OFFICIAL NEWS

Ryzom Forge meeting's agenda - 17th of august 2015, 19:30 UTC

On IRC (freenode) #ryzomforge
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=ryzomforge

1 Music Group
1.1 Music project for Ryzom

2 Infographic Group
2.1 Mercurial repository

3 Translation Group
3.1 Correction of ingame text

4 Lore Group
4.1 Lore wiki

5 Communication & Marketing group
5.1 Ryzom on Steam
5.2 Publication of the last Ryzom teaser on Youtube
5.3 Ryzom Forge wiki

1 Music Group

1.1 Creation of a Music Group Ryzom forge

We are going to make a Musical Project. For this we will first create Ryzom Forge Music Group. 
The Music Team will born in the future, we are still working on it with the Musical Lore. 
The manager of this Music Group will be Gaueko.
The common places for communicaton will be IRC, #ryzomforge or the specific channel #ryzommusic, the sub-forum that will be created, and of course Ryzom Forge Wiki.

General objectives
The role of both, the Team and the Group, will be to create the music of Ryzom and the ambiental sounf of the game itslef. The difference betwen them will be that the Team will take care of the Musical Lore (Scores, faction music, lyrics etc) and the RF group will create the ambiental music and the ambiental sounds of the game (I will explain more in few).

Ryzom Forge Music Group objectives
We have two main goals: Creation of background music and atmospheric sounds. The background music will be used for the missions and rites. This means we will create music to give a quiet atmosphere, frightening one, joyfull one etc.
And the atmospheric sounds are the objects do when we interact with them. 
Footsteps, a crate that is opened or broken, the wind, the breeze, the sound of the insects, maybe the sound of an animal that chase us... In the end, give to the background a more realistic sound experience, even if the one we have is good one, but we can improve it!!
For this, we will need to create music and sound files that later we will implement in game. We still don´t have a place to storage them but as soon as we have a place for it it will be told. The files we create must be created under CC-by-SA license.

Q: Will it be possible to activate/deactivate the music according to ones prefereces, while still having the sounds of the nature? Managing music and sounds separately in the client ?
A: Dev should answer to you Zatalyz, but I guess it could be possible. Of course, musicians will need to co-work with developers too.
A of YannK: I'll speak about it later for the graphic assets, but a deposit with version management (under mercurial) for the sounds can be considered really quickly. 

Q: How to link these music and sounds to a place, an object, an action... from a dev point of view?
A of YannK:
First, I want to mention that my knowledge is very empiric regarding sounds in RC, I haven't had much occasion to make a lot of tests.
That being said, from what I know, there are two kinds of usages for sounds: through primitives and through datasheets. Till there it's all very normal.
The datasheet part is linked to an animation: the sound (.sound file) is linked to the application of an animation (.anim file), which tells it how it should appear, with which gradation, at which time, etc.
This .anim file itself is linked to a visible object in the 3D part of the client, a .creature.
Don't be mistaken by the .anim or creature name. It can be an event where nothing is moving or an object which isn't a creature :) For example the tower near Chiang on Silan is a .creature.
But genereally speaking, it lets you know when a sound should be emitted in order to be synchronised with what the player is seing: so ensure that the box creaks when opening it, the engine can make it with no problem at all.
He sounds created when walking depend on the kind of ground if I'm well remembered, so except if creating a new map with new environmental textures, it will probably be difficult to change the footsteps, because it would imply to change the sound of all the places where the textures is used (to be checked).
You've understood it, skills of the characters call for .anim animations, which themselves start .sound, so it is possible to link a sound to a character animation easily. The difficulty is to create new kinds of animation, because it requires to change the code on BOTH client and server sides.
The other way to manage a sound is through primitives: on the map you can place environment sounds, sometimes on very small places, but there again lots of set-ups since we call actually datasheets which themselves give lots of set-ups to the original .wav.
This sounds may change automacially (day/night cycle for example or depending on the weather) or they can be linked to external triggers, either them being environmental or related to a mission. Everything can be set-up (but it's sensitive and will require lots of tweaks).
All of this to tell you that the system allows a lot of things (which explains the wealth of what already exists :) ) but there's a very big problem:  It seems there's no .wav nor .sound source file anywhere (and more or less all datasheets are linked to sounds). Which explains why nothing was released when the graphical assets have been.
So it's not possible for example to change the existing particle systems (because they often call for .sound), nor change anything already existing in term of sound background. Any change will have to be a re-creation from scratch, including the base .wav files.
We'll have also to consider the question of creating datasheets linked to sounds, knowing that we have no complex example to understand their exact way of working. So documenting it will be long (documentation of the datasheets on which I'm working).

