Atomic Blue

Web Page: http://planeshift.ezpcusa.com/pswiki/index.php?title=GSoC_2011

Mailing List: mailto:info@planeshift.it

Atomic Blue (www.atomicblue.org) is a Non Profit Corporation focused on building virtual worlds. Our mission, as taken from our bylaws document is to (a) to foster the growth of a community of developers skilled in developing multiplayer online role playing games; (b) to encourage the development of a large community of players that will interact with each other through the software, free from restrictions based on race, color, gender, sexual preference, beliefs, religion, national origin or age, and ( c ) to promote the development and growth of a virtual world in which such interactions may occur.

Our current and main project is PlaneShift, which is powered by an Open Source (under GPL) engine for Massive Multiplayer Online Worlds created by us. The PlaneShift Engine is one of the few to be really usable and in production with thousands of users. We do not have any income at the moment and the project is completely staffed by volunteers and supported by sponsors which are donating the hardware and bandwidth needed. Our team is a distributed team of talented and motivated people, which share the same objective of building a great free mmorpg and to see it in action. We always took the approach of proceeding by small steps, releasing to a live server the features as soon as those where developed, to test those with real users and take actions accordingly to responses. This has been pretty successful up to now, with more than 500,000 registered accounts on our servers.

Projects

• combat enhancement Right now PlaneShift’s combat seems to be very basic; if you’re doing melee or range combat everything is pretty much sit and watch while the server makes all of the decisions. It seems to be completely turn based and there don’t seem to be much you get from progression of levels, at least nothing very exciting. I would like to change the combat system up to make it more exciting.
• GUI Improvements Planeshift GUI system is implemented in the PAWS which is mainly based on Crystal Space’s iGraphics2D/iGraphics3D to draw all kinds of widgets. In PAWS, pawsmanager is a singleton to manage the entire GUI library. With the help of pawsMainWidget, pawsmanager could load configurable GUI interface from xml document of in CS’s virtual file system. The main goal of this proposal is to make Planeshift’s current GUI interface more configurable, more powerful, and user friendly.
• Sound system improvement and management of musical instruments With this work I plan to: convert the sound related part of the code into a plug-in; improve the support for factory based sounds; create support for random sounds from both environment and monsters; solve the problem associated to stacking of sounds implementing a distance lag effect; support for weapon and attack based sounds; introduction of musical instruments and composing activity in the game.
• Tribe AI This project's target is to reprogram the way tribes behave in PlaneShift. The end product will feature tribes that will react quickly to outer factors of the world (diplomacy with other tribes/players, expanding, resource managing, etc) and organize themselves based on certain targets. All tribes will feature unique treats and each tribesman will have different behaviors based on the assignment he gets from the leader. Besides, an unique mood system will simulate the way tribe members react.