Orxonox End-of-Semester Review

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patrick
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Orxonox End-of-Semester Review

Post by patrick » Wed Jun 27, 2007 11:53 am

hi guys!

I'm wondering how you see the future of Orxonox:

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.
3. How would you try to reach them.
4. How can our dev style be enhanced.
5. What shouldn't be changed.
6. What is the best way to make our community grow
7. Other questions, suggestions, comments

I'm looking forward to see your ideas.
Patrick
Last edited by patrick on Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:46 am, edited 2 times in total.

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beni
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Post by beni » Wed Jun 27, 2007 11:06 pm

Well I guess I make the beginning here. I hope I don't influence other opinions:

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
Orxonox is a game, but sometime during the PPS lessons one may forget about that. Since Orxonox became a PPS for second-year students, it became more of a workshop for students who program. Also the community is changing every semester, which makes the knowledge of the code of Orxonox get lost over and over again.
The long term goal of Orxonox should be, what it used to be: Not be a PPS per se, not be some never ending workshop for students, but become a solid and fun game, where the player notices the little difference between a game made for money and a game made for fun.

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.
I'd like to make another PPS next semester. Kreuzer Junior was actually happy to hear this. Next to the leading and organizing of the PPS I think about deeper change of the code and deeper story. Last semester I wasn't so keen thinking about the story, this should change. I have a lot of ideas while the project grows. I also got a lot more in contact with the code and therefore I think I'm able to see some problems I'd like to work on.
Oh yeah, and the organization has to be better.

3. How would you try to reach them.
There is already a story discussion board here, it's just not viewable by most people. I'd like to recruit some people to think with me about the story. The deeper changes in the code, are hopefully packed in a ticket I'll work on next semester.

4. How can our dev style be enhanced.
I would really like to get the code documented so we can use the oxygen pages. I think they help me a lot to quickly learn about the functions of a class or to look up some variables or methods.
Then there is the problem with the lost knowledge: People keep coming and going, not much are staying. So every newcomer has to learn from scratch what Orxonox is about . This slows a lot of "dev" down. A way to keep more people working for a longer time should enhance that whole thing. Also people should keep track of cleaning when something is implemented in a sloppy way.
After all it's hard to say how to enhance the dev style. Learn more tweaks about coding probably: read and discuss in forums and read some books. I don't know.

5. What shouldn't be changed.
Orxonox is meant to be fun. So we should hold tight on our traditions. PPS are fun, the grill, the fondue. The wiki and ticket system are useful and the forum showed its use already. Also important to discuss about Orxonox and its future and about the genre are really important. We also want to make Orxonox fun for the players so we have to work hard to reach this goal.

6. What is the best way to make our community grow
That one is a hard one. I think our traditions with the fondue and the grill are important for the community. What could be better is that everyone should be more participating in the forum and in the emails. A lot of people are rather readers than writers and then the outsider thinks, that not much is going on.
We all should also try to drag our friends into the project. When somebody seems to be interested, write him an email or invite him to a PPS. Show the game, the code, the content.
But we should also make ourselves interesting for complete outsiders, who do not study at the ETH. Good coders who want to help us and want to work on a ticket. Those guys must find a easy to work with code and documentation, a strong group of core developers who give quick and accurate answers, if the outsider has a problem and the main thing: Not to make him feel like an outsider. And there it is important that he gets not only the information he needs but also some information what is going on around the project.

7. Other questions, suggestions, comments
I think we have to work harder on our appearance: The code should be better documented, so newcomers find what they need. Webside should be up to date with new screen shots and the forum and the mailing lists should be used more extensively.
"I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite forum on the internet."

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Post by hofzge » Thu Jun 28, 2007 8:20 am

Concerning points 6) & 7):

I think that the first key factor is the web page. I know that I have been boasting about helping, correcting and what not, but haven't done a thing. This semester was a bit too much, as every evening of the week was filled either with language courses or soccer :)
As I won't take any new courses next semester I hope to be able to keep the web page a bit more up to date.

In my view what's bad about the page and about attracting complete outsiders to Orxonox is that there is nearly no content on the page. People want to see sound samples, music (partly there), up to date screenshots and no historical screenshots. The historical parts of Orxonox are more for us and should NOT be showed on a public page. I have seen the effect, as I forwarded the page to a colleague of mine and he was very disappointed and in the end didn't even try the game.

The second key factor is related to this and has also been discussed many time: The Windows distro needs to be up to date, or else we are doomed! I cannot stress this enough, as I am one of those 90% of the world who have little to no idea of Linux.

