Project 10 in 2010 Brainstorming

[el_matarife]

Here's a few ideas I've had or I've heard about to boost participation, grow player base, or just help in general. Let me know what you think, or post your own ideas.

Spring Prize-
I know Caydr experimented with offering bounties on features a while back and it created a lot of controversy, but I'm hoping we could try it again with some twists. Essentially, I'm hoping to keep the "prizes" small and the awards process transparent and democratic. Think of it like buying a friend dinner for doing you a favor. An example project: "Person who makes the best Spring promotion video and puts it on Youtube gets a nice order of Omaha Steaks in the mail" Alternately, we could just take a vote to see who's contributed the most to Spring in the last month / months / year and get them something nice as a thank you. There's lots of potential models, but I think it is important to say thank you and really reward people who go above and beyond the call of duty to help Spring.

Development Fund-
I'm thinking we should be using Google Adwords or some sort of advertising to raise cash for a general development fund we can use to purchase hardware to develop on or host Spring's server, or offset bandwidth costs or anything else. The key is to keep it above board and transparent so everyone knows how much revenue is being brought in, and what it is being spent on. I know some of the developers could definitely use more modern systems, or videocards, or we could even buy some Mac Minis to assist porting to OSX. We could even use the cash to commission some music for a Spring soundtrack.

Open Source Game Lobby Unification
This would involve getting all our lobby developers to join and help accelerate the Glou project. A lobby system that's shared between all the open source games would be great for exposing Spring to new players who already play and like other open source games. I think with enough development assistance, we could get Glou working by the middle of 2010.

[Licho]

Spring prizes could work although many devs are largely anonymous or even prefer to be anonymous.. I dont see that many devs being motivated by "fame".


Fund - well - you probably can pay for server itself from such source. But never for real developer costs :) But extra HW could help people like jK.
Spring hosting is atm provided by me.


Getting developers together - it does not work that way :) There are now 4 lobbies in development. Developers can rarely agree :) Each differ in basic concepts or stuff like architecture/language. Again only way is to start such project and try to get help. I will for example refuse to code in C++ because its too time consuming compared to other technologies.

[el_matarife]

Spring prizes could work although many devs are largely anonymous or even prefer to be anonymous.. I dont see that many devs being motivated by "fame".

Well, I understand not caring about e-fame but a nice package of steaks or cookies or beer or whatever would probably be a nice thank you a lot of people would appreciate. It would let a lot of people "give back" to the community even if they can't code or do Linux administration work or who knows what else is necessary right now.

Getting developers together - it does not work that way :) There are now 4 lobbies in development. Developers can rarely agree :) Each differ in basic concepts or stuff like architecture/language. Again only way is to start such project and try to get help.

Multiple lobbies in development might actually be a good thing for Glou, it needs a bunch of excitement around the protocol and a bunch of projects in development targeting the protocol but based on different languages and technologies and with different licenses might be the way to do that. Maybe we could just adapt the existing lobby clients or the UberServer project to target Glou.

[Licho]

Where is this glou you are talking about or its protocol? Is there a way to relay current lobby server/users to glou? If not its very risky to work on such thing since you might lose access to all current players :)

Cant find its page.

[el_matarife]

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/g ... =Main_Page join our mailing list. There hasn't been a lot of activity lately, but I think there's work going on out of site.

[koshi]

When glou was started we (SL devs) decided to not divert already sparse resources to it. If we're only talking protocol adaption, that would be easy enough to do if glou picks up. I know it's chicken and egg, but the reality is I for one do not want to invest time in something that might just quietly die in a few months.

[el_matarife]

When glou was started we (SL devs) decided to not divert already sparse resources to it. If we're only talking protocol adaption, that would be easy enough to do if glou picks up. I know it's chicken and egg, but the reality is I for one do not want to invest time in something that might just quietly die in a few months.

Well, if you're not planning on supporting other games there's not really a point. If you decided it would be fun to support a few more games, you should absolutely add Glou support.

