Open Source Uru Plans, the GOW perspective

[BAD]

I think this needs to be formally discussed in a very serious and deliberate way. We need to form a synopsis of what the GOW should do, once Uru is open sourced.

We need this because as we speak, people are coming to conclusions about what we are doing. They are speaking from fear of chaos, and are repeating irrational fears like a broken record. If we can come up with a concise, intelligent and detailed plan for building the Guilds server bank, we can extinguish a lot of that talk, while promoting our ability to be organized and decisive.

So I am going to create a form for the Synopsis. I want everyone to stick to the form. If you have a suggestion that you are not sure would fit into the synopsis, then go ahead and break from it, but in essence we should be able to stick to it.

We can safely assume Cyan is going to use some kind of open source service to release the code. Chogon has mentioned it twice now. If they decide against that, then we can simply set one up for ourselves and promote it as the central hub for the main version of Uru. If that doesn't work out, then we can always go with the flow of whoever ends up getting that honor. From there, we have many people here with ideas of improvements and additions. We should try to stick to generalities, but if a certain project is major enough, we can spend more time on it's details. Also important to note that this will be a ROUGH DRAFT, and only a GUIDELINE to what we want to happen. It may not represent exactly what we want to happen or at what time we want things to happen, but it will show our INTENTIONS to those who doubt us.

So on to the structure I want to use to get this going.

************************Open Source Uru Plan*************************

1) In the beginning........
*****A) Set up or join (if already existing) an all Guilds forum. Potentially the Guilds Server bank forum.
**********a) Create areas for server maintenance
**********b) Create areas for each Guild
**********c) Create areas for code projects
**********d) link all Guilds forums databases to the new forum
**********e) Set up forums for general discussion and sign up of other groups
**********f) Create areas for new groups as they spring up or join the forum
*****B) Set up a test server where GoW and GoMa can test out existing ages on the multiplayer aspect
**********a) Document the whole process and release it publicly
*****C) Determine server and bandwidth requirements for primary game server
**********a) Determine server hardware cost or acquire donated equipment
**********b) Determine bandwidth and ISP costs
**********c) Determine funding complications and costs added by International players
**********d) Determine legal liability for server operators in whatever country they are operating in - Example: TITLE XIV--CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION (USA Code)
**********e) Determine if legal council is needed - find counselor
****************1) Decide minimum age allowed on server (13 is a TITLE XIV line)
****************2) Decide who accepts liability for child protection and compliance
****************3) Decide if insurance is needed and cost
****************4) Determine cost of legal council
**********e) Handle funding
****************1) Organize legally responsible group to handle funds
****************2) Organize accounting system and books
****************3) Do fund raiser for initial costs - if needed
****************4) Setup game subscription system - if needed
*****D) Set up the Main Guild servers for playing Uru
**********a) Immediately after release, when all software is ready, set up a public server so the Guilds shard is seen as the primary one
**********b) Use knowledge from test servers to stabilitize the server as best as possible
**********c) Possibly begin soliciting for other servers to be set up to aid the main server
*****E) Publish a "home server kit" so Writers can do their unit testing at home

2) As we progress..... (after the initial set ups. Keeping people interested, possible problems and possible solutions)
*****A) Design UCC friendly way of linking to Ages (Relto bookshelf or Nexus might be a good start, but a library age would do better)
*****B) Make decisions about basic Shard Background (continuity of how UCC ages are written, establishing of guilds in IC sense - what did or did not happen in the last hiatus)

3) Home stretch..... (Here is where we have everything going. Put things we should keep in mind and promote to keep everything thriving)
*****A) Establish ways to bring new content into the shard. See this thread for 4 models.

OK that is as far as I am going for now. I don't want to write the whole darned thing all at once. I'll update this page when I can with the latest version. Remember that this is a ROUGH DRAFT. Don't hesitate to add your thoughts.

[Grogyan]

One thing I do know is that with the Ages we have, explorers want to visit them ASAP with friends.
Having a centralized forum where intercommunication of all the guilds and sub guilds is a great idea, not sure if the current Myst Online site can be used for that or not, because we know its there.

So we need to make sure that the Ages we have are multiplayable, work with the Maintainers on this part
It also means that we need to setup a server to test these old and new Ages.

