community filled with such chaos? It does seem sometimes that this uphill battle is pointless, but it does come down to something as simple as organisation and participation.

Currently in the works is an effort to open up community development to the very people that participate in it, with the Quadropolis project on SourceForge. Slowly, I am populating the SVN with things that need to be worked on, like the Quadropolis CMS and the utilities like TTF2Font. In an effort to minimize further spreading of the community resources, I will be conducting this along side my work on Blood Fronter in our channel #bloodfrontier on Freenode. If you are interested in helping out/joining in any capacity in the community, be it to one or more of the many mod projects or common areas, please feel free to pop in an have a chat to me or anyone else lurking there. I can help out among the myriad of other things I do, but think it is up to the people who want these things to tackle getting them done.

• Quadropolis CMS
• Cube Website CMS/Forum (Lower Priority)
• Universal Packaging Format
• Inter-game Content Browsing
• Method for sharing Code Snippets and Blocks

All mod projects (probably) need the following:

• Modellers and graphical artists.
• Sounds and ambience.
• Documentation and other resources.
• Maps and related assests (Blood Frontier could especially use maps atm).
• For you to spread the word!

Platinum Arts Sandbox

I believe quin wants everyone to introduce themselves before we get started on sharing 1337 4w350m3 f4c75 about the cube 2 engine, which others may not know about, development tutorials on how to add certain features to your mod, tutorials to create simplistic and good looking art, etc.

I'm Hirato, from the sandbox project, I handle pretty much all the code and script related stuff, and strangely enough, a good deal of the art too Calimer (aka. mike) is the other member of the team, he 'founded' the project', and these days seems to handle all the PR stuff. As of this writing, we're currently up to release 2.2.0, with Mike doing a 2.2.2 test release this Friday, just so that people can see how we're progressing to 2.3 :)

Sandbox is aimed a lot more at kids, as such, violence was removed, in other words, you can't blow stuff up, or dismember others... though there's the exception of pushing them into the lava :P, but there's a nastylava var, so lava doesn't necessarily have to kill. Due to the removal of violence, we focus a lot of our attention to ambience, mood, setting (regarding maps), and we try to make the interface as easy to use, and informative as possible, though, anyone will straight away realise, it's not much different compared to sauer, even if we have received comments about editing being easier in sandbox, compared to sauer.

Code wise, we're completely up to date with the sauerbraten CVS, along with many features of our own, sandbox can be customised a lot easier, compared to sauer. we also try to do a lot of examples for people to follow. If you look at our collection of maps, specially those by me, you'll notice that they each take certain aspects to huge extremities, like mansion and the spotlights, forest and the huge abuse of mapmodels or village and the [very natural looking|smooth] terrain.

While talking of features, I've ripped the rpg module out, and integrated moviecube into our code base, in return I contribute bugfixes to the moviecube brach, if you'd like a play with it, just run the svn sandbox with -gmovie, you can look at the semi-official moviecube site, here (yes, I know it's a sourceforge site :P), offtools (Thomas), provides a lot of extra animations with his machinima mod (moviecube), so I would suggest you check out his version, if you want your character to wipe crumbs from his shirt, hug the air, and point in various directions, while we do support this stuff too, we haven't animated the models, specially since I don't have the blend files geartrooper used for robochimp.

Other features, I'm especially proud of, are...

• Ability to change the hud colours, and textures in realtime, without relaunching the game, or recompiling


• The fifth entity attribute, we've already put it to rather creative uses, mostly as a bonus trigger range on mapmodels, lensflare sizes, and fadetimes of many other particles


• Miscelaneous edithud information, despite the fact that it may seem pretty bloated, this is one of the things that make sandbox easier to use


• Particles 11! that's right! we have text particles! :D


• we got rid of the need for const char *savedconfig, configurations are now saved as config_${cl->gameident}.cfg, and each module can define their own loading logo image :D


• There are functions that rename the window, based on what's happened, like when you're loading a map, calculating lightmaps, generating PVS data, etc.

I can't think of anymore, besides, I've probably yapped on long enough, if anyone wants to check out the project, please visit:

http://kids.platinumarts.net

If you want some eye candy, here's some screenshots for you of 3 different maps, two of which are still in production. PS: freaking insane resolution warning.

Plexus Introductions

First a thank you to Quin for setting this resource up, hopefully it will turn into something really useful for all of us dabbling in Sauer's source code!

