vbGore Free Online RPG Engine

So my whole idea of getting a small group of developers to work on NetGore with me has pretty much failed. I don't blame the individuals involved in the slightest bit since I can understand the lack of appeal initially; there are no active projects with the engine, and you're not making your own game, so its a bit hard to justify the desire to want to jump into such a large project. So I have been thinking of scrapping the site/wiki layout I have now and instead:
* Making the forums more generalized like vbGORE's (though most of the topics, like recruiting or project announcements, are quite preemptive)
* Making an actual site (might just go for a wiki like with vbGORE again)
* Opening up SVN checkouts to everyone (which means I'll probably host it on another server, like Google Code)
* Opening up forum registrations to everyone
* Allow everyone read-only support on the bug tracker
* Allow people to still come on as a developer if they wish, giving them more access to the bug tracker and SVN check-ins

So basically, I am thinking of just opening up every aspect of it except for the actual development, which would still be on a per-request basis. The idea is that this would allow people who are interested to keep better track of the engine's status and development, and provide a means of giving their input on how the engine should be formed without having to actually take on role as a developer. It'll also increase the foot traffic on the engine, which will hopefully increase the chance that someone would want to help by actively contributing to the code development.

I would just do this without mentioning, but the problem is that NetGore ain't at all ready for use still. You have to actually look at the code to see all that is in the engine, as the demo game itself hardly shows anything special. So I am a bit hesitant about having a project so open when its not really ready to be. Though as long as I don't advertise it, keeping it more to just the vbGORE users for now, I think it might be fine.

Opinions?

I agree with waiting till netgore is finalised before actually releasing it, I've seen (and tried) way too many beta engines, and its totally put me off every time, and then ill forget about it totally.

I think the site/wiki layout in vbgore was a disaster. I really think netgore should strongly consider how they are going to do the site this time round. Way more features on the site, rather than offloading all functionality onto the forum. If you want people to use the wiki you have to provide an incentive to stop them from going straight to the forum via url, and then having people linking them back into the wiki.

Again more features on the site (and a better looking site), would make people have more confidence in the project. A lot of people on this site have asked the question "so has anyone actually made a game with vbgore?", and then wait for the responses. However if there was something like a game-page feature, where everyone who was making a netgore game would automatically have their own page with list of features, screenies and so forth, this would be less of an issue.

Also im not sure that a wiki is the best way to go. Every time ive seen a full fledged documentation section work a lot better. The problem with the wiki is it only provides one style of documentation. You really need multiple styles of documentation for things to be understandable. I personally have never learned how to code anything on wikipedia, even though it is one of my main sources of programming knowledge. The code examples are there, but for some reason it just doesn't register, i just understand the theory.

For example:
http://book.cakephp.org/
http://cakephp.org/files/Resources/Cake ... tsheet.pdf
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api ... ector.html
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref ... 770006.3.1

Also a .NET version of Javadoc on the site would be useful.

This is all just my opinion though.

You bring up some good points, bake. I guess I just felt like rushing it since, well, it can be a little boring developing it in private for like a year and a half.

As for making a "real" site, I probably should. I just liked the wiki layout of vbGORE since it made it so easy to work with.

So are you saying that you want people who aren't developers to help you with ideas for the engine? Because I would like to help, but I am not a developer, all I know is self-taught HTML and I am starting to learn Visual Basic/JavaScript on the side (also self-teaching). I am however, taking programming classes next year but I am not sure what languages they are going to teach. I believe they teach Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++ 6.0, Java, Flash and some minor languages - these are just what the website has for tutorials - I am not sure exactly what they teach. I did notice that they had VB 6, VC++ 6, and Flash installed in the programming section of the school's shared applications.

Basically, I would like to have input on the new engine, but I really don't know if I want to help program it, so would just random people be able to do this? I think that is what you mean when you say:



I like the idea of a wiki site, but you could also have an actual website. Maybe you could even make your own MORPG that comes with the new engine that anyone can play so they don't have to find one or create and host their own - this would add a few pages to the website such as highscores, etc. Just a thought, you may be too busy to do this.

I had more questions/thoughts, but I forget them now as it is getting late.

EDIT: I too, like bake, use Wikipedia but never really edit any pages there so I wouldn't know the language too well - I use the buttons at the top of the page.

Just a thought...
Maybe you could just use forums for the website if you didn't want to make a whole "true" website. By this I mean have categories for what you would have on a website. I've seen lots of websites that do this.

I was more referring to the way features are implemented so that they are flexible enough, and very easy to expand on. The main reason I haven't really been looking for "feature requests" for NetGore is that I know I'll end up with way too many requests for stuff that would take way too long for me to do. Not that I wouldn't want to add all kinds of goodies, its just that I simply can't afford spending that much time programming a free project.



I do plan on making my own game at some point with NetGore. Though I don't know if I'll end up releasing that as open source. But it'll be a long, long time until I have my own game with a decent amount of content.

Is there a publicly-accessible NetGore website released yet?

EDIT: Is it http://www.netgore.com?

Yeah, that is the site. Though you can't really do anything but view the wiki. What bake said has influenced me to just wait off until the engine is ready, so it'll be at least another month or two.

I for one would have loved to be very active in netgore for around 2 weeks now,
but as soon as school finished, other stuff came which kept me busy.
most of my time is practicing as our band has to entertain an entire wedding party and
we dont have near enough songs xD

I do have some time to look at .Net but I'm taking a while to get into this.
"actual OOP" and the entire .NET framework are very new things to me

we have clearly decided that we will use netgore "someday" for aleron,
and up until then everything but the coding will be beta-ready.
so basically the coders will be dragging behind anyone else on the team.

my feedback on when to release:
IF you release a beta, dont release it way to soon.
simplest example:

MY REGISTRATION DATE
it was WAY before i paid a 2. visit to the forums which was by accident and I saw
"wow this isnt that old small version!"

I personally dont care too much about site layout,
probably because im used to using the forums for anything.
but a regular site (INCLUDING a wiki and a forum) would probably be good.

and bake, we have a "list of active projects" in the wiki, but its very ineffective

Yeah its not really what i mean, instead of a freeform wiki it would be better to just have a template where you can insert data but conform to a standard layout. The problem with the wiki is it looks like hell, and people can do anything with it. The side-effect of letting the gamemakers do whatever the crap they want, is if they are crap at design, it can make netgore look bad (e.g heres a shitty site for a game made with netgore).

I still want to help its just everything in the bugtracker I dont know how to do I've tried a lot of them just stopped checking them out because usually I get stuck or don't understand what it is I'm supposed to do.

I purposely left these two in there just for that reason:

http://netgore.com/bugs/view.php?id=16
http://netgore.com/bugs/view.php?id=18

Woah, sorry.

Got busy with exams and stuff for school, then kinda forgot about NetGore. Need to take a look again sometime I guess :3

Making it a bit more open wouldn't hurt I guess, except for as said before, the check once and then never come back thing.

Still, you could always just add a "send an email to [__________] when NetGore becomes available..." link kinda thing, then mail everyone when the first release comes out.

Sad part is I don't know what TSDictionary is so I didn't try them.

could my bugtracker account be enabled please?
it seems it got disabled with hat 1 DB error we had there

would like to be able to look at some open cases.

Sorry about that. It looks like set you to Developer site-wide on the bug tracker, not on just NetGore.