Also many people have the idea that we can suddenly spit out high quality and bug free Ages quickly, kinda my fault there with the RAD contests
We would need to discuss the greater implication of these contests

Need to tell the fans that even though the code is out, that it will take time to setup a robust central server to play on.
Eg the code is out on Christmas (yippee), expect April as a possible month to reopen the cavern

A new method to reach player made Ages should be done, that I feel should not be more books on the book shelf, link through the Nexus
Idea: Add a 3rd KI level upgrade from possibly the Hub in Pahts <- just as an example, to use with the Nexus <- RAWA's rules I guess would come in

I feel that the Archivists should help create a new overall story line,
Eg the wandering moose, symbolism

Perhaps we should have a talented group of Age writers that will work similery to what Cyan did for MOUL writing large scale Ages in for example a 2 month cycle

Should the GoW include cumlative easter eggs, eg the GoMa mark in every Age, where a click on one would add something to your pocket /look in pocket would reveal, eg a pen, a feather, ink pot?

A gaming Age was once an Age Cyan was going to write, and people may want that,
We should find out what players really need, wants come later when there is a firm grasp of the code.

I'm going to get in trouble now, Grogyan goes and hides

[Paradox]

Idea: Add a 3rd KI level upgrade (which actually adds a usable KI interface with the necessities for proper communication and a good gameplay experience, which Uru has been lacking for a while...) from possibly the Hub in Pahts <- just as an example

fixed

[Grogyan]

Huh?

[Trylon]

My input

************************Open Source Uru Plan*************************

1) In the beginning........
*****A) Set up or join (if already existing) an all Guilds forum. Potentially the Guilds Server bank forum.
**********a) Create areas for server maintenance
**********b) Create areas for each Guild
**********c) Create areas for code projects
**********d) link all Guilds forums databases to the new forum (perhaps even move all the guilds to one server bank)
*****B) Set up a test server where GoW and GoMa can test out existing ages on the multiplayer aspect

2) As we progress..... (after the initial set ups. Keeping people interested, possible problems and possible solutions)
*****A) Design UCC friendly way of linking to Ages (Relto bookshelf or Nexus might be a good start, but a library age would do better)
*****B) Make decisions about basic Shard Background (continuity of how UCC ages are written, establishing of guilds in IC sense - what did or did not happen in the last hiatus)

3) Home stretch..... (Here is where we have everything going. Put things we should keep in mind and promote to keep everything thriving)
*****A)

Just a few ideas for me - no time to fill in the whole thing yet

[SeanMc74]

A new method to reach player made Ages should be done, that I feel should not be more books on the book shelf, link through the Nexus
Idea: Add a 3rd KI level upgrade from possibly the Hub in Pahts <- just as an example, to use with the Nexus <- RAWA's rules I guess would come in

My thoughts were that new Ages shouldn't automatically be added to the nexus or the KI. I would like it to be similar to MOUL where a new linking book would appear and the explorers would have to discover it. Maybe have the GOME spread the word that a New Age has been discovered or one of the explorers has written an Age. I liked the scavenger hunt after every update, re-exploring every Age to find something new.

[Lontahv]

Nice plan BAD. I hope we can get it to work in reality. I've been dreaming about a single guild network (Rel.To--or whatever it's called--just doesn't count here) for a while.

Basically we need to do something that others have not done. We need this to stick. The best way to make things stick is: offer ease of use and make it worthwhile for people to sign up.


What would make signing up very worthwhile is if we hook all the forums up under one user-account db.

I'm not sure if you can just point phpBB to a particular account-db and keep all the other db's the same. We'd have to do some fiddling since the guild don't have united ranks. But maybe we could work out some sub-group thing.

I don't even know if login-user info is connected to rank. If it's not connected, great! I'd need to look more into the phpBB db systems. We could always edit the phpBB source so it connects to the db we want.

We'd have all the accounts have the preferred-guild labeled. For instance, on the main board my user-profile would say I'm a GoW member (I would've set this up to say this) and inside the GoW I'm a rep.

There are two problems with this idea though (my idea I just talked about):
a) the GoG is the only guild that does not use phpBB (we maybe could get them to switch over... but I doubt it).
b) guild-leader administration (banning, etc.) is VERY important. If all our leaders here had to go though the GoC, GoG, GoMa and GoMe before making any auth-db change our board would be full of bots posting porn advertisements and other things.

