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WiHack Blog: Third Day

Wihack Day 3

First: last few hours of day 2: At approximately 3am I hit one of the sofas here at the entropia and I missed a historic event: the first ware that was transported on a ship from one port to another. Nicolai has quite something to show for this weekend.

The wihack is not over yet, but it feels like we will not keep hacking all day today. We are tired since we didn't get much sleep and nicolai needs to travel home, so he will leave us in ~30 minutes. Today was cleanup and polish day: We fixed some of the bugs that were discovered from the tireless play testers from the forum and this will likely continue till tonight. No biggy new feature is worked on right this moment so I feel it justified to begin the summary post of things that were done. I will keep this updated as stuff pops up.

Participants in Karlsruhe

5 people were dedicated to widelands in the entropia this wihack. I will present them to you in order and tell you what they did for us in this sprint session.

Nomeata

nomeata His proudest achievement is the new clicking cursor: the hand you use in widelands to click things will now really move its finger when you click on a building. But his main work was in redoing the statistics menu: the plot area now can show more time areas and you can select them via a nice slider. Buttons that have a toggle state are now shown pressed or depressed as well. And he sped up the rendering of the plotting lines. Ohh, and he fixed many a bug in the UI code.

Shevonar

Shevonar Shevonar committed himself to bug hunting. He fixed soo many of them, e.g. there was a bug when you updated a building it would sometimes suddenly 1.5 times on the map. Fixed. The wares help was not alphabetically sorted in other languages. fixed. The graphics in the building window in the background are now centered and nicely toned down. Similarly the display of wares in wares queues has been optimized by him. All very noticeable and nice changes.

Ixprefect

Nicolai The man of many names (nicolai, nha or ixprefect) continued the efforts from the last wihack and worked on ships. Ships can now be build and they deliver wares between harbors in a useful fashion. That is, if you would have two harbors on two islands and a ship, you would already have a useful sea-faring. Expect to see this soonish in a scenario!

Kristin

Kristin Kristin looked through all maps shipped with widelands and looked if they are fair, if they can be played in team, if they are scenarios and so on. This is a grinding task that took forever but it is necessary to sort the maps into categories so that you can rely on the multiplayer maps to be playable by every tribe and to be fair.

!SirVer

SirVer I did some work before the wihack which lead logically to the work I did here: I began adding the possibility to choose the number of wares you want in production and constructionsites and finished the work here. This was the groundwork for the dismantle site which I did finish here as well. I did a lot of CPU optimizations before the wihack and fixed the problems and corner cases that remained here as well. And I introduced the framework for adding help texts to the windows. I am looking for people who are interested in writing building help texts. Oh, and I fixed some bugs as well.

Remote Participants

Thanks goes out to the guys in the chat, the play testers who had bug reports ready for features that were only just introduced and especially Tino who did not drop the ball on the nightly builds: we had constantly fresh builds from trunk ready for windows users to enjoy.

Wrap up and summary

This !WiHack was different. Less people, but more focused work. And fantastic new features (nearly) ready for prime time. My summary is: the socializing aspect was bigger with more people, but the work per person was bigger on this wihack. It was loads of fun and I enjoyed it totally. I am also very impressed and proud with what we achieved all together in this time.

I am really looking forward to testing the new stuff in-game!


9 comments Posted by SirVer on 2011-11-06, 16:09

Comments on this Post:

ixprefect

Wow, I look weird in that picture. Maybe seeing ships sail around the world does that to me ;p

SirVer

I think you look totally, completely and awesomely happy. Maybe you should code more and BWL less face-tongue.png

Personal_Joke

Great job guys (and girl)! Sounds like you accomplished a fair bit over the last few days! I hope you all had a good time face-grin.png

nomeata

If anyone looks weird, then me...

Baur87

I thought your sofware will handle the trackback so I did not instantly inform you about the blog post I did yesterday. So here it is: http://patrikschoenfeldt.de/2011/11/wihack-2011/

PS: It was nice to meet you.

SirVer

Nice write up. You captured the spirit quite well, but also your critique of not providing an organized introduction/tutorial for beginners is valid. Maybe we can provide parallel workshops on the next wihack.


Astuur

Yep, definitely a lot of progress for so little time! And on behalf of all that enjoy your efforts, I'd like to thank you all for the fine work.
Tino's regular WinPackages helped me to see what was going on - well, in parts (nobody said anything about "ships" while the WiHack was going on, so I'm quite surprised to learn about this bit of news - GREAT!)
Did you come around to discussing some of the topics on the official agenda (Immovable on Triangles, Caserns), too? If so, I'd be eager to learn into what direction the opinions were pointing.
Oh - and yes, Sirver, I will try to learn how your LUA formatting is used and fill the help pages, given time. Seems that ball came right into my direction :) I'll pester you some more with that when time comes ...

SirVer

We didn't discuss anything on the wihack, I felt like missing nasenbaer's voice (who is opposed to mine in some topics) and the small headcount no good enough sampling of opinions could be made. I discussed some of the issues with ixprefect who's opinion I value highly though. I will go ahead and establish the bimonthly community poll soonish to sort some of the topics out - I felt this was a generally supported idea.

About the help texts: I was just about to write you a PM about that very topic. I remembered dimly that you mentioned you were willing to write help texts. Let me know of any help that I can provide.


chuckw

GOODNESS! I go out of town for a couple weeks and when I return Widelands has a host of new dimensions - a clicking pointer finger, the bug list greatly reduced, ALL of the maps surveyed and sorted, improvements in ware management and conservation, and SEAFARING! I agree with the others who have stated that productivity was not lacking this WiHack despite the humble numbers of onsite attendees. Wonderful work, everyone!
Add to that the new topics in the forums and I have a lot of catching up to do. That'll teach me not to miss another WiHack in the future. ;D


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