Let’s get inspired by the organisatorical skills of others
Posted: 29 Jul 2009, 00:25
Wesnoth
Well, basically Wesnoth is the most successful open source game in my opinion (that is not equal to me enjoying playing it¹). So, what does Wesnoth do what we do not? I mean organisatorically speaking. Here follows a few things I’ve noticed. Something to learn from? I doubt much, if anything, here will be new to you, but it’s worth stating and pondering on.
Code access
ââ€â€Ã‚¢ Wesnoth uses Subversion, TMW uses Git (so we beat them there )
ââ€â€Ã‚£ In Wesnoth a coder gets SVN commit rights when a certain number of patches have been accepted (I believe it’s somewhere around three non-trivial patches), I am not aware of any rules/guidelines regarding this in TMW
ââ€â€Ã‚¤ Artists may get SVN access as well in Wesnoth, but other developers/artists happily commit their stuff fairly soon (in general) it’s been finished; it seems to me that TMW in comparison is rather slow to put finished media in the repositories
Art development
ââ€â€Ã‚¢ In general read Jetryl/Jetrel’s post «Attracting and keeping artists on an OSS game project», there’s not much else I can add
Organization
ââ€â€Ã‚£ Wesnoth utilizes several levels of user groups, used in the various communication channels (forums, wiki, irc, in-game), it is easy to see who has what priviligies, responsibilities and what you can expect from them; for TMW I think another user group on Mantis would be great for instance, something between Reporter and Developer (along the lines of Contributor), and the forum too would do well with a more fine grained user designation
ââ€â€Ã‚¤ The coding and art forums come in two fashions in Wesnoth: one normal forum where anyone can post and one restricted where anyone can read but only devs, artists, commiters, moderators, admins &c. can post
ââ€â€Ã‚Â¥ Several guidelines have been established for things like coding, art critique, playing, ...
ââ€â€Ã‚¢ I’ll refrain to compare the bug tracking as I haven’t really looked at it in Wesnoth, but I believe they have been fairly good at triaging, assigning and fixing bugs/features, something which is happening in TWM right now as well, something that hopefully will continue
Well, I do not know much about how the coding per se is working, but several tools have been developed to easen the development. One thing I know is that they have several translator tools which we may have a look at when we decide to translate things on the server.
Obviously I forgot dozens of things I have noticed at some point in time and there is even more obviously all those things I am not aware of.
_______
¹ Which actually holds true for me playing TMW as well...
Bam bam! Let the creative juices flow!
Well, basically Wesnoth is the most successful open source game in my opinion (that is not equal to me enjoying playing it¹). So, what does Wesnoth do what we do not? I mean organisatorically speaking. Here follows a few things I’ve noticed. Something to learn from? I doubt much, if anything, here will be new to you, but it’s worth stating and pondering on.
Code access
ââ€â€Ã‚¢ Wesnoth uses Subversion, TMW uses Git (so we beat them there )
ââ€â€Ã‚£ In Wesnoth a coder gets SVN commit rights when a certain number of patches have been accepted (I believe it’s somewhere around three non-trivial patches), I am not aware of any rules/guidelines regarding this in TMW
ââ€â€Ã‚¤ Artists may get SVN access as well in Wesnoth, but other developers/artists happily commit their stuff fairly soon (in general) it’s been finished; it seems to me that TMW in comparison is rather slow to put finished media in the repositories
Art development
ââ€â€Ã‚¢ In general read Jetryl/Jetrel’s post «Attracting and keeping artists on an OSS game project», there’s not much else I can add
Organization
ââ€â€Ã‚£ Wesnoth utilizes several levels of user groups, used in the various communication channels (forums, wiki, irc, in-game), it is easy to see who has what priviligies, responsibilities and what you can expect from them; for TMW I think another user group on Mantis would be great for instance, something between Reporter and Developer (along the lines of Contributor), and the forum too would do well with a more fine grained user designation
ââ€â€Ã‚¤ The coding and art forums come in two fashions in Wesnoth: one normal forum where anyone can post and one restricted where anyone can read but only devs, artists, commiters, moderators, admins &c. can post
ââ€â€Ã‚Â¥ Several guidelines have been established for things like coding, art critique, playing, ...
ââ€â€Ã‚¢ I’ll refrain to compare the bug tracking as I haven’t really looked at it in Wesnoth, but I believe they have been fairly good at triaging, assigning and fixing bugs/features, something which is happening in TWM right now as well, something that hopefully will continue
Well, I do not know much about how the coding per se is working, but several tools have been developed to easen the development. One thing I know is that they have several translator tools which we may have a look at when we decide to translate things on the server.
Obviously I forgot dozens of things I have noticed at some point in time and there is even more obviously all those things I am not aware of.
_______
¹ Which actually holds true for me playing TMW as well...
Bam bam! Let the creative juices flow!