To sum this up: It's important for this semester to maybe focus on the outsider's view of Orxonox. What does a person, who has no idea what Orxonox is, get.
Until now, as Beni states, Orxonox has been an experiment for students, but if we want to sell it, we need to think about things like: What does the customer (gamers) like and how can we provide it.[/u]
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

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Re: Orxonox End-of-Semester Review

Post by silvan » Thu Jun 28, 2007 11:35 am

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
To become a fun game with an interesting story that keeps the player going. I think we should stick to the FPS / VS paradigm as it attracts both FPS and VS gamers. I never would have thought I'd say this, but the vertical scroller as it is now, rocks! And the fps-levels are not bad either!

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.
Make the existing intro even more difficult so that the player has to go more slowly through the levels. As it is now the player can run through the levels without looking at the fantastic environment.
Extend the VS- part. As I said before I believe that the ActionBox vertical scroller has a lot of potential. Make something of it!
Continue the story! Maybe add a VS-level on earth in a city where the player has to avoid collapsing buildings instead of meteorites!

3. How would you try to reach them.
Only four PPS students in the last semester were to few. We need more students.
It would be good to give the students who want to code a more in-depth overview of the engine, e.g. show them the Object lists and the main game loop so that they know what happens when a GameWorld is running.
This would help to estimate what has to be done for their projects.

4. How can our dev style be enhanced.
We need more documentation. Only that way we can prevent things from getting implemented multiple times.

5. What shouldn't be changed.
The fondue and the grill.

6. What is the best way to make our community grow
I agree with hofzge on the webpage! It has to be updated with cool looking screenshots and maybe a video.
The light on the end of the tunnel is a train.

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Post by KK7c13 » Fri Jun 29, 2007 11:19 am

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox?
I think orxonox should actually become a game :) ATM its mainly a developers playground with cool graphics and sick game play possibilities. Therefore Orxonox should get balanced quests, so people who are not particularly interested in developing would get the game.

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester?
More VS-Levels and an interesting quest line in the FPS levels.

3. How would you try to reach them?
More PPS students! I think a problem is that from the eyes of an ITET-student orxonox is a project for informatics students who failed to choose the right course; students who have too much free time and some other geeks. What I saw in this semester is that you can vary a lot in what you are doing and how much time you invest for your 8pts. So there should be worded more precisely in the PPS-description and maybe in the mouth-to-mouth-propaganda, too.

4. How can our dev style be enhanced?
Comments not just in the c-code; it's as important in the xml or lua files (yeah I know I didn't do it, but I'm willing to enlighten my code too. :P

5. What shouldn't be changed?
The bbq event, the wiki,... and it should always be a students project: we don't have to beat the farcry2 engine (even if we are very close^^) . So the fun of coding should always remain a main goal.

6. What is the best way to make our community grow?
Nightly precompiled playable builds. I have this picture of a bored student sitting in front of his tardis/win pc in mind, who accidentally visits the Orxonox webpage: for this kind of people there should flush a big red button "download" where you just can click, the copy the package to your scratch and play. I know the difference to svn && configure && make isn't too big but normal guys dislike words like compiling very much. :)

7. Other questions, suggestions, comments
Why don't we merge the homepage into the wiki (or another wiki), so everyone can add his breaking news to the front page. I never visited the homepage during the whole semester and in case I wanted to present orxonox to a friend I showed him the wiki, because that's where the news and infos are on how Orxonox looks like atm.

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Re: Orxonox End-of-Semester Review

Post by x3n » Sat Jun 30, 2007 4:59 pm

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
Well, we have much more coders than designers. We should think about other ways to give orxonox a variety of levels, ships and weapons.

Space levels can be created randomly. And I don't speak about some randomly placed enemies, no, I mean completely random. This includes position, weapons and models of enemies, the track, planetes and their textures, (fields of) asteroids and the whole skybox including stars, nebulas, comets, galaxies, suns.
And yes, I know this isn't easy, but it's the only way to create a lot of different levels.

FPS levels can't be generated, so we shouldn't include too much of them. And we need more enemies in the fps levels to slow the player down. Someone knows the "cutters" from half life 2? Something like a mechanical fly with a rotating saw. Enemies like that should be easy to model and easy to implement, as it's much easyer than some real (walking) bots.

And last but not least: The weapons aren't spectacular enough. They should be screen-filling. For more variety, the could be upgradeable, each upgrade changes the color and increases the size of the effect. This makes the weapons more attractive.


Oh yeah, and we need an editor. For the beginning a simple XML-editor who knows the class-specific attributes and makes the creation of levels more clear is enough. Later it can be extended to a real editor.


