[STICKY] Team OSCAR: What You'll Want to Know First

An Open Content Development Team For Myst Online: Uru Live Again And Compatible Fan Shards

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Nye_Sigismund
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Posts: 64
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2010 12:59 pm

[STICKY] Team OSCAR: What You'll Want to Know First

Post by Nye_Sigismund »

What is Team OSCAR?

Team OSCAR (Open Source Creation and Restoration) is a content creation team for Myst Online: Uru Live Again and compatible fanshards. OSCAR seeks to create the best content in the community via an open development process that makes it easy for anyone in the community to contribute to the growth of Uru.

How does Team OSCAR work?

Team OSCAR is based out of this sub-forum. Most discussion is here, where the eyes of the community can easily read through what's going on. OSCAR also encourages less formal communication via IRC and Skype, and will be moving to set both of these up in the very near future.

OSCAR's development proceedure is based on the 5-stage pipeline that Cyan Worlds originally used to create Uru. The five stages are:

Planning
Pre-production
Project Review
Production
Final Review

When a project is begun, a thread is started here about it. The thread doesn't need any formal layout or structure for the time being, but it does need to clearly state in the opening post what stage the project is in, and this stage needs to be updated as the project progresses. After the thread is started, the project is in "planning". Anyone can start a thread - the community has lots of ideas for content, after all. :)

Stage 2 - Pre-production - is the stage in which the concrete decisions about the project are fixed and initial production is done - concept art, initial blocking out, puzzle creation, art, and probably the narrative of the age. On leaving this stage, everything that the project developers want to do in stage 4 must be planned - a blocked out scene is critical in 3d projects.

Stage 3 may well turn out to be a formality. Ideally, this should be a Skype meeting or similar, which allows everyone to come together to talk about the project and sort out any final issues. Enough pre-production work should have been done by this review that everybody who looks at the work should be able to know exactly what is being developed, so they can hop on board with a minimum of fuss.

Stage 4 should be the easy bit. Thanks to robust planning by the end of Stage 2, there should be minumal setbacks in actually making the content. The content is actually created here - code is written, pixels rendered and polygons pushed. The environment and props are created and placed together to create the entire scene, which is then wired up to the PlasmaMax plugin to become a proper Uru age.

Stage 5 is the final review, and QA testing. Should a complex enough project get this far, ideally the Guild of Maintainers should be invited to help with the QA.

Who is on the team?

Everyone who wants to be.

Actually, to be more clear - you're on the team if you can contribute. Contribution is deliberately vague, but as a rule of thumb, if you help out in the projects in a constructive manner, you're a team member. But that's really an arbitrary term, as I'm not going to keep track of who is and isn't a member. This is an open content team, so no formal structure. :)

Anything else?

Two things:
1) I'm the moderator of this sub forum, but I'm here to get things moving and keep them oiled. I'm a team member, not team leader.
2) As moderator, my only request is to keep things politics free. I won't edit posts or remove them - but if a project's wheels have obviously fallen off and the cart it was in is plunging into a cavern filled with flaming trolls, desiring the consumption of all joy and happiness, I will lock the thread. I answer to the OU staff for my moderating here, and they have a free hand here. Keep that in mind.
Huw Dawson
Team Member
Team OSCAR
Nye_Sigismund
Member
Posts: 64
Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2010 12:59 pm

Re: Team OSCAR: What You'll Want to Know First

Post by Nye_Sigismund »

I've just found some industrial-strength glue, so this topic is now a sticky.
Huw Dawson
Team Member
Team OSCAR
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