Post
by smerkli » Thu Feb 05, 2015 8:57 pm
Since I can't attend on Saturday due to craptastic planning on my side, I thought
I would at least state my inputs on the topics mentioned above here as a contribution.
Server:
- SVN permissions and accounts: possibly LDAP or simply move with
the old system since that worked so far.
- Data easy to move, but redirects nontrivial
- Same with Trac or new versioning system, maybe simply sticking with
what there is might be fine?
PPS:
- In terms of coding, I think the issue for more complex things like improving
the game performance require quite some hands-on coding experience that is
not taught in the ITET courses alone. What I think has been very popular
are tickets that are quite self-contained and are fairly local in the code,
such as creating game modes.
- AI seems like a very rich area, which I'd combine with scripting. Especially
for the advancement of a single player campaign, improvements to the camera
script controller and maybe dialogue integration seem like achievable PPS
projects that could enable more involving storytelling.
Content creation:
- A few recent tickets have made more things possible, such as the extension
of the space station modules with accurate collisionshapes. Combined with
the docking, this could now be made into levels where players travel from
one space station to another to get something or talk to someone, extending
on the current range of missions we have.
- While recording dialog for a story sounds fun, we would really need students
that are motivated to do so. Otherwise, I think just a textual dialog-popup
series would be fine to tell a story for now.
Restarting from scratch:
- I think restarting would in the long term not lead to a much cleaner
codebase, the whole model of students contributing over one semester is just
too open to keep code clean and well-structured. As we already discussed at
the previous Think Tank, we could introduce quality control and only accept
code that meets certain standards into the game's trunk. I think would be
more beneficial than a rewrite.
- Alternatively, we could also remove or refactor parts that are already present
and often present hurdles to people implementing new things. Examples for this
are for example the WeaponSystem which has a huge amount of features which
are not used a lot (yet) or the InputManager / InputHandler framework.
Communication PPS / other developers:
- We have done less advertising for the available channels in the recent PPS
iterations than before, however I think participation has never been very
high. This is likely due to many people looking at this as a PPS and
therefore a school thing, in which they generally don't participate with much
of their free time. I'm not sure how we could change that - the pizza evening
has worked well recently I think, maybe we could do this twice during the PPS,
one "get to know the developers" event and the usual pizza event.
Activity:
- I think the central issue there is that the multiplayer is not quite "there
yet". I've been trying to fix this by advertising a multiplayer debugging
ticket, but there were no takers so far. I think if we can get a gamemode
that is fun to play running in the multiplayer and actually start playing the
game more regularly, development motivation will also be higher.
Best,
Sandro
