8 replies to this topic

[DieGrueneHoelle]

Hi all,

im wondering why there are so few open source projects in the gpl community. We have some applications where the software developer has moved on or lost interest. In this case and if the developer has nothing against it, the software could have been made open source. There are some free sites like google project hosting or sourceforge and with the ability to use configuration management like subversion or distributing user rights. Maybe some other developers catch some interest and continue the development (e.g. IGOR with hosting two servers on the same ip but different ports, what if the hardware for the server list isnt maintained anymore; or GPLTV support for mods, rewind functions; what with all the tracks, i heard ppl have trouble fixing buggy tracks cause there is limited access and so on...). I think this is a better solution to keep the software alive, maybe with a break but else it normally dies. Its also a possibility to gather more ppl and increase development speed.

Im currently working on a new version of the OnlinGridTool (basically only interesting for league / server admins to create safe grids for online racing) and it will be made open source on google project hosting like i already did with other projects but they have nothing to do with GPL (or anyone interested in training with Tichy Algorithm? )

[Bob Simpson]

Good idea.  I keep seeing GPL utilties that look like they could be updated for more than 7 cars or mod specific track.ini files.  Not by me though.

[M Needforspeed]

I can only agree with your ideas that some GPL software remaining gurus could share with you

  michel

Edited by M Needforspeed, Feb 09 2011 - 01:15 PM.

[Bernd Nowak]

I have some stuff but lost time due to work. But what I would prefer is to create something with Visual Basic/C#/C++ 2010 Express in a team and once finished release the source code.
At the moment I have many things which would be interesting:

Blender 3DO stuff for 3DO model import/export. Blender and not Max because Blender is open source. I see that some populare game publisher start to activly support Blender because it's free. No money to buy anything from Autodesk. Usabillity might be better but ...
But I have not done anything special here. And it needs some Python knowledge and 3DO knowledge

A papyrus bitmap dll which could be used for many things. I started work on a bitmap editor which would primary use PNG as import/export format. PNG has native transerancy support and is a compresed file with no loss of data.

A LYT editor. To have a real good one it should be able to display the used pbf files hence a papyrus bitmap dll.

What I would like to do too but is beyond my knowledge a rasteriser 2.5 which would handle text output differently to avoid the drawbacks. And maybe even use DX9 calls instead of DX7 calls. No added functionallity. I know that Petteri is working hard on a complete overhaul but would like to see a better rasteriser v2 version. Nigel has left but he may would be ok to build a new set based on his work.

A newer gem which would use XML and a more friendly way to store settings so that trouble shooting would be easier. But there are 2 problems. ONe is how to patch 65 because 65 don't use XML files for patching.

Maybe even a GEM with online client build in.

So there's a lot of stuff but the problem is not the source code from old programs. It's just more or less new programming. Doing this in small teams would at least make it easier. If the source code will be released is not that important. More important is to create them so that additions can be made via XML stuff or whatelse

Oh, all IMO

Bernd

[DieGrueneHoelle]

Hi Bernd,

you mentioned some good points. Working in a team is always more interesting but also demands some management. Therefore i started to use google project hosting in the past. There are also other sites with some differences in the features they offer. Maybe these platforms can also attract other developers. I checked the subforum GPL Tools / Utilities but in most topics the final result or a new version is being announced.

You can have a look at the google stuff here which i am using now to develop the next version: https://code.google.c...onlinegridtool/

Its using Subversion with Email notification, you have a sort of wiki system to present the project and so on. Everybody can have a look at the source code or download it but only project members have the right to alter the code. Perhaps some developers are more interested in working this way in future to develop GPL Tools and i think its a good way to gather some new ppl.

[Bernd Nowak]

Ah, thanks this looks great I checked a bit and while C# 2010 looks better it lacks some binary read problems with the GPL files so I used VB 2010 for this.

But in general, I'm no Microsoft fanboy, the latest Visual Studio Express is great. No problems to create commercial programs or private ones. And they are offered for free by Microsoft.

[Stefan Roess]

Bernd Nowak, on Feb 09 2011 - 02:58 PM, said:

A newer gem which would use XML and a more friendly way to store settings so that trouble shooting would be easier. But there are 2 problems. ONe is how to patch 65 because 65 don't use XML files for patching.

Would it be possible to make 65 to use xlm files?

[brr]

Bernd Nowak, on Feb 09 2011 - 02:58 PM, said:

Blender 3DO stuff for 3DO model import/export. Blender and not Max because Blender is open source. I see that some populare game publisher start to activly support Blender because it's free. No money to buy anything from Autodesk. Usabillity might be better but ...
But I have not done anything special here. And it needs some Python knowledge and 3DO knowledge

I also use blender to get content for the DX11 renderer. An easy approach is to save the model in OBJ format, and use a conversion script from there. Its pretty trivial in my case, since the models are just lists of triangles (indexed lists in the future). Trying to convert a model into an 3do file is probably orders of magnitude more complicated.

Bernd Nowak said:

What I would like to do too but is beyond my knowledge a rasteriser 2.5 which would handle text output differently to avoid the drawbacks. And maybe even use DX9 calls instead of DX7 calls. No added functionallity. I know that Petteri is working hard on a complete overhaul but would like to see a better rasteriser v2 version. Nigel has left but he may would be ok to build a new set based on his work.

Seems like a lot of work for hardly any benefit. Practically all text output can be disabled, and most can be replaced in Pribluda. The main reason for inefficient rendering is small batch size (i.e. how many triangles are rendered by the GPU in one draw call). I did some GPU profiling, and back of grid 19 AI cars start showed more than 5000 draw calls for 67, and 23000 for the gt mod. The profiler suggested that the 67 is CPU bound, and gt mod is bound by draw operations but GPU is not fully utilized (not very surprising). Modern games rarely use more than a few hundred draw calls, since each draw call has some overhead which does not depend on the number of triangles drawn per call. A new rasteriser using the rasteriser interface is unlikely to help, since its the interface which probably forces the use of lots of draw calls.

But as long as other people do all the work, I'm looking forward to a v2.5 rasteriser.