[ANN] gzochi project development release 0.7

[ANN] gzochi project development release 0.7

[Julian Graham]

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to announce the seventh development release of the gzochi
game development framework.

The project description, from Savannah: gzochi (/zoʊ-tʃiː/) is a
framework for developing massively multiplayer online games. A server
container provides services to deployed games, which are written in
Guile Scheme, that abstract and simplify some of the most challenging
and error-prone aspects of online game development: Concurrency, data
persistence, and network communications. A very thin client library
can be embedded to provide connectivity for client applications
written in any language. gzochi can be viewed as an application server
(plus clients) for Guile applications that have special kinds of
workloads -- quick, CPU-bound tasks that require transactional
guarantees around sending messages and accessing data.

In addition to resolving some serious bugs in the server and reference
client implementations, this release includes several new features:

* New data management tools for portably exporting, importing, and
migrating the schema of gzochi game application databases

* Finally: A reference client implementation written in Guile Scheme!

* Configurable and more robust handling of server configuration files;
the location of gzochid.conf can now be specified via command-line
arguments

* ...and more! See the NEWS files in the distribution for details

This is a development release; the framework is largely
feature-complete but likely not bug-free, and this release includes a
couple of potentially breaking changes for game application code.
Nonetheless, there's extensive server and client documentation, and
the distribution includes two example games with heavily-annotated
source code. For more information, visit the web site at
http://www.nongnu.org/gzochi/ or check out the project page on
Savannah, at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gzochi/ -- you can
pick up the release from the downloads section.


Regards,
Julian

Re: [ANN] gzochi project development release 0.7

[Germán Arias]

On 2014-08-22 22:00:41 -0600 Julian Graham <joolean@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm pleased to announce the seventh development release of the gzochi
> game development framework.
> 
[...]
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Julian
> 

Can I recommend this software to people who develop proprietary games? I know this is GPLv3, but as far as I understand the clients don't need modify gzochi.

Germán.

Re: [ANN] gzochi project development release 0.7

[Julian Graham]

Hi Germán,

I believe that the Scheme code that runs server-side in a gzochi
application is explicitly freed from restriction by Guile's license:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-2.0/guile-ref/Guile-License.html.

They would need to develop their own client, however, since the
reference client implementations in the source distribution are
covered by the GPLv3.


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 3:14 AM, Germán Arias <germanandre@gmx.es> wrote:
> On 2014-08-22 22:00:41 -0600 Julian Graham <joolean@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I'm pleased to announce the seventh development release of the gzochi
>> game development framework.
>>
> [...]
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Julian
>>
>
> Can I recommend this software to people who develop proprietary games? I know this is GPLv3, but as far as I understand the clients don't need modify gzochi.
>
> Germán.
>

Re: [ANN] gzochi project development release 0.7

[Julian Graham]

Actually, I should revise that statement.


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 8:23 AM, Julian Graham <joolean@gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe that the Scheme code that runs server-side in a gzochi
> application is explicitly freed from restriction by Guile's license:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-2.0/guile-ref/Guile-License.html.

The server-side API is licensed under the GPLv3, so any /distribution/
of server-side game code that relies on these APIs would need to be
licensed under compatible terms. (There's obviously no obligation to
distribute the code, though.)

Sorry for any confusion!