Re: [palito-dev] So then...

[Rodolfo Borges]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 05:29:26AM +0000, Tom Barnes-Lawrence wrote:
> Well, it looks like there's not many prospective coders here, and Barrett's
> main problem is not having time to do stuff ATM. Overall I'd say not good,
> but not a disaster. People are still *interested* in Palito.

Well, the not having time problem is more like a motivation problem.
We allways have more things to do that the time avaiable, so it's a
problem of motivation and priorities.

> Even if we can't get any coding done at the moment for whichever reasons,
> maybe we can still *discuss* things a little? Any problem with that?
> If so, just say, please! :)

None at all.

> Firstly, I think it'd be pretty important that that last bit of news on the
> Palito front page (not the Wiki! But I'll get to that...) gets fixed. People
> will either suppose that the 9hells team have been flooded and thrown out
> *twice* or get confused. People won't bother trying to contribute if it seems
> like nobody is able to deal with their contribution because there's no
> machines to work on...

I fixed that now. The duplicated entry was probably that I copy/pasted it to
make a new entry, and leaved it half-finished. Haven't noticed until now. Ops..

> Secondly, I know that there's a TODO file, but I'd assumed that Barrett being
> stalled meant "There is a specific bit of code that I can't deal with", and
> people who want to help often want to know if there's something immediately
> important to do. What *is* the biggest problem in Palito ATM?

The biggest problem is, or was, the rewrite for the new client-server network
model. It slowed down the steady progress that was going on other areas of the
game.  It's more or less working, but there are some irritating bugs around.

> Thirdly: Personally, I don't really like the idea of Wikis, I sort of prefer 
> the
> idea of one or two people managing a site and maybe taking content from people
> and putting it in, like editors. *BUT* the Wiki is there now, and we have a
> small group of people who could work on it, and I think the spam problem only
> gets bad if the site is seen to be neglected. Supposedly a similar thing 
> applies
> to vandalism IRL.
> So maybe people who don't feel comfortable coding can work on the Wiki? I saw
> today that Nikosai had started an account to make some edits, which is cool,
> maybe we can figure out what sort of other pages would be useful there?
> I think we could do with
>  -Instructions for how to play the "stable" and "dev" versions of the game
>   (ISTR they're both different ATM)
>  -Documentation for the Flush language (I know there's some in the existing
>   readme files, but I think it could be better)
>  -Explanation of how things like the network protocol etc are meant to work
>   (there might be a big discussion on the mailing list, and some ideas get
>   abandoned?)
>  -Any other suggestions?

We can keep the main page static, a wiki for some other areas.

> Finally, Barrett and anyone else from the original team: if you being busy is
> just being *generally* busy, not anything specific (like work or university
> or whatever), then some people recommend making just 5 minutes a day (or
> every other day, every week, whatever) to the project, it can get things
> going a bit.

zED is working a lot, even in other (comercial, I think) games.
I don't even talk to him much moew lately.  I miss him, he was a good friend,
and it was very good to code with him. Many of the progress on Palito was on
long overnight coding sessions, with us switching the keyboard back and forth.

I'm working, but not that much. Other "problem" is that I'm married now.
But it's not that that will stop me from working on Palito again.

> But if it's something too important/urgent, there's nothing that can be
> done about that except put Palito stuff off until later. The code won't break
> in that time. Of course you don't have to do any if you don't feel like 
> coding,
> but you sounded as though you did want to.

Yeah, this hibernation period happened (is hapening?) for lack of motivation.
I looked at the code, and just don't fell like working on it again.
But that also make me feel bad. Your project is like a son to you, and
having other people interested just raise your responsability on it.

-- 
rodolfo
address@hidden