A change in the organization of things

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Bertram
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Bertram »

Hi Platyna,

I don't see why we should go away from Platinum. We'd know what we lose, but not what we'll obtain.

Secondly, a little bit of representation IIUC:
tmw-organization-mockup.PNG
tmw-organization-mockup.PNG (18.11 KiB) Viewed 2568 times
Feel free to correct me, I made this scheme on purpose.

Regards.
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Rotonen
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Rotonen »

Given our forks' track record of using server hosting for password phising, how are we going to handle the issue of which projects get on the server list?

I've been trying to push for some sort of privacy certification, but that has been shot down as nonsense.

I still think this makes sense as a concept:

http://www.esrb.org/privacy/index.jsp
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Platyna
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Platyna »

Cool schema, very clear.

Regards.
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Bjørn
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Bjørn »

Bertram wrote:Feel free to correct me, I made this scheme on purpose.
Bertram, I get the feeling you don't understand the essence of the change and the most important problems it is trying to solve. The point is really to separate development from any particular player community, which makes it imperative that development happens under a different name and that the base client has its own identity.
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Rotonen
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Rotonen »

Bjørn wrote:
Bertram wrote:Feel free to correct me, I made this scheme on purpose.
Bertram, I get the feeling you don't understand the essence of the change and the most important problems it is trying to solve. The point is really to separate development from any particular player community, which makes it imperative that development happens under a different name and that the base client has its own identity.
This scheme would IMO still apply to TMW.

The client maintainer would keep dev.manaworld.org and the dev client up to date with manasource. From there we'd cherry-pick what we need for the next CR to testing. When testing is done we release our CR client, our CR server and our actual CR -> server.themanaworld.org.

At least this is how I took that scheme. There is the separation: manasource is developing a platform on which someone can build a game and TMW is building a game.
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Bjørn
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Bjørn »

Crush wrote:The downloadable installers will also have a very small filesize because their only payload is the branding. This will be an additional incentive for the user to try them (when they see that it is downloading 50 additional megs from the net they already overcame the hesitation to download and start the installation and will be unlikely reconsider).

I don't know much about distribution of Linux software, but maybe a similar system could be utilized on most distros by having server-specific installer packages which have the mana client as a required dependency.
Crush, I think that's a very nice idea. And indeed, something similar would work on Linux. Then, all that would be required is for 'manaclient' to be a dependency of 'tmw', and the 'tmw' package would add nothing more than the branding and the shortcut.

Of course, I'd still prefer if it was also made clear that the Mana Client can be used with any server, so when simply launching the mana executable, it should pop up a list of default servers (which can be downloaded), to which you can add your own manually.
Rotonen wrote:This scheme would IMO still apply to TMW.
Ok, I didn't realize that it was about the organization of TMW after the split of TMW and manasource.org.
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Platyna
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Platyna »

How about you just modify the scheme picture, Bjorn? ;-)

Regards.
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Bertram
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Bertram »

Hi,

Ok, first correction so far:
tmw-organization-mockup2.PNG
tmw-organization-mockup2.PNG (24.77 KiB) Viewed 2545 times
1. I guess the generic client server will be in need to share the dev content in order to unit test new features, regressions, etc...

2. If not 100%, 99% of people involved in Mana-Client Server will be included into The Mana World. It's just a matter of fact.

3. Mana-Client/Server is a sub-project of The Mana World and remains GPL, authored by Elven, ...
:arrow: Bjorn, if you planned to move the code elsewhere in order to claim it, it's time to reveal your evil plan :twisted: And, if yes, (we never know), sorry, I won't follow. ;)

Is this mockup a bit more representative?

Regards.
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Rotonen
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Rotonen »

1. No, I think manasource will have their own test content out there just to show the things the platform can pull off.
2. Now yes, but since this is prone to change over time, let's not count on this for anything.
3. No, they will be separate. Still GPL, though.

This is not a takeover, this is to give platform developers more space and especially to give game developers more space. These are two different goals we have here and I really like this separation since it'll give us the freedom to make a game.

This in mind, TMW's interest in mind, I'd like to see the platform technology to be more of a library in style. I do not want any unnecessary features (as in unnecessary and potentially faulty/buggy or exploitable codebase) to bloat the client for our content releases. I'm a minimalist when it comes to engineering solutions.

The library-ish approach would enable us to maintain our own client and take features from the manasource platform as we need them, not as they are pushed onto us. The codebase of our own client would hence be really small and the brunt of the work would be done over on the manasource side of things. When this launches off, I'll be kind of seeing the TMW project as a client of the manasource project, which will obviously be a provider then.
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Jaxad0127
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Jaxad0127 »

Rotonen wrote:1. No, I think manasource will have their own test content out there just to show the things the platform can pull off.
2. Now yes, but since this is prone to change over time, let's not count on this for anything.
3. No, they will be separate. Still GPL, though.

This is not a takeover, this is to give platform developers more space and especially to give game developers more space. These are two different goals we have here and I really like this separation since it'll give us the freedom to make a game.

