Re: [Nel] .shape file format change

[Valerio Santinelli]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Miller" <address@hidden>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 4:01 PM

> First for the Nevrax.org home page: the news is all badly out of date and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.

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.

> 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.

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 ;)

> 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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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