The future of PBW - a call to arms

Gandalf Parker · #1 June 7th, 2004, 08:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Roanon:
As you seem to have good overview over the problems/needed features, and the needed admin abilities, how about appointing you to project manager?? Any objections? No? Ok, you have the job

Heehee. Thanks but firstly, I doubt very much that would go thru without objections.
Secondly, Id make a bad project manager. Im more debater than decision maker.
Call me when you think you have it all worked out and I will be glad to toss in "great ideas" that will stir the pot again. Thats what Im good at. (though thats not always considered a good thing)

ByTheWay, I probably should say that another forum, even a private one, can be setup here. Shrapnel has also offered in the past to help host web-signup sites like this when they are ready. But there may also be a faction interested in seperating and going with a fansite instead.

-- (sig line)The administration of programmers has been compared to herding cats. Basically you shoo them all in a particular direction by standing behind them, waving your hands and making loud noises. Eventually one of them might get where you want.

[ June 07, 2004, 19:37: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

#2 June 8th, 2004, 12:03 AM

There seems to be an implicit assumption in some of the recent Posts (e.g. discussing polls to pick programming Languages), that we'll be building a new PBW from scratch.

Can I just throw in the suggestion that maybe we just need to overhaul (and document, and arrange for long-term maintenance) the current system? When working properly, PBW as is (or was) had an extremely rich feature set. It may not be the generic PBEM game-server that Gandalf is after, and may not have been built using our favourite tools, but it did the job specified - running lots of Space Empire games - very, very well. Now I know that going throuugh an existing chunk of (presumably undocumented) code is going to be difficult and unpleasant (and may leave us with IP limitations depending on the original programmers' attitude to copyright), but it offers us the following advantages.

1. We know somewhere on the PBW server is a system that works. The diagnosis and fixing process may be difficult, but all the components of a working system are definitely there.

2. It kills two birds with one stone. Remember, that our mission - should we choose to accept it - actually includes two tasks. The first is keeping the current PBW server up and running so that we can continue to play games. The second is restoring the lost PBW functionality and adding any extra new features we might need. The advantage of the overhaul approach, as opposed to a rebuild from scratch, is that it does both simultaneously. The nightmare scenario is that the current server fails completely (or just becomes badly unreliable), while a shiny new PBW II is 12 months away from completion.

Mark

#3 June 8th, 2004, 12:14 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Do we think that a bunch of threads here in the Shrapnel forum is the best place for this? I was thinking one sticky thread here to keep the public aware of what's going on, and a link to another forum somewhere where we can organize things more to our liking. Plus we probably need some method of uploading files, which we don't have here. I am fairly confident Fyron would be happy to give us room on his site for a forum. Depending on how we go about it we may need a dedicated site though with whatever software controls the check out of the code in progress. I am pretty sure that would be easily gotten somewhere, but not here.

Geo is right that a design or programming team is going to need some facilities that these forums don't provide. On the other hand, I would like to think that the team can hold discussions in public. I think there's certain, welcome, level of accountability implicit in the idea that the potential Users of the system can follow what the developers are doing. And some of them may be interested, but unable to take part. Why split off into a private forum?

Everyone who plays SEIV has a stake in this process. Certainly we'll need to ask people to stay on-topic in certain forums, but why exlude anyone?

Just a thought.

Mark

geoschmo · #4 June 8th, 2004, 01:13 AM

I didn't mean to exclude anyone. My preferance would be for whatever forum we have to be open at least for reading and posting comments by anyone. My thought was just to allow us to organize the forum into different threads and whatnot that we can't really do effectivly here.

geoschmo · #5 June 8th, 2004, 01:16 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Mark the Merciful:
Can I just throw in the suggestion that maybe we just need to overhaul (and document, and arrange for long-term maintenance) the current system?

This is certainly an admirable goal. The open-source aspect of it may not be an option though in that regard since as I stated before, the code belongs to Admiral. I can ask him how he feels about making it open source, but I can't make any promises.

Gandalf Parker · #6 June 8th, 2004, 01:29 AM

I think that the gathering of information as to who is available and their backgrounds is still a good idea also. Overhauling PBW would be great, if we get permission and if we have people who can do that. Its both "ifs" that need answering.

Cipher7071 · #7 June 8th, 2004, 10:22 PM

Mark is right about one thing: our first goal should be to get permission to examine the code, do a little head-scratching, and see if we can't figure out what's gone wrong with it. At least we should be able to identify which blocks/modules contain the problems. With any luck, the programmer has left a few notes.

A complete rewrite is only necessary where the code is undecipherable. Even in that case, it still sounds as though much of it is going to be reusable.

[ June 08, 2004, 21:27: Message edited by: Cipher7071 ]