Let’s get inspired by the organisatorical skills of others

[Ces]

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
â—¢ Wesnoth uses Subversion, TMW uses Git (so we beat them there )
◣ 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
◤ 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
◢ 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
â—£ 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
â—¤ 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
â—¥ Several guidelines have been established for things like coding, art critique, playing, ...
◢ 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!

[John P]

Ces, this is incredible work, thank you

I was particularly inspired by the 'Art Development' section, and as I know that many people see a link and ignore it, that Jetryls guide is very resourceful in my opinion. I am going to highlight one or two of his points:

Instant Gratification for Artists:
This is the idea that artists need to see their work in game to be gratified, but putting it on a shelf 'to be implemented' is the wrong idea. Getting it in and doing SOMETHING with it (if not the penultimate use of the art) will excite an artist into working harder, better, etc.

Specific to our situation, artists seem to get minimal dev feedback, at least on the forums. I am sure artists and the devs discuss things on irc, but we (the many people who do not go on irc) don't know the results on the forum.

For this reason, I would like to see more frequent and more direct response from devs toward artwork. Numerous threads are fading away because the artists are not hearing the direct lines: "Yes, we will use this [if you perfect it]" or "No, this will not be used [please redirect your efforts elsewhere]".

Finally, the article discussed compiling. Even if the art is put right into the game, the artists will still have to wait until the next 'version release' to see it (because many cannot compile source). If we get those builds more frequently, instant gratification satisfied with more haste

ps. Nice using graphics to make a long post look shorter Ces

[Jaxad0127]

This is the idea that artists need to see their work in game to be gratified, but putting it on a shelf 'to be implemented' is the wrong idea. Getting it in and doing SOMETHING with it (if not the penultimate use of the art) will excite an artist into working harder, better, etc.

This gets a big no from me. I don''t want to add stuff that doesn't have planning and get a world that has no cohesion and is a big mishmash of stuff (like Aethyra). We used to do this, and that led to the disorganized world we have now.

Finally, the article discussed compiling. Even if the art is put right into the game, the artists will still have to wait until the next 'version release' to see it (because many cannot compile source). If we get those builds more frequently, instant gratification satisfied with more haste

No. Client data is not distributed with the client. The updates you get when you log in are for new content. New client releases may add the ability to use new types of content, but in general, content doesn't need to wait for the next client.

ps. Nice using graphics to make a long post look shorter Ces

Those triangles aren't graphics. Their special characters. Try copying one into your address bar, for example.

[John P]

*goes back to his corner and sulks