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!