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The Guild of Writer’s mission is to create an environment where anyone, novice to expert, can express his or her talents. Whether you’re an expert at code or a short story writer, many skills are vital to the The Guild’s growth. We have many helpful people who can guide the beginner and a dedicated development team who are creating more versatile and easier to use tools.

The Guild of Writers, as it stands in its present form, was formed on the basis of many explorers collaborating to make something better. We take great pride in our accomplishments and continually strive to create great things whether they be content creation tools, ages, or something else entirely. For more information, please visit our discussion forum where the bulk of our activity is. We also have a publicly editable wiki available as an asset to our ever expanding knowledge base.

Rapid Age Development Contest: Pod Age Edition

Rapid Age Development Contest

It’s the return of the Rapid Age Development Contest (or RAD for short) after a long time away. The theme for this RAD contest is Pod Ages!

The contest will run from the 8th of February 2025 until the 8th of March 2025.

A Pod Shell (either a Blender or 3D Studio Max compatible file depending on your editor of choice) will be provided based upon the Dereno Pod mesh. This Pod will be a complete pod, interior and exterior, and all of the meshes for the buttons, switches, and internal geometry for the pod will be provided. The Default Spawn Point, clickables, animations, and Camera Setups will be included in the files if you wish to make use of them.

The Age must be made from scratch (aside from the provided Pod models), existing projects are not allowed. This is a single person build contest, no teams please.

Obviously, we are not looking for something that is MOULa-ready with only one month of build time (with that said it does need to be playable for the judges to visit and vote).

All the details for the contest (including the Pod shell file) are posted here: https://forum.guildofwriters.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7856

Korman 0.13 Released

Korman 0.13 was released on April 24, 2022. It represents 83 commits with approximately 850 lines of code changed since Korman 0.12a. For download links and release notes, please see the linked wiki page. Per the announcement of Korman 0.12, Blender 2.79b is no longer supported. Korman will now only function with “Blender for Korman.”

Korman 0.13a was released on May 28, 2022, with fixes for 2 Blender crashes.

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Hacktoberfest 2021 Recap

Hacktoberfest is an annual celebration of open-source put on by Digital Ocean, by encouraging people to contribute to and support open-source projects. Participants who submit 4 or more pull requests to public projects on GitHub are rewarded with swag.

While winning a free shirt might not be the biggest source of motivation, it is an excellent opportunity for project to identify opportunities for new contributors to step in and make a difference, and an opportunity for folks looking to contribute to dip their toes in the water.

The H’uru projects on GitHub are open-source and elligible for Hacktoberfest credit, and for the past several years we’ve seen a number of contributions during these times. This year we had a record-breaking 41 pull requests, including some by first-time contributors!

Plasma engine client & tools

This is the Plasma engine as open-sourced by Cyan, which includes the MOULa game client, some related tools, and the 3D Studio Max plugin.

There were some really great quality-of-life fixes here that improve the game, as well as some bug fixes and preparation work for future content. Not all of these pull requests are finished and ready to merge, but an important part of open-source is collaboration and feedback on ideas as they are developed.

MOULa assets & game content

This project is all the MOULa game assets, including fan Ages and the Intangibles. Most of the work here involved fixes to existing game content, and set up work for future expansion.

Special shout out to Hazado, who has shown incredible skill at applying fixes and customizations to existing game data with surgical precision. Several of his pull requests are the technical implementation side of work by other community members, including new clothing outfits and updated translations.

DIRTSAND server

DIRTSAND is an unofficial open-source implementation of a MOULa-compatible server, and is most prominently used for the Gehn Shard. It is also popular as a local server for development purposes and testing out content.

This year’s fixes by Hoikas focused mostly on crashes and deadlocks around mismatched SDL versions.

libHSPlasma I/O library

libHSPlasma is an open-source Plasma data library that handles data from multiple versions of Plasma, and provides the base for many other tools like PlasmaShop, korman, and MoulKI.

There were a few fixes here this year, in particular one from new contributor roblabla to add some missing network messages. Thanks Rob!

PlasmaShop tools

This is the all-in-one, one-stop-shop for Plasma engine tools. Including game file editors, a log viewer, an offline Vault editor, PRP editing tools, and more.

Zrax did some work to make the code match modern conventions, as well as a performance improvement for log viewing.

Korman Blender plugin

Korman is the open-source plugin for building and exporting Uru content from the free Blender 3D modelling program.

It didn’t receive significant attention this year, but Doobes did contribute preliminary some work to improve connecting Python scripts to object animations and Deledrius contributed several cleanups and a modifier fix.

string-theory shared library

This is a C++ UTF-8 text-handling library written by Zrax, based on work to clean up string handling and conversions in the Plasma engine. Originally called plString, this was extracted into its own library that is now used by both Plasma and libHSPlasma (and other non-Uru-related projects).

This year’s work by dpogue focused on maintenance to the continuous integration build scripts and ensuring Solaris is supported.

Guild of Writers forum theme

The Guild of Writers forum theme has been needing some template updates, and Deledrius took a stab at fixing some of the compatibility issues.