4. How can our dev style be enhanced.
Less dualism. This means: If everyone implements his stuff in his own way, much code is done twice with little differences - it does the same, but it's not compatible.
To avoid this, we need a clearer class-hierarchy and some reimplementations of things like creatures and input/AI.

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Post by nicolasc » Sun Jul 01, 2007 8:18 am

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
We need a game which is playable by anybody, not just the devs. I think we made a large step ahead compared the last term (which was a step back, if not a waste of time).

We most definitely need a cleanup. But we do not have time.

And we need something like a masterplan, which defines where we are headed. ATM I think that the goals are set a bit squishy.

Keep the action in the VS, and add more quest/riddles/whatever to the FPS mode. I don't say, that there has to be a strict separation (but IIRC FPS are a lot of work to create...)

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.
create a game: And I mean more than just a set of loosely connected levels. start telling a story, and give it a general direction.

3. How would you try to reach them.
Remove their fears, and tell them that game development isn't just about programming. We need a more than just coders and (model-)designers, at least someone who takes care of the story, and some to develop some quests (or are we leaving that part out).

For coders, give them a clean and "easy" framework.

4. How can our dev style be enhanced.
Comments, comments comments... (what else :) )

Communication... The small group of this semester, made some thing easier, but in the term before, I didn't really know what or how the others were developing..

Branching and merging: once more a comment to my first term. Merge earlier and more often.
The idea of giving each student (or group) its own branch, gives them freedom in the beginning, but when developing on dependent code (i.e AI and character system), it much better to keep those groups together.
Less dualism.
I cannot agree more.

5. What shouldn't be changed.
Fondue and BBQ.

6. What is the best way to make our community grow
Both have been named before: a more appealing webpage, and always a running version.

Before I joined the orx team, I wanted to try orxonox for myself.
I grabbed the trunk of the webpage, and i wouldn't compile. reading the compiler output a bit more carefully, I saw some class definitions were complete wrong. Yes I never wrote a mail to complain about this. but even for somebody who like tinkering, this is just unacceptable for a newcomer (and I tried it again, a few days/weeks later, and the error was still the same.). The code in the trunk should always be stable and runnable. I haven't really thought about is, but the same has to go for the data trunk. (And I must admit, that the code part hasn't happened again.)
Creating a release after each term, or separating development from "stable" might a solution... (but I am happy with neither)

7. Other questions, suggestions, comments
see above.

cheers
nico
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patrick
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Post by patrick » Sun Jul 01, 2007 11:03 am

edit: rewrote major parts, pls read again :D

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
Long time goals:
I'm still in love with the multiplayer part of Orxonox, which fell asleep a year ago :D But still I think multiplayer is the easiest way to make it fun in short and long term. Orxonox did never try to be special in terms of game modes. But for the multiplayer part, Orxonox should invent something very new and special (there needs to be a reason that attracts people).

Then I also speak for a short singleplayer game sequence that keeps the story open at the end. As we actually also wanted to implement it.

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.
Many did complain about the quality of the code base of Orxonox. I agree, that after almost two years of PPSs the code base has a natural tendency to become messed up. So the big decision to make will be: do we take the time to make it better or do we move on developing new things and complaining about sometimes crappy code?

It's not realistic to do this in the semester vacancies since most of you are learning anyways. Of course it would be much nicer to do it this way.
I'm not sure how many people will come to a PPS. where the topic is cleaning up code.


3. How would you try to reach the goals.
Take either the semester ferien or the next semester to do a deep rework of Orxonox. Put it in better shape and document it. Or assign the students of the next PPS to do this. How will we make sure they do a better job than we did?

If we do a rework of the engine, let's do it properly! There are many things, I would do differently now, most important parts: rely on specialized external libraries, focus on game programming mainly.
I'm willing to sacrifice a great part of the current orxonox code base to be replaces with external libraries. Good external libraries have some very important pros to self-made modules:
- they are properly documented, even with example code
- restricted support (important things get fixed pretty fast), mailing lists, forums
- much more specialized than we are: much more features, than we could ever implement
- often with support of better editors etc.
- better learning effect for students
Therefore I suggest to replace all code of Orxonox that involves either graphics, physics and collision with external modules. So let's just keep the things, that make up orxonox itself (the game): World Entities, Story Entities, loading, scripiting, networking, etc.
This sounds crazy, but I don't thing that it's too hard to be accomplished the pros are massive:
- support graphical effects like shadow, bump/normal-mapping
- open gl GUI for free
- cross-compatibility for free
- physics for free
- many different file formats supported
From this point on, we can focus on making games only :D