This in mind, TMW's interest in mind, I'd like to see the platform technology to be more of a library in style. I do not want any unnecessary features (as in unnecessary and potentially faulty/buggy or exploitable codebase) to bloat the client for our content releases. I'm a minimalist when it comes to engineering solutions.

The library-ish approach would enable us to maintain our own client and take features from the manasource platform as we need them, not as they are pushed onto us. The codebase of our own client would hence be really small and the brunt of the work would be done over on the manasource side of things. When this launches off, I'll be kind of seeing the TMW project as a client of the manasource project, which will obviously be a provider then.
That's one idea, but still requires a lot of work for the other projects that don't care that much and just want to make a nice world for players. How about a modular client design where different servers can use different modules? Then you can sill use the same generic client, just only with the modules you want.
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Bertram
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Bertram »

Hi,

IIUW, the rewrite of tmw using QT will be done, like as a generic fork from TMW, or something?

Regards.
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Jaxad0127
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Jaxad0127 »

Bertram wrote:Hi,

IIUW, the rewrite of tmw using QT will be done, like as a generic fork from TMW, or something?

Regards.
Not really. Mana 1.0 will be the new name of what was going to be TMW 0.1. Mana 2.0 will be a rewrite into QT.
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Bjørn »

Rotonen, Bertram, Jaxad, I'm not trying to fork the project. This is a separation between on one side client/server development and on the other side (production-) server content and player community. The Mana Client is not expected to be much different from the client we have now, apart from not having a built-in connection to one specific server or sharing its name with any specific player community. The suggestions to move to a library or plugin/component based approach are ultimately interesting, but are not at all necessary or relevant to these organizational changes.

Bertram, it's nice that you draw diagrams, but since I'm proposing a split between TMW as a game and player community and the client/server software that this community is based on, they are really only useful in the context of trying to draw the complete picture as far as the TMW project is concerned. I am personally not planning to contribute to TMW directly apart from contributing to the Mana client and server, and at that level TMW would be just one of the users. Hence, while the diagram is interesting, it is not the picture as seen from a manasource.org point of view, and I have no interest in modifying it, like Platyna suggested, since most of the diagram is outside of the scope of manasource.org.

I think you could compare the relationship between TMW and manasource.org to the relation between TMW and Tiled. While TMW has a lot of influence on the way Tiled develops, being one of the primary users, it remains a generic editor that is also used by many other people.
Bertram wrote:IIUW, the rewrite of tmw using QT will be done, like as a generic fork from TMW, or something?
(Btw, I'm not aware of what IIUC or IIUW mean.) About the Qt port, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it as part of this reorganization, since it really doesn't have anything to do with it. I mentioned it since several people are interested in doing this, so I know we will give it a try. But you should notice that 1.0 is planned to be released first, without Qt dependency. Whether a Qt based 2.0 will be a success will be a different story, and something we probably won't know until in about a year. Of course, we'll start this port in a branch, and the non-Qt version can be continued to be developed in parallel.
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by Matt »

I wonder If this will really work since TMW is an open source project which depends on its community. Even if its community is full of ebnrs. Technically I like your movement, but we will see if it was useful in the future.

I see this whole thing as a try on your side to get independent from Platyna anyway.

And Elven, our lovely master, found out about this while reading this thread - not very respectful, but I am german so I guess its okay ;)

edit: after a long discussion on irc with thorbjorn I approve the splitting of the TMW project into an generic engine project and a TMW content project, thus making TMW into a lighweight content datapack for the new "2D MMORPG SoM-Like Roleplaying Engine" project which will be hosted at manasource.org (yes thats the official name, and yes, the roleplaying part is redundant!)

Lets hope the ebnr people won't fork the new shiny "2D MMORPG SoM-Like Roleplaying Engine" into "Aethyras awesome engine"!
But if we will encounter things like these our marketing guys could came over saying "hey noobs, what the hell are you doing, just use the main generic engine thingy, use the datapack for branding and if you need something, just request it over at '2D MMORPG SoM-Like Roleplaying Engine / manasource.org' and don't create your own Chocolate Cupcake that will definately die!"


hugh.
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Re: A change in the organization of things

Post by ElvenProgrammer »

Rotonen wrote:
ElvenProgrammer wrote:So if I understood it correctly, all the developers are moving to manasource.org and we need to create a solid team to keep server.themanaworld.org up to date with development and correctly managed as a production server.

Anyone willing to join me on this task?
Can I take this as you stepping up a bit again in the project? This is great news since I was worried I'd have to take charge of the entire TMW project which would take my time away from content development oversight.
I really hope so, and I'm working toward it. At least I would like to take care of client administration.

If you still want to take care of content development, feel free to, since that's the biggest part, now that code development is not one of our projects.

I don't know what's the current status, but I guess, we will need some help in server administration. I've out of the scenes for so long, that I don't know who's responsible for what.
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