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/