Core Problems For CleanUps:
- exchange the pnode system with the ODE implementation
- change to a new graphics engine (e.g. OGRE)
- integrate states (menu, pregame, loading, game, postgame, in-game-menu, etc.) much better into the framework. Remove this stateless fuzzyness

Minor Problems:
- Do a clean rework of the whole weapon system from scratch (perhaps nicolasc knows more about this)
- Differentiate game styles (fps, vertical scroller, action box) better and not in every world entity on its own

So which external graphics library would we like to take? i stared a new thread about this: here

cheers,
patrick

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Post by chrigi » Sun Jul 01, 2007 5:34 pm

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.

i'd like to see our network code in action again. even if there are a lot of multi player unfriendly parts in orxonox.

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.

find some really motivated coders with some programming skills to implement a multi player game mode. create some more content for single player (new levels)

3. How would you try to reach them.



4. How can our dev style be enhanced.

document code :D

5. What shouldn't be changed.

bbq

6. What is the best way to make our community grow

build a level / game mode which actually makes fun playing.

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Post by nicolasc » Sun Jul 01, 2007 6:17 pm

And last but not least: The weapons aren't spectacular enough. They should be screen-filling. For more variety, the could be upgradeable, each upgrade changes the color and increases the size of the effect. This makes the weapons more attractive.
Thought of something like THIS?

Back on topic: I can mostly agreed with what people are posting...

I think the main problem is time...

cheers
nico
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Post by Nowic » Tue Jul 03, 2007 5:21 pm

Better late than never... my answers:

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.

To create an open source game which is attractive to play and fun to develop.

2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.

I don't think changing the engine is a good decision for this project. Most open source engines have all the features that we'll ever need already implemented. So what coding challenges will be left for us and the students? Only scripting game logics?
Are we (and the students) able to create content for these advanced engine features? No, we can't! We don't have enought artist and time. So orxonox wouldn't look much better.

So what should be done:
* a big cleanup and documentation session.
* extend and improve the fps and scroller part.
* add a multiplayer mode.

3. How would you try to reach them.

More students and more spare time :-/

4. How can our dev style be enhanced.

more documentation and more public communication.

5. What shouldn't be changed.

The social activities.

6. What is the best way to make our community grow

* We should make frequent and small incremental releases with packages and installers. The way many open source projects are doing it. Creating alphas, betas and a gold release isn't a good developpement model for a open source game. We have to spread the code. (even if it's buggy) :)
* Keep the webpage up to date and attractive. I'm also if favour of the idea of dropping the page and putting everything into the wiki. It would be easy to maintain and more people could contribute.
* mirror the orxonox stuff to sf.net and other open source platforms
* create orxonox gameplay videos (youtube)

7. Other questions, suggestions, comments

null
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Post by bensch » Sun Jul 08, 2007 7:17 am

1. What should be a strategic long term goal of Orxonox.
beni: Stick to the plan and push future development of a game, I agree
Silvan: Important point. Its perfectly fine to settle on this, and if it is fun, what more do you want? FPS and VS it is also from my point of view.


2. What would be your goals for Orxonox in the next semester.
As Simon pointed out a good public relations could also be considered. Have a web-developer research some improvements.

3. How would you try to reach them.
beni: Like to see that story board :)
silvan: Good point. How to get more students -> make the topic more interesting and open. Maybe search public relations manager...

4. How can our dev style be enhanced.
Documenting the code is important but not always necessary. Focus on the main classes that you really need and document them. Do not focus on functions that are self explanatory as it just takes too long.
A good introduction to the framework might be more valuable, and then go from there.
Maybe deleting and updating obsolete classes as well would be cool.
patrick: Definitely a good idea to switch to some other libraries. I like ODE and Ogre, and as soon as we are at this change the feature development can decrease and a game can arise much, much easier

5. What shouldn't be changed.
Cool, Grill it up. At some point I will invite you guys to my place for a mayor grill (when I am back from Thailand).

6. What is the best way to make our community grow
Forcing people to write into the forum will not help, but I guess writing a cool update on what is happening every now and then, including a link to a Windows/Linux/OSX release (with short install instructions) might help. People will automatically respond to simple things, but not if they have to read a book on Orxonox...
So main focus: make Orxonox Human usable and present the best parts (as we alwayz did).

7. Other questions, suggestions, comments
Mostly: Increase webpage popularity. Good idea. Wiki? No, the Dev page is a wiki, we do not need two. But it should be easier to add a new screenshot and stuff...

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