Crossfire Meet Up or Get Together

Place holder for details for the Crossfire get together¹⁾ in Italy.

As this is a good opportunity to meet other crossfire developpers or artists and reenforce the team, this is important we jump on this opportunity to discuss important matters for crossfire. It's indeed far easier to organize a small reflexion table around problems when people can sepak face to face. Please describe below the subjects of disscusion you want to be raised. Give headlines of what you plan to tackle so people can think about it before we meet and be able to easily express their opinion. Also, it might be interresting to write down some report after meeting of what has been decided or suggested. Fill in abstract informations in table and create a small explanatory paragraph below.

Crossfire project has absolutely no communication rules or guidelines, no media access point, no distribution maintainers dedicated contact. As a result, lots of distributions are distributing old version of client and server (ubuntu breezy badger: 1.7), we have no visibility amongst the open source gaming community and we have lots of difficulties to gather artists around the project. I'll bring suggestions to solve this, bring your ideas too.

Currently there is no fixed process for getting new maps/archs/images included in crossfire beyond 'send them to the mailing list/tracker and er….'. On the occasions that someone tries to create something, there is no real way to support them properly in testing, verification and inclusion of new content. Any substantial changes need either to be agreed by consensus (which is almost impossible with no proper way to track that) or else championed by someone with commit access - which isn't always easy to achieve.

COMMENT: I've been watching the Flyspray [http://flyspray.rocks.cc/] project since they looked the most promising (via Google searches) for a bug tracking and user voter tracking tool. However, the “vote for features” feature seems to be stalled. =-( Anyone have other suggestions?

Whatever to create the player caracter in-game or off-game. Close all developers in a room and give them food only when they have coded the decided feature.

Recently Cher made the suggestion to merge the two editor branches of crossfire and crossfire's descendant daimonin to join editor efforts. If you're lucky, Cher will bring his PC and demonstrate the latest Daimonin Java Editor.

IMO currently Crossfire is not very fun to play. This holds both for newbies and for “old” players.

It seems to me that the root cause is that we (i.e. the developers) keep on implementing new (technical) features rather than trying to make the game play more fun.

Some random points to show my view:

• The exp table is just wrong: the exp increase per level is for levels 1-10 much higher than for levels 30-100, thus the game starts to be quite hard for newbies but becomes rather easy at level 30.
  Possible solution: make the exp table exponentially grow for all levels, possibly slightly less increasing for levels <10 than for >10.

• The death penalty is much too high, especially for low-level players (the stat loss is not curable) and very high-level (110+) players; 3 levels/20% exp loss is discouraging. The effect is that many players do not explore new maps because they fear death too much.
  Possible solution: add an “after-death” map where you can chose between “return fast to life but lose much exp” and “invest work/time to lessen the exp loss”.
  Possible solution: change the stat loss to be not curable at once.

• The world_xxx_yyy maps are not playable: much too big, far too many blocking mountains (and blocking/non-blocking high-mountains are visually hard to distinguish)

• Scorn has too many newbie-unfriendly maps: large centipedes/skeletons/mice in the beginners maps, acid attacks, West Scorn Trademarket contains Dreads and Dragons, mad mage and his servant kills far too many newbies.
  Related issue: most newbie maps should reset much faster than 2 hours IMO.

• We have no “official” client but at least 6 clients, none of these is really working.
  Possible solution: declare the gtk-v2 client as the “official” client which is supposed to implement all “bells and whistles”; drop support for the other clients in CVS, or even remove them from the main CVS.

• The game does not reward in-game experience; in fact, players using out-of-game information gain huge advantages over “honest” players: finding alchemy/shadow alchemy recipes, finding interesting maps, solving quests.
  Possible solution: hide some information, for example make maps and maybe most archetypes (i.e. the “content”) non-public.
  Possible solution: add some kind of randomness to alchemy formulae; for example let the server select a few random ingredients for each recipe to make the formulae list unusable to learn recipes.

That said, I'd like to find and agree on solutions to these problems, and if possible, start to implement them.

Currently NPCs are extremely limited in what they can do. They can match strings and give a reply based on that, some of them use magic ears to trigger events on certain phrases. However, there is no sensible way to hint clients towards sensible conversation options, nor is there any sense of 'state' (answering 'yes' to an NPC can do something even before they have asked a question).

Consider ways to send richer information to clients, as well as have a way to 'select' answers from either the NPC response, or maybe items the Player is carrying (invisible conversation option items?)

Arrival is suggested for the 4th of May if you arrive at Orio al Serio airport (Milano BGY)

or for the 5th if you arrive by car or train

Departure is sugested for the 9th of may

Location is Pettenasco on the wondeful Lake D'Orta.

http://maps.google.com/?ll=45.81564,8.413467&spn=0.122036,0.21801

• Bedroll or sheets for the beds
• Towels
• Swimsuit or bikini! Lake is “swimmable”, temperature can be around 18-20 C if we are luck. Attending girls are allowed to swim naked.
• Beach towels
• Food from your country/region to please the Waffle Hunter

• Cher + z0ra + Nico: arrival 5th at approx. 20:00 by own car, departure 7th at approx. 20:00 by own car
• Tchize: arrival 4th BGY at 23:40, departure 9th BGY at 20:20
• Gros: arrival 4th BGY at 23:40, departure 9th BGY at 20:20
• Ragnor: arrival 4th 13:50 BGY, departure 9th 10:20 BGY
• Cavehippo: arrival 4th BGY at 22:20, depature 9th BGY at 22:45

• There is no internet connection at Lake House, bring your source with you!
• Bring hubs or routers, I think I can bring mine, but if we have two it can't hurt!
• Bring some ethernet cables
• I have a wireless router, so bring wifi (till 802.11g) cards if you like!