Honestly, I'm not too bothered about this rendition of URU, from a game play and politics side, (see other threads)

I'm more worried on the code and asset management side, hence the thread

There is little understanding of what open source means. At the moment people seem to be talking about game politics, not the mechanics of what will hold things together.

There will be a single master source from cyan, and in the instant it gets released there will be many branches spread off, and with this communities need to hold on to what they have, in the misguided hopes to gain power and respect, the branches will never merge, this is a strong concern!

There are actually several open source projects that will build Uru, Server, Content Creation and Client to name the obvious ones.

I'm looking at this point for the community to start thinking about key leaders in order to manage the huge task ahead, yes there are the guilds and they will own/manage a part of Uru, making each area an open source project in its own right!

But who leads them, who are the key spokespersons for them, are they ready to manage a repository, do they know what software revision is, do they know how to document, the list goes on

Then there is the merging of each branch to build an Uru Revision, for example:

One guild adds a new message class into the client, but the server people never got told about it, a revision build goes out with this been over looked, servers crashing left right and centre.

I'm thinking It wouldn’t go a miss to include a "guild of guilds", made up of key people from the guilds, and outsiders with specialist knowledge of open source management and development to share and manage the "communities master branch".

The "community master branch" is ultimatly a key part of all this as without all the parts talking you don't get Uru.

Anyone any thoughts, on whether this is a point worth moving forwards on?

Quote:

There will be a single master source from cyan, and in the instant it gets released there will be many branches spread off,

That is very important. Everyone starts off with the same URU Live client.

Rusty_Russell wrote:

Quote:

There will be a single master source from cyan, and in the instant it gets released there will be many branches spread off,

That is very important. Everyone starts off with the same URU Live client.

Can I add?

That is very important, Everyone starts off and continues to have the same URU Live client

Indeed, that will be essential. I don't want to have to have multiple copies of Uru for the different shards. That will cause Uru major issues.

One of the things that we have a chance to do is make Uru more accessible to casual gamers, something Cyan didn't do well (adding a label to the classroom door when we needed to have an easier KI among other things).

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It's actually a nice idea.. I'm just wondering how modular the system really is compared to what Chogon implied. UserKI could slot in nicely because of the way it handled .paks and pythons, but that was extended command lists. What we'd need eventually is a way to break part of the KI interface design free of the exe so it can be repatterned on the fly with user mods (dunno how to do that.. probbly a mix of xml layouts and python coding). That way you don't need to have a seperate version with your features compiled in, that may or may not work.. or alternately fold the whole works back in to main and change it for everyone.

At this point we have nothing to look at but I think when we do we'll want to break free parts of the layout to allow external parts to affect it.. that and usage etc.

Otherwise I can't imagine it ever being a unified client. (Unified server heck no, but as long as they all behave with the single client it's ok)

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Welcome back all!

If I understand what you posted DarK, one of your main concerns is communications between parties that are involved in making URU work for everyone. That has been one of my concerns as well. If the guilds have a part in making this work, one of the things I am are planning on biringing up and discussing at the next all guilds meeting is making sure there is open, constant and reliable communication between the guilds.

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Thanks much, DarK. You've managed to describe successfully a large portion of my concerns that I seem to have been unable to convey properly over the past few days. I am in full agreement with you.

DarK wrote:

Honestly, I'm not too bothered about this rendition of URU, from a game play and politics side, (see other threads)

I'm more worried on the code and asset management side, hence the thread

There is little understanding of what open source means. At the moment people seem to be talking about game politics, not the mechanics of what will hold things together.

This is a especially a problem for new people (like me) who have little or no knowledge about the Myst community, but who what to contribute ideas.

Quote:

There will be a single master source from cyan, and in the instant it gets released there will be many branches spread off, and with this communities need to hold on to what they have, in the misguided hopes to gain power and respect, the branches will never merge, this is a strong concern!

This is one of the main problems of many open source projects. They get forked and forked again and someday there are several small projects who don't make real progress. (This happens to OpenMoko right now)

Quote:

There are actually several open source projects that will build Uru, Server, Content Creation and Client to name the obvious ones.

I think they would be subprojects and should share the same codebase (at least the client and the server)

Quote:

I'm looking at this point for the community to start thinking about key leaders in order to manage the huge task ahead,

I think these leaders will emerge automatically as developments goes on.

Quote:

yes there are the guilds and they will own/manage a part of Uru, making each area an open source project in its own right!

But who leads them, who are the key spokespersons for them, are they ready to manage a repository, do they know what software revision is, do they know how to document, the list goes on

Then there is the merging of each branch to build an Uru Revision, for example:

One guild adds a new message class into the client, but the server people never got told about it, a revision build goes out with this been over looked, servers crashing left right and centre.

I'm thinking It wouldn’t go a miss to include a "guild of guilds", made up of key people from the guilds, and outsiders with specialist knowledge of open source management and development to share and manage the "communities master branch".

