Yeah, I'll give it a rest. I kind of gave up on it after bp said a new server would be required to handle the added load and that they're doing the website code update first. It makes sense for the most part but if they can't afford it personally then why not do a donation drive or something now rather than waiting until after the site updates are complete? I'm not sure how much is required but it could take a few months to collect $5k for a high end box.

Openlancer has a wiki but moving it out of the community like that is disappointing. This project isn't vaporware, its not over due, not abandoned, not a pipe dream. Its just a massive undertaking that needs a large amount of community support to become a real sequel to Freelancer, Tachyon, and others. That was the point in using a wiki hosted on TLR, using TLR's forums, and otherwise keeping the bulk of the development work on TLR. As far as I'm concerned its supposed to be a community project.

Now it looks more like we have to “win” TLR's attention by building the core game engine first. Only after we have something “material” for people to work with will the project get the support it needs. Like a shiny metal object to attract the mob's attention. I was hoping it would play out a bit more intelligently than that and as a collective community effort but so be it.


-Burn

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato

isn't CVS a pain to secure? Something about the user needing remote write access to the directory. I think there is pserver but I don't know if its encrypted. However if openlancer is in need of CVS and it is licensed as open source why not use sourceforge to host a project page and use its CVS servers? Its a proven system running many many other projects happily, only minutes ago I was updating my CVS copy of a projects files using annonomous CVS access. Of course lancersreactor would not be permitted to use it, to do so would be illegal.

As for hosting CVS on lancers server, isn't it a windows box? CVS doesn't really work on windows does it? As far as I was aware only the CVS client got ported from *nix based systems. I have seen a couple of CVS servers for windows but they are really dificult to use. One of the reasons I got a Linux/Windows dual boot. I can get CVS local repositry running in a few minutes, and that was first time I ever setup a repositry.

If the want SVN (I assume thats subversion?) sourceforge did trial it and I think they are rolling it out to all projects who want it, if I remember the email news letter correctly.


-- PS
on the CVS security front I _think_ sourceforge do it by tunnelling it over SSH so developers log into SSH to put themselves onto the local machine. Again I don't know if you can get SSH servers to run under windows but there is most definantly clients for windows (so windows users can SSH onto a *nix machine), I know this because I used to do it quite often.

Megaburn, you should know better than for people to blindly help out a project thats barely gotten off the ground. Until we give them something playable (which is getting more and more distant because you keep insisting on using graphics engines that barely work) they won't care. Its the same with mods, only the original development team will really help out until theres something there. Even then, few people permanently join a project.

Thinking that TLR would support a project this early in its infancy is the pipe-dream, not openlancer itself.

side tracking just a bit, if openlancer is open source can't you get some of the things needed from other open source projects that allready exist? isn't that one of the main pros of open source that you can build on top of what others have allready done to make something even better?

I can now see how you are using the wiki, doesn't look too bad tbh. Dunno if I would ever really write much on it, just due to the fact that all it would need is someone to get really pissed off and start deleting stuff out of spite.

But still, it does look like it has potential. Whether it would get adopted by others to contribute, I simply do not know, and the only way of finding out would be to "road test" it.

Sorry for the extremely late reply. Haven't been monitoring this forum lately.


Andy101,
We are using Source Forge. I was proposing TLR use Subversion (SVN). SVN uses WebDAV which should run on most web servers (mainly apache but it will run on IIS and others, or even standalone). SVN is more secure than CVS but thats not really the issue. As long as we have a decent history of commits and some fairly basic access control then security isn't a big concern (e.g. DB encryption and/or SSL would be excessive).

The main point with TLR hosting a CVS/SVN server was for mods and open source projects within the TLR community. It would cover pretty much anything developed for any game covered by TLR, including programs, mods (INI/XML), web code, other text, etc.

Source Forge is fine for Openlancer's code but we're still missing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) server. That would maintain revision control for graphics, audio, and other content not normally supported by SVN or wiki.


Blackhole,
Indeed, but TLR has its own problems. Most of which I didn't know about when I started making lots of noise about needing more resources for the project. Right now just having forums is fine as far as I'm concerned.


Andy101,
Yes, we're using as much open source middleware as we can get our hands on. Should make building the game engine much, much easier. We still have to do a large amount of development work for stuff not covered or poorly covered by free middleware. Most good middleware is proprietary and extremely expensive, but not all (Ogre and RakNet are prime examples of top of the line stuff thats free).

That said, free art assets are a different story...


Chips,
Thats what I've been saying for a while now. I was hoping TLR would host the test run so more people would use it, but the Openlancer project is happy to do that for you. Wikipedia is probably a bad example due to its massive size but that about the same as our setup. We're slowly going topic by topic documenting everything going into Openlancer. In time it will include all static text game data and probably templates for the dynamic stuff. Its great from revision control. If someone deletes stuff or makes an edit you don't like, just look at the history, its all there. Its been invaluable for our larger documents and will be for our campaigns and quests (scripted story missions).

I said I'd drop the wiki topic, and I have for the most part, but I'll start yapping about it again in a few months. Just have to get OL's wiki up to speed so it makes for a better example of just how useful a well maintained wiki can be.


-Burn

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato