Re: [glob2-devel] A personal roadmap, and some pompous arm-waving

[Nuage]

Hello,

I'm sorry but we, the developpers, *are* out of time. We really tried our
best to, either add wished feature, or add comments in the code. Making
good comments is not easy and takes times. Anyway, your request to have
each is very sensible because its seem usefull and there is a chance that
we will be able to do it in our spare time. Thank you for your usefull
advice.

About the SGSL editor. First: There has been numerous threads about this
subject, please take it into account. Second: this is *very* long to make
a user friendly GUI, and it is not that bad at all. Use your favourite
editor, and copy-past it.

If you want to play around with GA, why not proving its efficiency by
making an AI (articifial player) ? Yes, we need one up-to-date AI!

About the tutoral: Why don't you make the tutorial you ever wanted to
have ? Yes, we need it!

And yes, we had toughts about the way to have a more flexible map format.
(NCT especially)

Yes, we are missing workpower, but we need you to help us!

Nuage


Andrew Sayers wrote:
> I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about glob2, about what needs
> work, and about how I can help.  I would like to implement a GA, because
> I think it would be a Cool Idea, but I've stuck it at the back of a long
> queue, because the project has as many people working on Cool Ideas as
> it can take, and not enough working on bread-and-butter issues.
> 
> This isn't meant as a nasty or negative post, but I'm afraid a lot of it
> will be a tour of things I think glob2 is doing wrong right now.
> Basically, I think it's about barriers to entry.
> 
> 
> The idea behind glob2 is a very attractive one.  At first glance, it
> looks like Warcraft done right, and with far more of a sense of fun.
> The game draws people in, but the community doesn't yet do enough to
> keep them in.  There are three groups of people that need attention:
> would-be players, would-be developers, and would-be contributors.
> 
> People that would like to play the game have the problem that it's very
> difficult to find out how it works.  Glob2 is surprisingly complex,
> the tutorial and Joey campaign aren't that instructive, and neither is
> the website.  Although I really appreciate Nuage's help with answering
> my questions on the forum, it seems as if he's the only one that
> understands much of this stuff.
> 
> People that would like to develop the game have the problem that they're
> given very high-level overviews of the text, and code that would be very
> easy to understand if they already knew how the game worked, but not
> enough information to approach one small area of the project they'd like
> to work on.
> 
> People that would like to contribute to the game have the problem that
> the tools they've got are quite basic, and they're locked in to working
> on the program the way that the in-game editor wants them to work.  It's
> quite difficult, for example, to spell-check campaign text.
> 
> 
> In the run-up to a 1.0 release, I think the best thing I can do is what
> I've started doing on the wiki - documenting every aspect of the game,
> in a way that ordinary players can understand.  Dizzz referred to it as
> a player Bible, which I think is a good analogy.  In the long-run, I
> would like (someone else) to write an abridged Glob2 primer, but the
> first goal has to be completeness.  I think I can promise to work on
> this solidly and on my own, and have a useful document out in time for a
> 1.0 release.  I will though need to keep asking people to explain how it
> all works in simple terms :)
> 
> I do seem to be picking up a bit of information about code here and
> there, and there are some improvements to the comments that can be made
> before the 1.0 version - for example, if people could put a few lines at
> the start of each file and class explaining what it is, that would be
> very helpful.  Nct has done this for SGSL.h and SGSL.cpp to show how
> this would work.  However, once version 1.0 is finished, I would hope
> there would be a period of reflection on how the game works and what
> should go in a potential version 2.0, and that some attempt to write up
> code from the point of view of a novice was part of that.  If I'm still
> around when that happens, I would be more than happy to help in the
> process, and to turn the results into a code guide, as mentioned on the
> wiki.
> 
> TMM is starting to write a new editor, and we're talking about increased
> support for scripting, but the other thing I think contributors need is
> an improved format for storing maps, which can be more easily expanded
> to include things like customised images and whole campaigns in a single
> file (so you can easily send them around on-line).  Again, if I'm still
> around after 1.0, I'd be interested in working out a system based on zip
> files, with campaign text, script, and map as separate files inside the
> archive.  It would be easy to add directories for images, tiles, fonts
> etc., and for the second and further maps in a campaign.
> 
>       - Andrew
> 
> 
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