RE: More players and mobile clients
Collin Pruitt
Anuj Kumar
-Anuj (slut)
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:07:28 -0800
From: col...@collinp.com
To: netrek-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [netrek-forever] RE: More players and mobile clients
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Dave Summa
To: netrek-...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 10:30 AM
Subject: RE: [netrek-forever] RE: More players and mobile clients
-Anuj (slut)
Dave Ahn
If you want more players, then get the infrastructure for netrek.org into the control of people who actually care about the game and who have played the game in the past year or five.
Zachary Uram
recently of intense discussion and several developers expressed
interest in working on netrek, but they all have gone eerily quiet
since and I guess lost interest. Finding talented developers who have
the interest and the time available seems incredibly difficult. Yet
other open source projects don't seem to have such a problem. What is
netrek doing wrong to attract development?
--
Zach
http://www.fidei.org
Collin Pruitt
We have no community. There is no reason to develop. How hard is this to
comprehend? Why develop for a project that has no future or hope of ever
being used again?
Focus your resources on getting the community going first. Worry about
development second. We have three fully-functional (by some definitions
of "fully functional") clients and a server already, development isn't
our top priority right now.
Allen Tipper
time to code on it, if there's someone leading a development effort,
but not the time to run the effort myself. As I said in that
discussion, I can probably toss in about 8 hours a week; that alone
isn't sufficient for anything really significant, but it can certainly
add value to a coding effort.
I've often wondered myself how Netrek could properly attract open
source developers; I'm no PR expert, but a lot of the problem, at
least to me, is that no one has heard of it. When I talk to my
friends, even my techie friends, and mention Netrek, they have no idea
what it is. I can't even show them a real game, since there's pretty
much never T-mode on the servers. I'd have to do something like get
together 8 folks at once, or preferably 16, and set up a formal game.
I've even seriously considered doing just that, but time constraints
tend to get in the way.
Netrek is a unique game, and there's nothing else with the same depth
of play and strategy on the market. As many Indie games prove, it
doesn't need to be especially pretty to attract a loyal following,
just interesting. Take a look at Dwarf Fortress and the following it
has as an example. I'm just not sure how I can really even advertise
it or show it off when we can't even get T-mode going currently.
-Allen Tipper
-------------------------------------------
Insert witty .sig here
Joe Evango
Had ads running monthly, pulled all of them because it was a waste of time and money trying to pull people in only to have them driven away by the political nonsense stirred up by a few bad apples.
Unfortunate because the community had people willing to contribute and invest time and money to build the game but due to a few extremely unsocial individuals those people have moved onto other projects.
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:43:17 -0800
From: stee...@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: [netrek-forever] RE: More players and mobile clients
To: netrek-...@googlegroups.com
Zachary Uram
>
> We have no community. There is no reason to develop. How hard is this to
> comprehend? Why develop for a project that has no future or hope of ever
> being used again?
>
> Focus your resources on getting the community going first. Worry about
> development second. We have three fully-functional (by some definitions of
> "fully functional") clients and a server already, development isn't our top
> priority right now.
That is a valid point, however not everyone has the same points of
motivation vis a vis development. Some may only get involved if there
is already a vibrant community of active users, others may be
challenged by a less active community and relish the chance to have a
big impact. I think we're talking about two tracts, which are mutually
dependent in my view, to pursue for reviving netrek (everyone I think
can agree it is for all purposes dead as an active community).
First: creating buzz about the game, getting broader exposure (I'm
sure many gamers have never heard of it.)
Social media can be a good tool for this, but it doesn't do much good
if you get a nice influx of newbies and they are turned off by the
graphics, the messaging system, the lack of guidance, and a host of
other issues. So this brings up the second tact.
Second: have a desirable (however you define it) gaming experience for
the newbies when they do come. We should make things as easy as
possible for them. There is a lot that can be done which won't affect
classic netrek gameplay at all. We must be aware that netrek now
competes against literally tens of thousands of other games. How can
we get their attention? I think netrek will always be a niche game
because it does have a steep learning curve (that in itself is not a
bad thing) and right now there is not active communities of players OR
developers.
So whoever will revive the game must have a coordinated approach that
accounts for both of these different problem sets.
--
Zach
http://www.fidei.org
Zachary Uram
> I have always wondered what happened to that myself, Zach. I have some
> time to code on it, if there's someone leading a development effort,
> but not the time to run the effort myself. As I said in that
> discussion, I can probably toss in about 8 hours a week; that alone
> isn't sufficient for anything really significant, but it can certainly
> add value to a coding effort.
Yeah, people who were interested expressed initial estimates on time
they could devote and areas of interest, but after that they all went
silent. You can't force people to be passionate so I figured best to
just wait for people to get something going and then we can bring on
more interested devs.