Call for musicians is launched!

2 Infographic Group

2.1 Mercurial repository

YannK: 
I just wanted to mention that in the frame of Khaganat, we're creating a Mercurial deposit server (for your own needs) and that we have created a place for the graphical assets of Ryzom Core / Ryzom Forge. Since we're often working from these ones and organisation of this database is important to know for us, let use it also for RF, especially since the old site has disappeared. For now, there's just Kaetemi updating f zip file on the Ryzom Core site, but it's not always easy. Here, with a Mercurial server, it will be easier to add files for the additions made by RF, be them .max or textures (for now). The server can be reached anonymously for read and one can even download a .zip, a .bz2 or a .gz. The address is: http://depots.khaganat.net/scm/hg/ryzomcore_assets

 If some of you have files which are only available in the rev4 of the assets, it would be great if you put them at disposal. For now, the simplest way is to ask me through PM here, but we'll also open the deposit in commit/writing to some of you eventually.

 In the meantime, you just have to send me the existing .max / .png (since I don't think there are animations, skeletons or particle systems newly created) and I'll add them in the deposit little by little. And these additions will then be available for everyone easily, without requiring to download everything each time.

And regarding the project about sounds which Gaueko introduced, we can create a deposit dedicated to RF/RC sounds the same way.

It allows us, in Khaganat, to study what is done, to use it eventually for our project, and will allow an easier sharing for the RF members also.

3 Translation Group

Nothing new this week.

4 Lore Group

4.1 Lore wiki

4.1.1 Chronicles

Zendae:
First, following the works for the integration of the chronicles in the Lore wiki, I've started writing a small reading guide. The aim is to make players aware of the interest of reading the chronicles, and more globally the Lore, and to explain how the texts have been sorted (FR part).  Doing this drove me to make some improvements in the sorting, and to start to get texts from an other source: the forum. There are indeed texts "Atys chronicles" in the forum which weren't listed in the Lore site. These texts are often specific to the Aniro history, so Zorraorgh created a banner to mention this specificiy at the beginning of the text.
There are some texts which are difficult to integrate, i've asked the anim to get an idea on how to proceed. Several cases, first one, a simple "event report" such as chatlog, but with NPC in it giving important bits of information. For example: http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/7674/31 , where there are lots of data regarding kitins. Second case, when the event is a serie of exchanges or texts, from various people, including players. Such as the "Dark sawdust merchant" and "Azaen" series on Aniro.
That's all regarding on-going works.

Gaueko:
I think we could check those text on the Lore Team first.  We already have some problems with some texts and documents right now that have information that is being rechecked. I talk about the texts with information related to the Lore, of course, if the texts is about something that happened on an event you can´t change nothing.

Tamarea:
We've got this "Lore validated" stamp. The Lore Team could read the chronicles again and validate them, or modify them if needed.

Zorroargh: 
The Lore stamp for the chronicles has been improved to mention to which server they're related when there has been a divergence. I've added "templates" in the DE, EN and ES wiki for these articles. But I wasn't able to translate them. If someone can casst a sjort glance at them...

4.1.2 Lore files

- Addition in the Lore wiki of the file describing the tryker scientific society (FISHES), recently introduced in event
DE: http://de.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/Die_Tryker-Forschungsgesellschaft
EN : http://en.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/The_FISHES_society
ES : http://es.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/La_sociedad_BIRRA
FR : http://fr.wiki.ryzom.com/wiki/Centre_CREVETTE

5 Communication & Marketing group

5.1 Ryzom on Steam
Ulukyn and Kervala are still working on integration Ryzom on Steam. Some patience is hence still required.

5.2 Publication of the last Ryzom teaser on Youtube
EN : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RO3jo1xmEQ et https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWR3CBLkTg
FR : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZVKC5oAk9M 
ES : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ny_q42rHaw&feature=youtu.be

5.3 Ryzom Forge wiki

Tamarea is refactoring little by little the "projects" part of RF main page http://forge.ryzom.com/ in order to display all Ryzom Forge groups. At the end, we will have only to click on the group which interest us to access to its important informations. But she does it only on FR and EN pages and let you to it for other languages.

Zorroargh patrolls through the wikis. He improves mainly the categories and sometimes also pages, mainly those who were migrated from Khaganat. He also does templates when we ask him.
Hes does not know German or Russian so cannot help there. He could in Spanish but I have no time.