Author archives: Mike

Since I seem to be incapable of sleeping, here's a quick description of how networking works in Productive...

Lobby Level

Productive has a traditional "lobby" interface, where the children who are gathering to play the game can configure their player characters (and eventually the game-size and in-game name). This interface is handled by the olpcgames.mesh ...

I've put up a brief summary of the state of development environments as I see them on the Wiki. I want to get to the point where we have at least a LiveCD image that can be installed to a machine's hard-disk which includes a (likely Qemu) emulation script that can download the latest images ...

As of right now I can play Productive (minus a few rules) under jhbuild on my workstation against myself. I've also got it building an xo and a POT file (pot file is still a bit anaemic). The UI is nowhere near what it needs to be, but the networking works and the main game ...

Since I burned a few hours trying to track this down, I'll post the work-around... the problem is simple; Log Spew.

Productive uses Python's logging module throughout to provide debugging and informational output during development. We log enormous amounts of information at debug and info levels (about 2.5% of our total run-time is spent in ...

Yesterday I managed to finish hooking up enough of the networking that the game can start while running as an activity and the status updates flow properly from the server to the clients. We did the "lobby" code all using the olpcgames wrapper's built-in functionality, with the actual game code using an ExportedGObject for efficiency ...

Either no-one has ever used olpcgames.mesh or they have all fixed a number of broken pieces individually. I fixed one show-stopping bug today that would have meant no activity could properly track the users in the channel.

Anyway, I *think* I'm going down the right path for the networking. Will see as I get the ...

Had a very interesting conversation this morning with a volunteer out in the field (which is to say, in a developing nation) about the opinion being observed that Intel's Classmate is just as much a part of the OLPC project as the XO. There's a perception among those observers that the joining of the board[1] ...

My OLPC priorities at the moment:

* get Productive finished
* use what we've learned from Productive to fix OLPCGames
* get Develop development restarted, produce at least a simple, straight forward IDE similar to SciTE built, tested and delivered
* find people to work on porting to EEE and Classmate
* find people to ...

Got the rendering test code refactored into a set of widgets and then moved those widgets to the UI screen where they are supposed to live. Got all that done and then realised that the demo simulation doesn't work under the olpcgames wrapper because the pygame timer doesn't fire into the wrapped olpcgame queue. Sigh. ...

Productive now has an official, public source archive. The spike test for graphics and simulation is available in spikes/spike_render.py for those who want to start playing.

I've been playing with some scaling tests... will need to do some work there to make larger maps usable, both for the UI (for moving units long distances) ...