Daniel “Dahie” Senff has come up with several exciting ideas for new community web projects that could make the sim racing community a nicer and more productive place. Daniel is not just part of CTDP, he’s been active in our community for over ten years, enjoying the Grand Prix series and rFactor.
The ideas presented in this series of articles are free to picked up by everyone who feels like it, you´re very much welcome to leave your opinion and discuss the ideas in the comments area as well. Below is the final part of his series, make sure to check out the first, second one, third one, fourth one & fifth one as well if you haven’t yet.
By: Daniel Senff
Project hosting!
The last idea I would like to present to you roots from my background as software engineer. It is probably the most ambitious idea and the hardest to realize, because it takes a lot of knowledge, experience, skills, time and probably money. Still I want to share it.
Building mods is a big process. Big mods combine the work of more than 30 people and project development can span years. It’s a hobby, but good organization and good infrastructure helps a lot to coordinate the work and to share knowledge and help communication within the team. For teams it is important to create this infrastructure. At CTDP this is part of my job and there are some technologies I would not want to work without anymore. However not every team has the same resources and so in many talks the idea came up to have a web application, that helps mod teams in the crucial infrastructure.
Project development
This in inspired by several Open Source software development and hosting solutions. SourceForge, Google Code and my favourite github give the software developers an integrated solution. You create your project and get a set of tools that help you in your development: Version controlled repository, issue tracker, task management, wiki, file sharing, forum, webspace to name a few features.
These sites are free for Open Source development, but have premium memberships for commercial projects.
A version controlled repository is perfect for sharing source files among members. The data are stored on a special server. Members clone a local copy and upload their changes to this central server. These updates are shared within the team very quickly. Software like Subversion (SVN) has proven itself to be very reliant. The big disadvantage are the costs for having your own SVN-Server.
Wikis within a team are perfect for setting up a knowledge base. Mods include a lot of research and tutorials, so having a central place to post everything from simple notes to big articles is very helpful.
Project organization helps to keep your tasks straight. In big teams with lots of different work and alot of specialization it helps to keep your head if you always know who is concerned with which task. The same applies for bug trackers to keep an overview on the issues that have been found during beta testing or after the release.
These features are not required for building mods, but they optimize the creation process and help dealing with the annoying stuff that surrounds the development. The proposed web application would give Modders their own private world with all these tools to use for their Mod development. I don’t want to get into the software itself at this point. You could start your own specialized web application or build on existing software like Apache ACE.
Sites like github are focused on Open Source, which is different to Mod development. Mods are mostly about content, projects with a defined end and the technical requirements are much bigger; texture and model sources blow up data repositories as Mods grow to Gigabytes of source data. This makes the idea so tough, because to make this idea work you have to invest more into the technical solution. You need good servers and lots of storage.Not impossible, but hardly feasible for single person to create and to run. Running costs make this unrealistic as a free service and I doubt the commercial market is big enough. To be a commercial success the website would have to communicate their service and their intentions very clearly. The community has been skeptical and even hostile towards commercial endeavors. Here is a niche, but companies not native to this community or arrogantly trying to sell under their terms without looking for a dialog in the community will get their bloody nose (again).
While this idea is bold and has several obstacles, there are hosting solutions already out there, that could be interesting for modding teams. Jira Studio allows for open source projects and other solutions also give you a good infrastructure for starters.
Ideas
In the past articles I covered several ideas for web applications, websites, blogs and other web-based solutions that have been missing in the past. The ideas differ in how easy they are to realize. Yet many of them have been done before in one way or another and have precedence from which we can learn. What we need are people to have ideas and the guts to get started. I donate my ideas for everyone to take and realize. Probably, not everything will be a success, but with more and new Modding and Community-friendly games on the horizon it is the time to kick off some new things, get them rolling and shift into next gear.
Thank you for your attention and your thoughts on the topics.
Daniel (Dahie)
