1) Is there community interest in these features becoming available?
2) Does anyone have any suggestions for other AI plugins they would like?
3) Can Jorrit or anyone else involved please explain why the GSoC 2007 AI project never made it into the CEL source?

Quite a bit late to answer, but well, for the records...
I won't answer 1 & 2 since you've been selected for GSoC 2009 AI project
For interested people, also check the  CEL mailing list archives.
For 3, well, the GSoC 2007 was merged in CEL trunk.
If you meant GSoC 2008, there simply was about nothing to merge, the guy disappeared and the project failed

Hello, I'm new to CS, but am excited to get to working on a project that's been a brainchild of mine for some time now. I believe Crystal Space is exactly what I've been looking for to finally put my idea's to purpose.
I'm having some initially issues, however. I downloaded the CELStart, thinking that's what I needed to run the demo games from the Crystal Space site. However, all I'm seeing is Executable files instead of Shell Script files for running the platform. Thus, I'm having issues running the Executable files to get CELStart running. An overall tutorial might be in order. If CELStart IS what I needed to run the demo's and begin working on my own project, then please help me get it running... Executables aren't typically what Linux uses to start a program...

Many Thanks
Mystik.

Hi,

  I guess you're referring to the binaries at http://www.crystalspace3d.org/downloads/contrib/?C=M;O=D ?
Anyway, generally celstart-based applications are zipped in a so-called .celzip file, and all one has to do is:
./celstart /path/to/file.celzip
Granted, a script can help setting the environment up but it's not strictly required, one can do it by hand.
And in fact there's a .sh script for celstart (celstart_wrapper).
There's a little README file with some instruction in there too.
Note most CEL demos files are sadly a bit outdated (they're from the 1.0 era iirc)
and may not work very well with more recent builds...

Hi,

  it's a bit hard to say without knowing the CS version you use (and revision if it's a SVN checkout).
One possibility is that you previously had some lights in the level and relit the map (thus generating lightmaps).
When later the light was removed, the lightmaps had to be deleted or recomputed for the change to be apparent.

One thing which may help a bit is to not create a distinct entity for each tile/node,
but just add a "tagged" pcmesh to the existing one.
Probably you could also save the "character grid" by not using a complete entity
just for "ground type" information, and instead use pcproperties with a "clever"
naming scheme so you can lookup what type of ground some node is made of.
It could perhaps even be skipped if you used eg. some part of the material name for
that, which would be assigned to the tagged pcmesh I mentioned earlier.

Hello !

  one way would be to load stuff you want to unload later in a distinct region (with 1.2.1/1.4)
or collection (with 1.4+) depending on the CS version you use, and call eg.
iRegion::DeleteAll() or iCollection::ReleaseAllObjects().
Another option would be to just use iEngine::DeleteAll(), but then you might
have to re-load stuff you already loaded earlier.

Hello,

  are you using the same MSVC project files (of your app) between as the one which work with 1.2.1 ?
I guess those have to be remade/regenerated.

A missing VFS plugin is generally caused by of problem with zlib,
which on win32 means that setup of cswin32libs and/or PSDK was not followed correctly.
There should be no need, afaik, to copy stuff around manually.
Try cleaning what you did and restart from scratch, following the manual steps for MSVC configuration scrupulously.

You should ask about Triangulate3D on the mailing list, where Scott could see it.
If you're lucky, you may also find him on IRC, his nick is jwir3.

map2cs was removed long ago, before 1.0 it seems.
If you use an old version with which it was provided, that would work.
But there's nearly no chance a map converted with it could be loaded correctly in recent CS versions.
Your best chance would be to somehow get this imported in blender (perhaps with a hop to .obj format),
then re-export it using blender2crystal.

You don't mention using cs-config, which is the primary way to get compile and link flags to build CS apps.
I think one has to add commands like
`cs-config --cflags`
and
`cs-config --libraries`
in the appropriate IDE text fields.

I've been having odd problems with CELStart, I can run normal examples, but I can't get any python samples to run. I had the exact same problem on 1.2.1, and 1.4.0, with python 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6. Here's the error it throws every time:

Do you use pre-compiled binaries or did you build CS/CEL yourself from sources ?
In any case, setting PYTHON env var to the python[.exe] binary and/or PYTHONHOME to the Python install directory might help.

P.D.: Are you thinking about updating the CS/CEL tutorials?

Yes, but that probably won't be done until after 1.4 is released

Looking forward to cracking on with these tuts, shame there ain't an active community or anything. Something that's always helpful when learning something new.

It's true this forum is not so much visited by long-time CS users, you'd have had much more luck on IRC or the mailing list...

CS itself provides nothing network-related.
But you can use any of the popular networking libraries (or just sockets).
CEL has a TCP networking plugin, with interfaces for player and game server iirc. It's based on HawkNL.

[:]

I don't know about  OSX details, but here are two things that may help getting CEL to detect CS:

• add more directoryies to CRYSTAL env var: since you installed CS (not a good move for a beginner IMHO), stuff is spread in the system. At least on Linux, the separator is :, so one can do things like export CRYSTAL=/usr/local/lib/crystalspace:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/share/crystalspace
• add the directory containing cs-config to the PATH before running CEL's configure