Subject: [Nel] .shape file format change

From: "Daniel Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:08:48 +0200

A quick word of warning to anybody downloading a new version of the 3D
library:
The latest version of the *.shape file reading code is not backwards
compatible beyond versions 6.  This means that you may need to re-generate
your .shape files in order for the latest code to read them.

Regards to all
Daniel.

---

From: "Valerio Santinelli" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 08:55:25 +0200

Just one personal thought.. how many people are actually developing on NeL,
except those at Nevrax themselves?

It would be a good idea to keep the nevrax.org homepage updated with news
like this one and with some more documentation in order to get people
started on how the overall system works. Nowaday the only real documentation
is the one about the Network library which is good but it's not enough.

--
Valerio Santinelli
http://www.digisoft-multimedia.it/

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Miller" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 6:08 PM
Subject: [Nel] .shape file format change

> _______________________________________________
> Nel mailing list
> [email-masked]
> /mailman/listinfo.cgi/nel
>

---

From: Vincent Caron <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 14:43:05 +0200

> except those at Nevrax themselves?

From time to time, I checkout the CVS, compile, make some introspection in
the code ... To keep informed, I'm involved in game programming and
crossp-platform development.

The nevrax.org site is well designed and has rather comprehensive docs.
However this looks too much as a shop's display, it's laking some life...
For instance, we don't have a roadmap and I think the users were a
bit lost when the whole code was redesigned these last months. Posting
the change logs in a regular basis is part of the solution, you should
also talk about the directions, the problem encountered in your game
development, ask for some debates on technical questions ... I know
this is not easy.

NeL is also a consequent piece of code, and most importantly an application
framework : you don't choose to rely on it that easily ! :) People will
surely consider NeL more massively after Nevrax's game release. You could
also use Snowballs to make it an easy and agreable way to learn about
NeL : for instance, a document explaining step by step how to start from
a simple game design to a client/server application that does the job
would be a very valuable information that would gain you a thankful
audience. I believe this 'tutorial' thing would help with the very abstract
and austere look of nevrax.org. The screenshots where a very good idea
indeed, a lot of people coulnd't affort time and competence to compile
NeL+SnowBalls. And while we are at it, what about packaging binaries ? :)
'NeL-sdk', ready to code ...

Enough said, let's checkout that CVS !

---

From: "Daniel Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:01:25 +0200

I was just drafting a reply to Valerio Santinelli's mail when this one
turned up, so I guess I'm replying to both postings at once.

First for the Nevrax.org home page: the news is all badly out of date and
doesn't show what's going on at the moment.  Sorry about that.  We're just
sorting out our internal knitting so that we can post news more easily.
There should be a general improvement at this level soon.

For the roadmap - my mail of last week entitled 'a bit of news' contains a
loose plan for the next few months. It'll go up on the site some time soon.
I'm not sure if it contains the information you're after - please shout if
it doesn't.

On the documentation side - We posted a handfull of new 'features' documents
under the different library headings earlier this week. Any feedback would
be very much appreciated. Beyond that we have been discussing what docs
would be good to write among ourselves. Any ideas are very welcome although
our time for writing dociments is a bit limitted right now!; The problem
with 'how to design and build an MMORPG' type docs is that they warrant an
entire book - and I don't have time to write a whole book right now :(.
I'll see what I can do.

Snowballs is being re-written (to look more like a designed program and less
like the accumulation of a few dozen chunks of test code spaghettied
together). We're just starting, so our first steps 'll be up on line
shortly...

For a binary sdk - it's a good idea - We'll look into it. :)

Regards to all
Daniel

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
Vincent Caron
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:43 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Nel] .shape file format change

---

From: "Valerio Santinelli" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:41:58 +0200

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Miller" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 4:01 PM

> There should be a general improvement at this level soon.

I spoke to Lecroart about this point. I think that keeping the site up to
date at least once a week wouldn't require a great effort. I'm not asking
you to report on the news page every single change that happens upon the
codebase. Just some generic news about what's going on in order to know that
the project is still alive.

> I'm not sure if it contains the information you're after - please shout if

The roadmap you posted last week has been greatly appreciated on my part. :)
I hope that you can keep sending those once every one or two weeks ;)

> entire book - and I don't have time to write a whole book right now :(.

I've just looked at the new docs. I'm going to print them all and read them
with ease later on during those lonely nights :)

I'm not going to ask you to write a "how to design and build a MMORPG" book.
That's out of our scope. If I'm evaluating NeL, it's because I am already
designing an MMORPG and I'm evaluating a framework that would reduce the
efforts needed to code all the game from grounds up.
The kind of documentation that I'm looking for in the future is something
that gives an overview of how the pieces of the NeL framework are tied
together, and then, some more indeep documentation about how to build a new
3D entity, how to make a connection to the server and all those things that
explain what objects should be used and which method should be called to
accomplish the main operations.

> together). We're just starting, so our first steps 'll be up on line

I'm not pressing you to make a new Snowballs in no time. You've got all the
time you need (I know that I have no influence over this, anyway :))
I just wish that the new Snowballs will show how to write a basic server and
a basic client, and how to code the main functions needed to make them both
run with each other. That's enough to get started with coding upon NeL.

> For a binary sdk - it's a good idea - We'll look into it. :)

I agree on this one. A binary SDK would save a lot of compiling-time which
is mainly unneeded.

Having an offline version of the code documentation without going over the
doxygen compilation time (which took a hour or maybe more on my Athlon)
would also be useful once the code is in a fairly stable condition.