On Fri, 6 Apr 2007, ChronosWS wrote: > I'm not a big fan of over-organization, but there are common-sense, low cost > steps which can be taken to facilitate a cohesive development strategy. The > wiki is a joke, honestly, as it's really just a collection of bullet points > with no one having bothered to distill or synthesize the ideas into a plan > of any sort. > The wiki is a reference, not intended to be a todo list. > If the group is really too lazy to bother to log into a forum (you know, add > a bookmark to your browser, it will remember who you are, just click it and > you are logged in) then may I humbly suggest that the group may not have > what it takes to really reinvigorate the game to the level which you have > professed to desire. It's a serious task which is proposed, and even though > we are part-time developers on it does not mean we should be lazy about > doing what is needed to pursue that goal in earnest. > I fail to see why we need yet another forum when we have 2 active mailing lists, 1 code commit mailing list, 1 dead mailing list, IRC, rec.games.netrek, and the forums at playnetrek.org. > My goal here is to provide a means for organization and a mechanism by which > the leader(s) of it can communicate the actual plan and have that plan be > readily available to all developers who will be referring to it during their > development process. Having a single point of access for discussion and > decisions means there is no need to know about mailing lists, wikis and docs > in source control as separate potential locations of information - it's all > in one place, easily found, easily searched, and if people are doing their > jobs, mostly up to date (and if the conversations are included in the > forums, then even out-of-date information can be corrected by review.) > There is a single point of access for discussion, it's the IRC channel Quozl mentioned. Every active developer (except the mactrek guy) uses it. And he would have benefitted from hanging out there (RSA fiasco anyone? :P). Perhaps I should lay out the state of netrek development. There are 4 "active" developers working on code, besides akb who is working on the web site. There are also some people who contribute once every few months but I wouldn't call them active. Oh and I forgot the guy who ported COW to a Nokia, but that was only in the last week :). One of the devs (Narcis) does Mac client only - he works alone, no one else is up to speed on Mac development. Quozl, Karthik, and myself work on server development - we use IRC to pass ideas/code back and forth. In my experience, rarely have I needed email to discuss the code, as the guru (aka Quozl) is around frequently. I also work on the Window client, I work alone because no one else is up to speed on Windows development. We have ample infrastructure for communicating. We have mechanisms for task assignments (server has several TODO lists such as PROJECTS and BUGS). I have another TODO list for the client. More developers are welcome. The barrier to joining development is low (server) to moderate (client). People on IRC are around to answer any questions to help developers. I would be thrilled to have another Windows developer. Will it be you? ;) > How far are you willing to go to bring this game to that huge pool of > potential players? > We have paid advertising (thanks Joe), we have a high google ranking (thanks Joe again), we have a list of ideas: http://wiki.us.netrek.org/netrek-dev/MarketIdeas Any other suggestions on what we should be doing? Bill