Technical update
by m64 on May.10, 2009, under Administrative
Small technical update about the progress of things. While TheAncientGoat and dmj726 are busy writing universe concepts proposals I have been spending some time evaluating different possible technical platforms for hosting the commundo world lore and asset repository. Options currently investigated are: Drupal, Joomla, ocPortal and MediaWiki (+ some supporting technologies). So far Drupal feels like the easiest one to use, ocPortal is nice because it has many useful features (like wiki, chat etc.) included in the base install (but it is a bit complicated), Joomla falls somewhere in between and MediaWiki has not been evaluated yet. If anyone has experience with those systems and would like to share his knowledge, then I could certainly use some advice.
Aside from that, I have added randomized favicons to blog and fought off a small wave of comment spam. Also I have started a thread I called Design Drills on FGD forums – the idea is to exercise our game design skills by collectively discussing some game idea without any plans or obligations to ever implement it. Unfortunately the thread is not getting too much interest, so if there is someone who reads my blog, but does not read FGD or have not noticed the thread, I would appreciate if you give me a hand with getting the discussion rolling.
May 10th, 2009 on 8:59 pm
All I can say is that chat needs to be IRC-client-accessible.
How open will the creation be? Perhaps it might make sense to choose a system that equals files stored in a rcs so everyone has a copy – for 0-latency loading and editing of pages? MediaWiki IMHO is too slow. And web browsers also slow down a lot when large text fields have to be loaded.
Web-based system is attractive because it’s probably easier for integrating image files.
Best solution would be to have a system that can be edited either via web or text editor on your localhost without having to use the browser. Google Code allows this for its wikis for example: http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=56645&topic=10457
May 10th, 2009 on 9:50 pm
I have just realized I do not havy any vision of what should the system look like. My ideas were like “just a wiki, forums and an asset repository…”. I will have to think a little more about, although I wonder how important the offline functionality will be. I generally envisioned that people will be browsing through it online, but being able to download all assets and documents in bulk can come in useful when the project will grow.