| |
| Author |
Message |
|
| Cayle |
 Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2007 11:26 am |
|
|
Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
|
Whether the effort to buy Ryzom succeeds or fails, some thought should be given to what comes afterwards. If the effort fails, the only alternative left will be to plug ahead with what in effect is a re-iteration of the Build a World project. If the effort succeeds, there will inevitably be those whose primary interest is in maintaining the current Ryzom and there will be others interested in turning what Ryzom is built on into an open platform for creating community worlds. With this in mind, I feel that it is appropriate to give a postmortem of BaW from my (likely subjective) perspective. At this point, I should point out - as Xavier already has by PM - that my points are related to a general OSS world engine effort and that he does not share my views on project management, at least when it comes to the three Ryzom shards.
It might not be a bad idea to translate this postmortem to German and French, so that it can be posted on all three forums. I can speak German and have no trouble reading the German language boards, but my written German reads like the scrawl of a semi-literate lunatic, so it is better if I don’t do the translating into that language.
Build a World (BaW) was envisioned in the heady days following the last round with Nevrax. There were so many people and so much energy for getting something done; the Peragro Tempus team was visiting the VCA, the Worldforge team was around, some of the VCA people went off to start Aurora Borealis, etc. The idealistic thinking went as follows; these teams can come together and share efforts, scratch each other’s backs and all get further together than alone. Aurora Borealis quickly lost their steam and disappeared into the ether. Peragro was only interested in recruiting and with the recruiting ban at BaW, never even created forum avatars. Some Worldforge people stuck around to see what work could be done together, but I got the impression that they quickly wrote BaW off as a flash in the pan. This left one active team, Project Angela, and a handful of stalwart individuals from the VCA.
These individuals all had different interests and agendas. Some were interested in NEL. Some were interested in designing backend server architecture. Some were interested in implementing rule sets that they had designed, etc. Each individual brought with them a desired increase in scope that outmatched the resources and skills that they brought with them. People also brought unreasonable expectations with them. A great many of them were dreaming of building a WoW killer and flatly refused to participate in any project that could not scale to those proportions out of the box. Each person was interested in working on what they wanted to work on, not in what others were interested in. In itself, this is not a bad thing. The cumulative effect however was that nothing ever happened beyond talk. When results are slow in coming or not coming at all, people lose interest. Some drifted off altogether. Others drifted to PA. This had the effect that there was an expectation of the increase of PA’s scope that we could in no way ever fulfill and was nearly fatal to the group.
As I see it, these are the lessons of the BaW experience:
- There needs to be a focus and a mandate – BaW had no clear mandate beyond being a generalized place where “teams come together” to work on virtual world stuff. In practice, this meant that focused teams sniffed around the edges but did not want to waste resources involving themselves too deeply with something amorphous. Individuals at BaW essentially drifted alone. A post free-ryzom community faces the same risk.
Over at www.mmoworkshop.com, they face the same problem to an extent and they have something that you can download and start world building with tomorrow. Granted, I think part of the problem there is a community with “indie” rather than open source genes, but the lack of interest by any party in driving community development cripples it.
- Being a generalized place where “teams come together” does not work – Existing teams have their agendas and goals. They will cooperate if they see more to gain from it than what is lost in productivity. It was not a resounding success and nearly killed Project Angela in the process. You can share membership with other projects; many Planeshift developers are also CrystalSpace developers.
- Resist Scope Creep – BaW always had much more to do than people to get it done. There is a specific issue at hand here. Talking about virtual world design is fun. People like to do that and it is very easy to get a lot of people talking. That talking invariably adds scope. Making the transition from pontificating to doing is difficult and not made any easier by having a project with an impossible scope. Define a task list that is manageable and stick to it until 1.0.
- Avoid allowing observing pontificators to steer the project – Pontificator is my word of the month. It refers to people who talk and talk about how to build a world/engine/whatever or what they are going to contribute, but never actually contribute. BaW had its share. While democracy is good, anarchy will kill a project faster than you can blink. Full participatory democracy is problematic when people have opinions and desires that outmatch their willingness to contribute. Also be aware that a spoken willingness to contribute does not mean that the person won’t disappear as soon as it is time to get work done. An oligarchy might be the best approach; essentially participatory democracy where the suffrage is limited to those who actively contribute to the project. Observing pontificators can easily add scope or unreasonable expectations.
- There needs to be leadership – Someone with diplomatic skills and a vision needs to sign on to cajole the project forward. The purpose of a project manager is precisely to interfere with what people want to do and get them to do what needs to be done to bump the project along. Much of the work isn't glamorous or sexy and so no one really wants to do it. If the project is a pure democracy, the way BaW was, that work simply won't get done and the project is doomed. Ensuring that the foundations are laid is critical. The project lead needs to be committed to the project first and foremost. That person would ideally be a former Nevrax dev. Otherwise, it could be sfb if he has the management skills, or he could take the technical reigns and someone with project management skills could fill the leadership helm. The leader should not be a dictator, but a consensus builder with patience and vision. He should be the one guy willing to stay with the project when everyone else has abandoned it.
