From Palito

About

Palito is an RTS game, made by fans of Total Annihilation.

Current Status

This Wiki

This may replace the old Palito homepage (http://palito.9hells.org/) if it goes well. Everyone is welcome to edit the pages of this site (well, that is what a Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) is for) (You can practice on the Sandbox.)

To get some idea of what needs to be done, and what is being worked on, the Community Portal might be a good place to start.

Note that recently, quite a bit of new content has started going up. You might like to have a look, and maybe lend a hand. Also there's now a page just about Wiki maintenance- for problems, ideas, tasks, unresolved questions, whatever. Ideally discussion too if anyone else comes along.

Development

Barrett: Unfortunately, I'm alone and stalled on this since the end of 2003. There is an extensive list of things to be done (http://palito.9hells.org/src/palito-dev/palito/TODO.txt), and if some interested developers show in to help move the project forward, I may get motivated again.

Tomble on July 2006: Palito fans should think about the relatively small number of potential developers who've come along over the years, and how long they've seemed to hang around after they first offered help. Some of them might have not really been serious about helping, or not been any good at programming, but others may have been put off by the feeling that they were being left to do everything, or finding the code too hard to get into without explanation. There may be lots of other people who would be interested in doing some coding for Palito, but don't even bother to say because it seems pointless for them to try so hard, doing more than anyone else, for nothing.

So does that mean we should all give up hope? No. Even if you can't program, there are actually other things you can do that would help the project and might also make a big difference with gaining or retaining those programmers who might like to help. If you don't lift a finger to support Palito, you can't blame anyone else for not doing the hard bits.

Graphics

The current graphic engine of Palito will not be developed until we finish the game and network engine. After that maybe we could add a 3D client, if we find people to model the animated characters. (Other day I found the Irrlicht engine (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/) that could be useful.)

(This sounded a bit unclear, but I think that here Barrett means that we will be continuing to use the Flush graphics system for the foreseeable future, rather than that nothing will be done to the game's graphics. But this shouldn't be a problem as I think a lot of people like the way Flush looks...)

The original site has a screenshots (http://palito.9hells.org/screenshots.html) section, and I noticed the Wiki doesn't yet. Unfortunately after starting work on one, I found that might not even be possible as this Wiki has uploads disabled so I don't see how to get images onto it. Nonetheless there's now a kinda pointless screenshots page for the moment; sooner or later it'll either be sorted out or just removed again.

State of Palito community/reclaiming the Wiki

Hi, Tomble here (not Barrett or anyone, sorry) making a request. After a long time away from doing anything Palito related, I noticed a few days ago that I was still having people come to the map renderer on my site via the Palito link, and when I then came and looked at the Wiki, I also noticed that some of the countless anonymous changes to the site were people removing spam rather than adding it. So heartened by this, I joined in- because it was a big change for me to see that not only were people still interested in Palito, as they have been for a long time, but now some actually cared enough to do something- even something as dull and thankless as cleaning the wiki.

At that point I also added a request that in future, people who restored wiki pages back from spam, should maybe say hello here to give us some feedback, as there seemed to be people from all over the place and it'd be encouraging to know who's out there. But soon after that, I ended up kinda digging the whole wiki out of the spam, not just a couple of pages, and have been continuing since (also working on some content too), so maybe people wouldn't find the opportunity to do any such spam removal, or might feel like just letting me do it all (please don't!). Hence instead, I put up a little guestbook instead, for anyone who's even just looking here. Why should you bother if Palito isn't going anywhere? Maybe because it acts as a reminder that there's a reason for anybody to bother doing any work on it, which is a lot more effort than saying hello. No contact details like email address etc are necessary if you don't want to give them, and you don't need a Wiki account, although saying vaguely who you are might be nice :)