I have very little knowledge about the guild system, but I think a guild of developers which contains all developers would be better than having multiple guilds working on the same source and try to communicate which each other.

Quote:

Anyone any thoughts, on whether this is a point worth moving forwards on?

I think most important now is to build up the communication channels to allow constructive communication.

I am worrying about the same things too DarK. It seems to me there are two main classes of development in this project. One kind of development targets the story and content creation using the API's provided by the engine. The other kind of development targets the engine itself, the client, the server, the data distribution service, the architecture of distributed game environments. The area related to content seems to be getting a lot of attention, but the area related to the structure is really fuzzy at the moment. This underlying structure of the system itself is very interesting to me.

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DarK wrote:

There will be a single master source from cyan, and in the instant it gets released there will be many branches spread off, and with this communities need to hold on to what they have, in the misguided hopes to gain power and respect, the branches will never merge, this is a strong concern!

...

The "community master branch" is ultimatly a key part of all this as without all the parts talking you don't get Uru.

Anyone any thoughts, on whether this is a point worth moving forwards on?

DarK, there is a very interesting discussion about possible means to unite, see here http://www.mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16711 . I really like the sound of something like LaunchPad, to ensure a good code basis.

Just skip the arguments and it should make a very good read Would it be useful to merge the two threads? They seem along similar lines really...

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The time has come for us to move on. Thanks for the wonderful friendships, pleasant interaction and 7 happy years in URU. Above all, thank you Cyan for bringing Murray and myself together. Be well, everybody

Nominate people , get the commuinity to vote and elect a council.Council should include representatives from the Guilds who can put forth ideas / changes to the commuinity for vote .We'd just have to be damn careful over who was voted in and ensure its active.

....Just a idea as we'd need a starting point /structure

Or maybe wait until the Cavern reopens and make NO changes for a while...... and we can freely interact IN the cavern 'in person" so to speak and be able to discuss things freely and also see the world that we may be affecting changes on.

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I think hanse is right about the the leaders emerging with time. These will hopefully be natural leaders. If we hold elections who says we won't get some person who can't code (or doesn't like to) and doesn't understand things fully.

Whilyam, I think having to have multiple clients in unavoidable (but not installs if the dataserver can be set up right). Don't tell me you use the same data-set between SOME shards...

I'm not sure how Cyan plans to distribute the plClient itself if they own the dataserver (maybe they can just serve the Cyan age-data and then there's a secondary one that is run by the server owner to download fan additions and clients). If each shard could have their own data-server just for the client exe to be downloaded from you'd only have to update 7mbs or so between servers (if they use a different client build).

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hanse wrote:

DarK wrote:

I'm looking at this point for the community to start thinking about key leaders in order to manage the huge task ahead,

I think these leaders will emerge automatically as developments goes on.

I agree with you there, people who work towards the projects goals effectively will emerge. There is a problem to this however.

During the transition there is no one is directing the project, it’s going to be utter anarchy in getting the first build out with regards to what goes in and who is responsible for it?

Growing pains, I’m hoping will come quickly and leave just as fast; it’s something I hope the next point will help smooth out.

I noticed you mentioned a developers guild as well, this is on similar lines to the “guild of guilds” I was referring to, they have no control over story, IC’ness etc. It just manages the development aspects of Uru, with the OC areas of the Cyan guilds if necessary.

Lynnutte wrote:

If I understand what you posted DarK, one of your main concerns is communications between parties that are involved in making URU work for everyone. That has been one of my concerns as well. If the guilds have a part in making this work, one of the things I am are planning on bringing up and discussing at the next all guilds meeting is making sure there is open, constant and reliable communication between the guilds.

Can you also bring up and feel about how people would feel about open governance?

I’m not talking about elections and votes. It’s not productive and does not put the right people in the right places as mentioned, so people please no more suggestions that we hold elections!

I’m looking for Open governance to be directed by key players in each area. Collectively between them a procedure needs to be built for when releases happen, what is to be included in the official/whatever build, who is responsible for it etc.

Key players are decided by the people who volunteer for tasks; remember that more than one person/one group can work on a single project, or procedure. It will be up to that small group to decide on who leads, codes a set item, signs things off for repository commitments etc.

The modular design here gives groups the ability to run and manage their own in house stuff, if they so choose. They can have and manage their own downstream repository from the main sources for what they are working on, but it all has to come back up to build the end product.

A beautiful thing about open source is that people can all have a hand in the pot if they so want, this is also a hindrance as well because in the initial stages, everyone will have an opinion.

So to that end, we can have a team of people working on repository commitments, a team managing bugs, group of people working on KI code, even a group of people leading the development of said area, and for those that want it, a group of people working on the fluffy pink marshmallow ride.

What goes into a specific final build is up to the choice of the person building it, but a group should be charged/involved in releasing officially stamped binaries that will let them play Uru on vanilla shard builds.

(Any terms here which insinuate authority mean absolutely nothing at the moment because "officially" nothing is decided)