Ember 1 Introduction This is the Ember client for the Worldforge project. Ember is a fully functional 3d client for both Cyphesis and Indri servers. It's goal is to be used with all worlds created withing the Worldforge project. 2 Quickstart The first thing you'll see when you log in is the server browser, which shows you all of the available servers. If the list is empty you might be behind a firewall which blocks the needed traffic. Use the server browser to connect to a server. Once connected, you'll have to create a new account. Enter an account name and a password and press “create”. After you're logged in with an account, you'll have to create an avatar in the world. An account can have many avatars. Choose a name, a type, a sex and optionally a description. 2.1 Moving around in the world Once in the world you'll be presented to a third person view of your avatar. By moving the mouse you can pan around, and the keys wasd will make your character move. If you click the right mouse button you'll switch to “GUI mode”, in which mouse movements will move the cursor instead of the camera, and you can interact with the gui. When in gui mode, the gui behaves pretty much like a standard gui. Double click on window headers to make them roll up and down. Click on an entity in the world (a tree, a NPC) to show the mouse picker menu. Most options here are pretty self explanatory. If you have something wielded, like an axe or a shovel, you also get an option to use the wielded object with the picked entity. 2.1.1 Talking to people Down to the left you have a widget which allows you to interact with the world. If you want to say something, just enter it here and press enter. When someone else in the world says something, it will be shown through the use of a “talk bubble” to the left of the person. Some NPC have a series of suggested responses. These will be shown to the left of the NPC. You can let your avatar say one of these by clicking on them. 3 Developing The main design philosophy behind Ember is to as much as possible use 3d party libraries. We strive to remove as much uneccessary code from Ember as possible, if there's equivalent functionality to be found in an existing library. This prevents us from a Not-Invented-Here mindset and makes it easier to kill our darlings. • It uses Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org) to present the world in full 3d. Ogre is very much hardwired into the core of Ember. • SDL is used for input handling. This is not that hard wired as Ogre, but since the goal of SDL is to provide a platform agnostic library there's perhaps no big reason to provide support for a different input library. We will hade to do some research into DirectInput though. • SigC++ is used for signals and events. This is also very much hardwired into Ember. Other notable libraries used: • CEGUI (http://www.cegui.org.uk) is used for the gui. This can be removed from Ember, and another library can be used. Note however that all current widgets are made for CEGUI only, ie. we don't try to provide a generic widget abstraction. It seems unlikely that such a construct would work. For reference, see any discussion on Java's AWT, Swing and SWT. • OpenAL (http://www.openal.org/) is used for the sound. This should be loosely decoupled from Ember, but much like SDL OpenAL is geared towards providing platform agnostic sound support. Then again, FMOD might be interesting. See the doc directory and http://www.worldforge.org/dev/eng/clients/ember/ for more information. 4 Third party libraries This project uses the Ogre3d library licensed under the LGPL. It can be obtained from http://www.ogre3d.org This project uses the CEGUI library licensed under the LGPL. It can be obtained from http://www.cegui.org.uk This project uses the OpenAL library licensed under the LGPL. It can be obtained from http://www.openal.org/ This project uses libraries from the Worldforge project, licensed under the GPL. These can be obtained from http://www.worldforge.org/