[Licho]

Designing good flexible API for such system is very hard task. You need very experienced people to do it properly.
Also any such open system should probably be distributed in its nature or at least support federation. You need to provide means of control over certain aspects of the system on both technical and personal level. You need to create the system itself..

It seems like huge task. Who are its developers atm?

[koshi]

no code activity in almost a month is a bad indicator in my book:
http://code.inrain.org/browse/glou/libx ... :/libxoup/?

last activity on ml was announcing an uml diagram...
http://code.inrain.org/browse/glou/libg ... head:/doc/

[el_matarife]

Designing good flexible API for such system is very hard task. You need very experienced people to do it properly.
Also any such open system should probably be distributed in its nature or at least support federation. You need to provide means of control over certain aspects of the system on both technical and personal level.

Yeah, federation has been on the agenda from day one. We're building it on top of XMPP because we decided the last thing anyone needs is another random internet chat protocol. Check out the wiki, mailinglist archives, and join us in #glou on Freenode to talk details. I really encourage every lobby developer for Spring who spends any time or IRC at all to idle there.

It seems like huge task. Who are its developers atm?

no code activity in almost a month is a bad indicator in my book

Noya is the prime mover and he's been busy with exams or something for a few weeks. He's got a meeting with the Ubuntu games team next week, so stuff is still going on. Nekotaku is getting ready to build a library implementing the Glou protocol to make it easier on lobby developers, and Absurd-Mind is building a GUI toolset in Java.

[hoijui]

the gloou thing sounds like a good idea, but in gerneal, i see it like Licho does: Its open source, and you can not force anyone to do anything. Companies are already trying to harvest with the pros of open source, but it inevitably comes with downaisdes, from their point of view. You cant make part of your software open source, have all devs work on it for free, and still tell them what they have to do, and set deadlines, for example.
And as was said, if you want something done, you have to do it yourself, and if it is a real need, then others will come and join you.

[el_matarife]

Spring Single Sign On
This is pretty simple, let's have one Spring account that does the lobby, the forums, the wiki, Mantis for tracking bugs, and any other services associated with Spring. We've already got the forums and wiki talking to each other, why not try to unify everything? I'm sure we can come up with some cool stuff to do once we've got the forums and lobby tied together.

[Regret]

Spring Realistic Expectations
This is pretty simple, have them.

[el_matarife]

Spring Realistic Expectations
This is pretty simple, have them.

If you're going to crap on the concept please do so in the other thread like I asked so we can get some work done in here.

[Regret]

If you're going to crap on the concept please do so in the other thread like I asked so we can get some work done in here.

Oh I'm not 'crapping on the concept', just suggesting another way to improve it.

You can't expect things like "Open Source Game Lobby Unification" to happen in Spring.

[el_matarife]

You can't expect things like "Open Source Game Lobby Unification" to happen in Spring.

It's going to happen eventually, and I don't know if Spring will be the first to implement it but I don't see any reason why we couldn't be one of the first if not the first adopter.

[Regret]

It's going to happen eventually, and I don't know if Spring will be the first to implement it but I don't see any reason why we couldn't be one of the first if not the first adopter.

It is most certainly not going to happen any time soon, and there is nothing pointing to it happening at end of 2010.

[werdo]

We could even use the cash to commission some music for a Spring soundtrack

I have allready offered to write a spring soundtrack, all I need to know is what theme's will be used??
industrial?, orchestral?? etc..
why pay for something you can get free.

[Licho]

Imo we take anything ..
Also you cannot aproach spring and ask for answers :)

For example I would prefer orchestral soundtrack for CA, but some others from CA team can prefer industrial, or raege or bali orchestra :)

Now imagine asking 60 000* people of spring the same question! Just do something what you like and we take it :)


* base on number of unique IP on autohosts

[Auswaschbar]

I just had an awesome idea:
Talk less, do more.