So, now that I've taken you though a detour of my dream for the United Guilds I can get back to discussing what I think BAD meant with the guild-hub forum.

Even if we can't merge the auth db or don't want to we can still make it feel connected.

I think we should first find a way to figure out how many guilds are out there that want to be represented on this hub. If we say: WE ARE THE HUB OF ALL GUILDS we are saying that we are the one true hub (and by saying that we make people think they HAVE to deal with us). This should be a site that, rather than being a hub for everyone, is just _a_ group of guilds rather than _the_ group.

Here's my idea for how to let new guilds into the network to be recognized by this site:
A group of people (united admins from the other guilds?) decides if a guild should join based on a set of rules put down in a structure. The biggest of these rules (the only really powerful one) would be: the guild must have X numbers of supporters to classify as a "guild" rather than a "group".

So now that we have a group of guilds that has signed up to be on the main guild list (excluding the "Guild Of Lontahv Hates Gunk On The Bottom Of Optic-Mouses"--which has 1 member) we can add them as groups on the forum.

You can only join one of these groups at once, but membership is open (I for instance could say I'm a Maintainer on this board or unaffiliated). This group-membership doesn't give you anymore power of access to boards. It could be used to color code you or such. It's just an easy way to see what guild this person supports most.

Now we have: a central forum and members that can have guild-based colors.

Ok, I had another idea of what this site could do: it could rent part of the server and sub-domains out for sites at discounted prices. This way we could afford to get a good, big, server and not have it go to waste with just one board on it.

I don't think the site should run on the same server has the Inter-Guild(closest-to-official)Uru-Server. I don't want to get lag in the city because someone's posting a large message.

I'm not sure how many people would rent some of the space (I'm sure it depends on the price). If renting the server out can cover a lot of the web-server costs we sill need to figure out how to cover our costs for the game-server.



The game server: Other than hosting we would have several other costs.

The admins of the guilds will have to pay me off so it stays OOC. Ok, I'm not QUITE that bad.

It's hard work to keep something stable while still adding serious updates. With a testing build you can implement something that's not 100% stable but getting there. But to have a server that tries to replace what Cyan's MOUL server did, you need creme de la code.

I'm not saying the people using the shard should have to pay for food and bedding of the devs (although old donated hardware would not be un-welcome ). I for one don't want be be losing money paying for various things I'm _only_ getting for development on the server and client, software-licenses for needed development tools for Plasma (not sure about if I'd need to use commercial software at first).

I don't think it's a huge deal with the money if we can give people a better-than-MOUL-like experience on this server but at a lower price. I don't know how everyone feels right now about charging for entry to the main server (little testing server we'd host with part of the money we get would be free of charge).



Another idea would be: The Guild Of BookMakers. This could be the main development hub (or at least for the versions of client and server the guilds would use). This way we don't have the GoG and GoC arguing about what we should put in the code.

We'd be a hub for development but nothing more. The guild could own a few testing servers for new code etc.

[Chacal]

I'll have contributions to the plan later.

Reaction about a centralized Guilds forum: I don't see why.

What we need is a forum (or part of an existing forum such as GoW) relating to the shard itself. There is no need to merge existing guild forums. There seems to be an implied statement that centralization is good. This isn't true. This is contrary to my experience. In most cases, centralizing multiple communities and systems has been detrimental to all of those communities, except when they have complementary purposes AND compatible mind sets. There was a reason why different communities were initially started.

[J'Kla]

If Chacals' I don't see why refers to "I don't see why we need to centralise" then I agree. If its "I don't see why there's a reaction" then I don't but either way I'll run with the herd.

I was wondering about Cyan saying the new code was scalable and I was wondering "Scalable down as well as up" We are wondering about the big shard but if a small home shard that may only handle say 15 users is a viability then that would allow testing without the overheads.

Yes the main running shard would need to be scalable the other way but if the development shard or even shards were built like UU just for primary multi player testing remember you only need to play the main ages to get your KI and then we use whatever method to get to our test age there has to be a shorthand way of handling that.

I am open to a swift blow on the head if I am talking total nonsense here, but we know the way into UU shards could they be mangled to provide this test/development environment?

[Calam]

As per the "All Guild" forum... If it's needed enough, and if there's enough cooperation, Whilyam and I might be able to get the Assembly of Guilds forum back up. (Although we're both busy with another project, so don't think I'm volunteering his help.)