Online voice chat meeting, Wednesday 17th June

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rah
Space Floater
Posts: 38
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2014 11:32 am

Online voice chat meeting, Wednesday 17th June

#1 Post by rah »

Hi all,

Tomorrow will be the first online voice chat meeting, at 8pm Berlin time. Here is the agenda for the meeting:

1. Introductions
2. Support for Hi-DPI displays
3. Any other business

Please reply here you have anything more you'd like to add to the agenda.

The venue will be the Mumble room "getStringFromObject()"/"Linux" on the following server:

Name: PDEG.de | Public_Mumble_Server
IP: 84.38.65.32
Port: 64738

I would strongly recommend installing and configuring Mumble before the meeting because the audio setup can be tricky. In my experience, push-to-talk is easiest. I will be present in the room from 7:45pm Berlin time in order to help anyone who needs to check their setup.

Looking forward to chatting!

Cheers,

rah

rah
Space Floater
Posts: 38
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2014 11:32 am

Re: Online voice chat meeting, Wednesday 17th June

#2 Post by rah »

Thanks to everyone who attended. A very rough summary of the meeting:

1. Introductions were made

2. Meeting software - It was suggested we try Jitsi rather than Mumble. It was noted that Jitsi has problems with large numbers of meeting participants but for our small numbers it should be OK. There was agreement that we should try Jitsi.

3. Support for Hi-DPI displays - rah went into detail about his interest: Hi-DPI display which has issues in some parts of the UI when increasing font size and ten-foot interface, both of which are solved by having a UI with arbitrary scaling. It was noted that there were no problems with font sizes with FreeOrion on MacOS or Windows; clearly the Hi-DPI issue is limited to Linux.

The UI and graphics system of FreeOrion was discussed; FreeOrion uses mostly 2D SDL graphics with the GiGi library (which FreeOrion now maintains) and some 3D rendering of, for example, the star field. Issues around the toolkit were discussed and it was noted that long term, a switch to another toolkit or framework would probably be best.

The client/server architecture of FreeOrion was discussed. The topic of changing the UI to use something like Godot had been brought up on the forum previously and it was noted that FreeOrion is already architected in such a way that there is a separation between the game logic and UI. The AI can already be considered as a separate client (with some caveats). That means writing a new client using a different framework can be achieved without big changes to the whole codebase.

rah said he would start small with some changes to fix widget issues with big fonts, etc., with a view to the possibility of switching to a different toolkit library (while not obligating himself! :-)

[ Unfortunately I retained very little of the subsequent discussions as they were largely over my head. If anyone else wants to add below, please do so. Very generally, subjects that I can roughly recall being discussed were: ]

4. Spending of influence points.

5. The impending release, the release process and future releases.

6. Balancing and testing.

7. Future meetings. It was agreed that a frequency of a meeting every two weeks was OK for now and that we should try Jitsi next time. Some may not be able to attend every meeting but they will if they can.

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adrian_broher
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Joined: Fri Mar 01, 2013 9:52 am
Location: Germany

Re: Online voice chat meeting, Wednesday 17th June

#3 Post by adrian_broher »

rah wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:48 pm it was noted that FreeOrion is already architected in such a way that there is a separation between the game logic and UI.
People should not lie to newcomers. The UI is full of logic that goes beyond simple data bindings.
rah wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:48 pm Issues around the toolkit were discussed and it was noted that long term, a switch to another toolkit or framework would probably be best.
Cheap suggestions, as usual. There are currently no open source ui libraries, which even remotely cover the widget pool that gg does (which, by itself is already in a pretty sad state) because everyone decides to write their own, half-assed solution which either lacks: widgets, rendering support for a certain backend, capabilities for costumization or essentially bolt a webbrowser onto the game. The only viable contender is GWEN, which was written with a "no fucks given" attitude for rendering backend or platform cross compatibility.
Resident code gremlin
Attached patches are released under GPL 2.0 or later.
Git author: Marcel Metz

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