> I've often wondered myself how Netrek could properly attract open
> source developers; I'm no PR expert, but a lot of the problem, at
> least to me, is that no one has heard of it. When I talk to my
> friends, even my techie friends, and mention Netrek, they have no idea
> what it is. I can't even show them a real game, since there's pretty
> much never T-mode on the servers. I'd have to do something like get
> together 8 folks at once, or preferably 16, and set up a formal game.
> I've even seriously considered doing just that, but time constraints
> tend to get in the way.
I've had the same experience. Perhaps a training client could help
with the initial exposure to netrek. Keeping track
of everything and being aware of all the layers of team play and
strategy is impossible for a newbie, they just see netrek as a space
battle game, and then as they learn and peel away the layers of the
onion they finally get clue and appreciate just how deep of a game
netrek is, but the problem with that is it takes years to fully
mature. So we should focus on making newbies initial exposure to
netrek as fun as possible. Have killer graphics, quality sound, a web
bases stats/ranking system so a player can login (or have it all
public) and see all of their up to date stats. I can already hear
people groaning, "Stats don't matter!" But it *does* matter to the
newbies and most modern popular games have some sort of public stats
system available now. I wish I could lead such an effort, but I don't
have much programming experience nor experience coordinating
developers so I think someone with lots of experience should step up,
but such people tend to be very busy.
> Netrek is a unique game, and there's nothing else with the same depth
> of play and strategy on the market. As many Indie games prove, it
> doesn't need to be especially pretty to attract a loyal following,
> just interesting. Take a look at Dwarf Fortress and the following it
> has as an example. I'm just not sure how I can really even advertise
> it or show it off when we can't even get T-mode going currently.
Good point. I'm sure with enough ad dollars we could get all the
players we wanted, but then the essential question is retention. If
they try it once or a couple times and have no fun and leave forever
then the ads are just wasted money.
--
Zach
http://www.fidei.org
Zachary Uram
> The troll factor is one of the major items that drove me away from the game.
> People wanted to spend more camping on observer slots, flinging insults and
> driving people away from the game rather then playing or using that time to
> contribute.
>
> Had ads running monthly, pulled all of them because it was a waste of time
> and money trying to pull people in only to have them driven away by the
> political nonsense stirred up by a few bad apples.
I didn't realize we no longer had ads running. A pity.
--
Zach
http://www.fidei.org
Dave Summa
Collin Pruitt
> First: creating buzz about the game, getting broader exposure (I'm
> sure many gamers have never heard of it.)
> Social media can be a good tool for this, but it doesn't do much good
> if you get a nice influx of newbies and they are turned off by the
> graphics, the messaging system, the lack of guidance, and a host of
> other issues. So this brings up the second tact.
>
> Second: have a desirable (however you define it) gaming experience for
> the newbies when they do come. We should make things as easy as
> possible for them. There is a lot that can be done which won't affect
> classic netrek gameplay at all. We must be aware that netrek now
> competes against literally tens of thousands of other games. How can
> we get their attention? I think netrek will always be a niche game
> because it does have a steep learning curve (that in itself is not a
> bad thing) and right now there is not active communities of players OR
> developers.
>
> So whoever will revive the game must have a coordinated approach that
> accounts for both of these different problem sets.
My approach would be to (in loose order):
a) Remove a lot of the useless features from clients. Make it so you
won't hit a random button and the message window will disappear (yes, I
know that can be disabled in the configuration of any decent client, but
it's still annoying.) Which brings me to my next point;
b) Create a cross-platform configuration wizard *and* a configuration
file that is compatible with all clients.
c) Make the clients look the same. For heaven's sake, COW looks like an
Atari game without the graphical package, Mactrek looks strange to begin
with, and Netrek XP looks like something out of the 2000s. No insult to
the respective client developers, but looks are a lot of the deal, sadly
enough.
d) Possibly, create a newbie server. Set requirements to play on that
server, and if you surpass those requirements, you get disconnected and
instantly redirected to the metaservers. Make it so that, any new client
installs automatically default to the newbie server unless it's disabled
in the client configuration file (wizard). This will prevent newbies
from getting rewled off the ordinary servers by more experienced members.
e) This is an idea that would take a lot of flak if actually
implemented, but there might be the necessity to implement a curse word
censor. Maybe we could have a single "safe" server for that. I'm not
sure, though. That's a whole discussion within itself.
f) Possibly, get Paradise going and onto the metas. As much as the older
clue will hate it, if it attracts players, then we need it. Paradise has
that whole "chaos" part to it, and it's much more expanded, than
ordinary bronco is. It's the same thing that makes some people like
Sturgeon more than others.
g) Get INL going. But that's far in the future.
In addition, we need to have a whole marketing team that handles getting
ads everywhere, getting a social media presence, and such things as
that; generally getting the word out about the game. There's got to be
some people out there that want to play the game, they might just be
hard to find. They're more than likely going to be the UNIX-y type of
people, too. In addition, they need to pull the emails of every old clue
that we can possibly find, contact them, and see if they would be
willing to come back and play some and teach some newbies. It's a long
shot but we might get a few back.