My name is Roy Riggs. I am a member of TEAM CTHULHU a programming team that formed back in the late 1980s when we met while in college while at Purdue. Fresh off William Gibson's teat, we've always this a dream of building cyberspace. Back then it was MUDs, but now the sky is the limit!

Our latest endeavor is a project called Plexus. You could think of it sort of like Sauer in that it's not just a game, but a platform for making games, and once its up and running we hope others will dive in and create their own rulesets. Time will tell.

At this phase in it's life, Plexus is more of a collection of cool features to get our platform up to snuff. Our first release won't really have a game to play other than making and exploring maps made by other people. Probably mind numbingly boring to existing Sauer fans, but you have to start somewhere. Anways, here's some of the things we're going to have. Naturally our code base is open source, zlib license to be exact, so if anything looks to be of interest to your project, feel free to poke around our repository! I'll focus on things that might be of interest to other Sauer modders.

P2P Networking – All information is stored in a cloud. Models, maps, everything. No central server means that there’s no downtime, and no need to worry about which server your friends are on. Uses Free Pastry for communication. Although this is all independent of our Sauer mods, it's a big deal, so I had to mention it!

Socket level control of Sauerbraten - We've spliced in a socket to communicate with Sauer so you can control the engine from any outside application that uses this protocol. We're writing our stuff in Groovy but you could make your own game using Python or what have you. This allows developers to use whatever language they wish.

World of Warcraft style mouse handling - Sauers mouse handling is frightening for anything other than an FPS, so we've reworked it to be exactly like WoW's. You can even orbit the camera around your toon for screenshots. There are still some bugs/quirks with this in edit mode, but in general it makes editing Sauer maps so much easier.

Randomly generated maze maps - Nothing too fancy, but we don't have many artists helping on the project yet so anything that up the appearance of content is good. Our sauer socket protocol has additional functions to allow external creation of maps.
Importing of Dwarf Fortress maps - There's a popular indie game called Dwarf Fortress which uses old school ASCII style maps. We have an importer that can load these maps into Sauer using the same interface as the random maze generation.

Custom models/costumes – I wrote a model importer that imports md2 and md3 models and creates the md3.cfg so you can load them into Sauer. We modded the engine to allow changing player models on the fly.

Feel free to check out our Plexus Blog for updates!

Share the Collaborative Spirit

It has been over four years since the first public release of Sauerbraten, during which time Cube Engine 2 technology has evolved significantly. Not only is it a platform for building games in a new and exciting way, but working with it is in and of itself an artform. We have plenty of neat features to play with, and amazing eyecandy effects done efficiently and cleanly, which makes it a great choice for anyone looking to make their own games quickly in today's market using open source software.

I myself, started modding with the original Cube Engine quite some time ago, creating fun little things with my friends in Coop-Edit and tweaking the interface with it, but it wasn't until a few years ago I decided I needed to do something more constructive with this knowledge. Joining in with the community, through the forums, Quadropolis, and on IRC, I started a project to give Sauerbraten bots, which soon snowballed into an effort to enhance the game with things that both myself and the community wanted, which was later known as SauerMod. While this was a fun and educational experience, I was inherently limited in my ability to push the boundaries of what we could do with the engine due to the fact I was trying to maintain compatibility with the original.

Fortunately, I worked very openly in the community helping others with their own things (when they'd demonstrated to me they were serious and productive of course), which is how I met Tony Cord, my current partner in the Blood Frontier project. We have worked for over a year together building a totally new game from the Cube Engine, helping people reevaluate their view of what can be done, and just how good things can look with some TLC. During all my development efforts, I have always tried to maintain a presence in the community and fostering the open source collaborative "spirit", and that is exactly what I hope to accomplish in this blog, with everyone.

One thing I have found during my time in the community, is that quite alot of people using the engine are cut off from each other communicatively, apart from the Cube Engine forums and Quadropolis. While I have been trying to foster this spirit in the community, it hasn't been as good or as easy as it could be. Hopefully, this blog can serve as a central hub for Cube Engine modders, developers, arists, and supporters; where sharing information and and the bits we learn along the way is paramount. Together we can help further our knowledge of what can be done with this amazing technology, while sharing that with the rest of the world, and it would be great if you would all join me in this effort.

Here, I will try to cover all areas of Cube Engine development, from working with the source code and adding your own stuff, to the web development of the forums and Quadropolis, with open discussions on future endeavours, and who knows, maybe I can coax others to do the same along the way.