Lore is fun and easy. By itself, lore won't move the project anywhere. Bugfixing, design/specification documents, regression testing, that 80% stage in design where the fun ideas have been hashed out and the hard par of aligning the tricky parts happens and that 80% stage in coding when it is only about quashing bugs are all things that the project needs to get through.
- Scopes and roles should be clearly separated – This comes from our PA experience. Confusion about whether PA is a team building a world (Epoch), or a team building tools (RML) caused problems. There would need to be some sort of separation between the live team running the three “Saga of Ryzom” shards and the group taming the Ryzom Platform. I say Ryzom rather than NEL because Ryzom is so much more; art assets, a complete engine, player and GM clients, builder tools, etc. If the team working on the Ryzom platform is the same as the Saga of Ryzom live team, there will be the temptation to make changes that only benefit the Saga and not other users. These would be unnecessary changes when viewed from the outside.
I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but Project Angela shifted its focus a month or two ago. It is no longer a world team that doubles as a tools team, but we are strictly about the Rule set Modeling Language, everything about RML and nothing but RML. This was the antidote to the dark hours we went through with BaW. The BaW drifters worked under the assumption that all of their individual desires were under BaW’s and hence PA’s mission scope. Being upfront about RML changes nothing in terms of the concrete work that we have been engaged in; but frees us from unreasonable expectations.
Some will be interested in the existing shards only. Most of the current talk in the English and German (I can’t read French) “Counting the free helpers” threads are geared toward the three shards. Some will want to use it to create their own stuff. When the inevitable slashdotting of the VCA happens (it happened twice last time), this group will grow substantially. Both groups will need to be organized and both (interlocking) mandates will have to be laid out concretely. |
_________________
The Ruleset Modeling Language - A project for making it easier to design virtual worlds. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| recentcoin |
| Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2007 5:50 pm |
|
|
Joined: 15 Jan 2007
Posts: 55
|
Without leadership, direction, and some general management, BaW is doomed to drift aimlessly. not unlike the Mary Celeste - a ghost ship with no crew and no destination. None of the PA/Epoch folk have the time or the will to take this up. We're sort of tasking you with locating a suitable leader, giving them a mandate and letting them run with it.
Ask any of the successful open source projects on source forge and you'll see that there's either a single leader or a small cadre that sets direction and assigns tasks. It's just how development projects work. Running around willy nilly and not taking care of basics won'[t get you very far. You'll end up with scattered bits and pieces of code and still no working engine. People will get frustrated and leave and you'll have exactly what you have now. A forum that's only visited by spammers. A wiki that no one writes in. A project that is essentially dead in the water. A second round of this will likely kill BaW permanently.
Any time you're talking about a development project, you're talking about getting people to do quite a of tedious, unsexy, unglamorous, unfun work but it's work that's critical to the project. Doing internationalization of the user interface is a prime example. It's not much fun, but if you want people use your software who don't necessarily speak English, it's kind of necessary. Refactoring code is another one but it's often necessary to clean things up and ensure that they work properly. |
_________________
TIA,
RecentCoin
Epoch The Game
www.magnaturris.com
Project Angela
www.rpg-gamerz.com |
|
| Back to top |
|
| recentcoin |
| Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 4:07 pm |
|
|
Joined: 15 Jan 2007
Posts: 55
|
| Wow, we've got as many posters in this thread as we do volunteers to help with the work of crafting the game.... |
_________________
TIA,
RecentCoin
Epoch The Game
www.magnaturris.com
Project Angela
www.rpg-gamerz.com |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Kaetemi |
| Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 4:20 pm |
|
|
Joined: 24 Nov 2006
Posts: 31
Location: Lembeek, Belgium
|
recentcoin wrote: Wow, we've got as many posters in this thread as we do volunteers to help with the work of crafting the game.... |
_________________
 |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Cayle |
| Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 8:09 pm |
|
|
Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
|
| It had to be long to have any value as a postmortem for BaW. Actually, it was already the "short" version. |
_________________
The Ruleset Modeling Language - A project for making it easier to design virtual worlds. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Kalindra |
| Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2007 8:39 am |
|
|
Joined: 05 Oct 2007
Posts: 41
|
Well I do read the French part of the boards and it is the most active part with the most volunteers. How many of them will really work on the project ? I don't know. What I know ist that, to have the three shards with the same content and have the 3 communities working toghether, it will take many more translators doing the communication job.
Just between the French and English part, there is so much to do I don't know where to start. There is a full FAQ with Links to translate too that I (and hopefully some others) will have to translate from French to English. With that much content, I'm almost tempted to babelfish+correcting than rewriting everything. |
_________________
Kalindra
Sherkalyn on Arispotle
Language Student |
|
| Back to top |
|
| recentcoin |
| Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2007 10:40 pm |
|
|
Joined: 15 Jan 2007
Posts: 55
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
