Plasma-running.

Man I forgot to post this.

Plasma is already running on a server: http://www.maluku.de/plasma

And it is available for review and/or help under http://plasma.sf.net. Check the SVN trunk.

I’m currently working on the most awesome skin for plasma, full AJAX (well more AJAS, because it uses SOFU) usage, window management, drag&drop for items and a lot more. Can also be found in the Subversion trunk, the skin is called PlasmaOS.

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Plasma Maps – Video

I made a small plasma feature preview this morning, about the Mapping features of Plasma.

Link (HQ-version)

I need a new mic.

Plasma – Forums

I coded the Plasma Forums in 4 days, 3 hours a day, that’s got to be a record, I also included: Skins, a News system, a better transfer screen and a lot of other stuff, its currently running under http://aurora.dbb.at/plasma.

Also new is the register feature. Well its needed if you want to create a new account. Although Hotmail seems to be blocking my emails send to them, probably a spam filter or something. You even can now claim accounts under my accounts. Its works quite easy, you simply select a character to claim as yours and then you log into Freelancer with that character and you will get a password send to you. Just enter this on the claim-page and the whole account (5 characters) are yours. It work like that on the first try, I never had to do bugfixing for it … and no admin is needed.

Forums features now include:

• Plasma-based right managment, you can for example say this Forum (Subforum) can be moderated by the Clanleader of a specific clan. and the clan can decide on its own who can moderate. Same goes for other permission, like “Admin” for Server Rules or similar sections or just plain old “USER” or “” permission where only users or everyone can post. You can set permissions for read, post and moderate
• Support for BBCode and HTML post. HTML is checked by HTML::CGIChecker (thanks to whoever wrote that) and it forces the post to not kill the design and it even removes javascript and similars.
• Moderators can move, split and merge threads with about 3 clicks.
• It has not all the real features of a phpBB or similar: You can’t upload files, it only supports Signatures, Avatars and Custom Titles (No ICQ and Home and Phonenumbers, but I don’t need that anyway)
• Complete backtracking of all the changes made (as a moderator) to a post.
• Completly skinable using the Plasma skin sytems. (I already had that one, so why not use it).
• All the other common Forum features: Unread posts, Sticky, Closed Thread, Quotes and Editable posts

Coding is fun 🙂

Plasma – Maps v2

All my messing around with OpenGL has finally payed of a litte. I was able to introduce a small feature to plasma which makes the user able to rotate, zoom and move around the generated map of a system. The fun part is: All the 3D calculations (or what I think of it) is done in the browser by a small javascript, so it is  (somewhat) fast and produces no server load at all.

Thanks to this you can now move view maps that leave the ecliptic like Guanaga Proxy in Freelancer Evolutions. This makes understanding such systems a lot easier, since the top-down view is not much help at all.

By the way, this is the first time I admitted Javascript is good for something at all.
Half a year ago  I would have said everything with “Java” in it is unusable and not needed for (yes even the coffee and the island) but since I was forced to deal with Java and Javascript I’m starting to like it both. Still not sure about the coffee. (Or coffee at all).

I think I’m losing it, but who cares. (Not me)

Addition: I can implemented much nicer looks now by mapping the z-coordinate to the z-index property of CSS.

Plasma – Maps

While I was still trying to replace IONCROSS with Plasma, I figured: why not replace Datastorm as well?
On my machine Datastorm takes around 10 Minutes to read all the information on systems, items, markets, bases and ships into its database and shows it. Plasma reads the same (including also the .cmp files for the ships to get all possible hardpoints for a model) in around 3 seconds.

Next thing to do was to build a nice output into the website and this is what came out of it (after a long fight between me and Cascading Style Sheets):

All images rendered in Minefield (Firefox 3.0 beta), because in Firefox 2, Opera or Internet Explorer the grafics look kind of pixelated. Thats because I can’t use transparent PNGs in IE. I have to use GIFs and downscale them and only Minefield can scale transparent GIFs bicubic which looks a lot better.

Plasma – New Design

I finished the new design for the plasma webinterface a few days ago, someone told me the old one was too “white”.

This one is darker now and it has a cool scaling Freelancer-style dialog around the main page.

It was hard enough to make this one look good in my Firefox, but I had to redo it completly to make it look usuable in the Internet Explorer. Opera still screws up the dialog size in the middle.

Also included in the features are now clan creation, clan management and a clan storage, the administrative part is yet to come (I’m scared about that)

Plasma – CPAN Modules

Going to make all modules Plasma uses available on CPAN, but under different names because I neither want or need to have them all as a single name module.

I gonna sort them all into the Games::Freelancer tree.

• FLBini ->  Games::Freelancer::Data::Bini (Bini reading and writing)
• FLResource -> Games::Freelancer::Data::StringResource (Getting names from the .dlls)
• FLUtf -> Games::Freelancer::Data::UTF (Reading and writing UTF-files (.cmp, .3db, .ale, .utf …))
• FLCodec -> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Codec (reading and writing FLS1 files)
• FLPlayer-> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Multiplayer (Oo) (manipulation of server side savegames)
• FLPlayer::Cargo -> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Multiplayer::Cargo (Oo) (Cargo manipulation)
• FLPlayer::Character -> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Multiplayer::Character (Oo) (Character look manipulation)
• FLPlayer::Houses -> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Multiplayer::Houses (Oo) (Reputation manipulation)
• FLPlayer::Name -> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Multiplayer::Cargo (Oo) (Name functions (decoding / encoding)
• FLPlayer::Position -> Games::Freelancer::SaveGame::Multiplayer::Position (Oo) (Position in space or on base)
• FLHash -> Games::Freelancer::Utils::Hash (CRC and CMP hashing)
• INIARRAY -> Games::Freelancer::Utils::IniArray (Oo) (Ordered and structered hash-like data with multiple keys)

All at CPAN, as soon as I get the final proof read done.

Plasma, soon finished

Plasma, the alternative Freelancer Server Manger (alternative to IONCROSS) of course, is soon finished.

It keeps the server alive, saves all the playerfiles into a database (MySQL) and reads commands from it.

By accessing the database many things can be scripted, like changing equibment, reputation and money. Save ship changes (without screwing all the hardpoints) will also be included. One goal is for example to let people buy/sell things on a webfrontend, so shops can go around the 90 items limitations. Banking and Web-Storage of stuff is also possible. To give a player 2 station torpedos and take 300 Millions for it the Frontend will put in the plasma-queue the following:

modify, playername(encoded), -300000000, +2:<StationTorpID>, NULL

These commands will only be run if all the items, money, rep (-) could be removed, otherwise the file is not saved.

playername, their cargo, rep and money can be found in the database of course, along with some more information. (Usefull for flstat, which should be VERY fast then, just ask the DB).
Plasma-Init collects now all the information for your mod (it even parses TNG without errors), collect all the IONCROSS gamedata information and some more:

• good->equipment relations. Goods are not mounted and equipments are, they mostly got the same name, but not allways, so if you unmount an equipment by just moving the HASH to the cargo entry in the savegame-file you will corrupt it or loose the good. Plasma moves gets the real hash for the good and writes that.
• hardpoint-list from the shiparch and the model:
  If you change the ship in IONCROSS you will most certainly corrupt the file, because there are few ships in the new mods with the same hardpoints. So everything mounted will be mounted to unknown slots. Plasma keeps only the eqiubment mounted on hardpoints of the new ships shiparch entry. The rest is converted to goods. If something has no good (like lights), it will be kept only if the cmp-file has a hardpoint of the same name. Otherwise it is discarded.

Of course parsing all the cmps takes a while, but it has only be done once by plasma-init.