And, this is directed specifically at Dave Ahn:
If I could get access to the netrek.org server, I personally would be
willing to renovate the website into something more usable. I'm not sure
who exactly administers the netrek.org server - wouldn't that be Tanner?
And a general question, who runs playnetrek.org? I used to know this but
I forgot it a while back.
James Cameron
> On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 12:07 AM, Collin Pruitt <col...@collinp.com> wrote:
>
> If you want more players, then get the infrastructure for netrek.org into
> the control of people who actually care about the game and who have played
> the game in the past year or five.
>
>
> It's odd to argue that the people who pay for and maintain the infrastructure
> on a purely voluntary basis would do so without actually caring about the game.
> I didn't realize that playing the game was a requirement to host the servers
> and to make sure that the web site, etc are up. I've decided to take
> corrective action based on our detrimental impact on the community.
I disagree with your proposed action.
I also disagree with Collin that the infrastructure should be in the
control of people who play ... there's no sign that the people who play
either know about infrastructure control or can provide content and
coding. If there was a sign, we'd have a row of contributions already.
I also disagree that placing the infrastructure in the control of people
who play would increase the number of players. In my experience, this
reduces the number of played hours by the number of hours dedicated to
the control task. Zero sum game.
Still waiting for content and code contributions.
--
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
Collin Pruitt
> I also disagree with Collin that the infrastructure should be in the
> control of people who play ... there's no sign that the people who play
> either know about infrastructure control or can provide content and
> coding. If there was a sign, we'd have a row of contributions already.
>
> I also disagree that placing the infrastructure in the control of people
> who play would increase the number of players. In my experience, this
> reduces the number of played hours by the number of hours dedicated to
> the control task. Zero sum game.
>
that, if something were to change, it probably would have changed by now
- but I personally believe that more would be accomplished with the
infrastructure in control of the people who play. Currently, at least,
there's a lot of *interest* in doing stuff, but no stuff being done, and
that's because I feel that people are reluctant to contribute when
nothing has changed to show that it will help anything. Everything is
still *exactly* the same as it was... six months ago, maybe even a year
ago. I believe that the fundamental infrastructure of the game being
transferred to the control of different people would signify that a
movement is underway to change the game, and might help to encourage
more people to contribute if there's some hope that said contributions
will bear fruit to the overall health of the game.
It's more the psychological factor in the equation than the actual
change that makes me push for this.
James Cameron
I think what you perceive is an effect of responsibility. When someone
is in control of something, they have a clear responsibility to act, and
so they act.
But in the Netrek technical community we have generally given
responsibility to people who have demonstrated their ability to act.
The main trouble with requiring those with responsibility to also play
... is that we instantly lose infrastructure components when those
people stop playing. It has happened before.
Allowing non-current players to control infrastructure improves the
infrastructure available to the player community.
Dave Ahn
I disagree with your proposed action.
And, this is directed specifically at Dave Ahn:If I could get access to the netrek.org server, I personally would be willing to renovate the website into something more usable. I'm not sure who exactly administers the netrek.org server - wouldn't that be Tanner?
Currently, at least, there's a lot of *interest* in doing stuff, but no stuff being done, and that's because I feel that people are reluctant to contribute when nothing has changed to show that it will help anything.
Everything is still *exactly* the same as it was... six months ago, maybe even a year ago. I believe that the fundamental infrastructure of the game being transferred to the control of different people would signify that a movement is underway to change the game, and might help to encourage more people to contribute if there's some hope that said contributions will bear fruit to the overall health of the game.
Collin Pruitt
> No, on both accounts. The production netrek.org server requires strict
> access control and consistent up time. It is not for developing a new home
> page. If you are serious about your offer, then proceed with your work on
> a development server. I can provide one if you don't have one. Once you
> are done, the production server can be updated. If you commit to long-term
> maintenance, we can discuss and grant access to the production server. But
> the very first and obvious thing to do is to contact Andrew, the listed
> webmaster on netrek.org.
don't have a reliable machine to test on at the moment. I need an
environment that can emulate netrek.org's current setup (software-
wise) as closely as possible, so I know what I have to develop on.
Side note: Please excuse the time delay in my replying, I've been busy
with a lot of personal issues recently and haven't had time to write a
response.
Collin Pruitt
> You need an instance of Apache with PHP enabled. Most hosting sites
> provide that.
>
> Then you need darcs installed.
>
> Then you type
>
> darcs get http://netrek.org/
>
> and put the resulting directory somewhere interesting.
>
Yes, but wouldn't such a production system as netrek.org have specific
versions of PHP and other such software?
James Cameron
Please don't make private replies public.
I was making sure you wouldn't be unduly impacted by having to wait for
access to a production system. I wasn't working to give you access, and
I wasn't implying that access would not be given.
The answer to your question is yes, netrek.org does have specific
versions of PHP and Apache, but I don't think specific versions are
necessarily required. Regardless, you can demonstrate changes
immediately without production access, as can I, simply by making them
available somewhere else.