announcements at Mysterium - implics for Minkata?

[Treehugger]

Hi, it may be immediately apparent to most of you what the implications of the Mysterium announcement on fan content are for Minkata, but it's not so obvious to me, so can someone set me straight:

will the fan ages come onto Minkata before going to MOULa? Or does DIRT create a new mechanism that bypasses Minkata?

[JWPlatt]

New ages can be tested here before installation on MOULa, but it is not required. They could be tested anywhere. If here, they can be tested publicly or privately/confidentially. Minkata is still the the fan shard closest to the MOULa implementation out there. We'll make sure it works for content as well as code. Rarified needs some time to ramp up for content testing, but I'm sure he'll let us know what's happening.

Please note that we're not going to make artistic evaluations for the builder or on behalf of Cyan. We just plug it in to see if it gets through the build process and whether it works in the game. But we could comment privately and informally as users if the artist is interested. Cyan will need to be the judge of what they put on their servers - like any other shard owner. But anything the fans can do for Cyan saves real community dollars (CAVCON). Anything we can do for Cyan and the community, we will. That might include folks at Cyan, or the artists, logging onto a fan shard like Minkata - with its powerful automated build systems - to review the proposed content so that they don't have to spend time setting it up for test and debug themselves.

[rarified]

Just to follow up (and indicate I'm still alive but perhaps not kicking as much right now ),

I've offered Minkata as a testing host to those individuals and groups that I know are working on fan content. Obviously it has been more attractive to deploy content on a highly active shard to get good exposure, and I understand that.

What Minkata can offer right now is an environment as close to the MOULa shard as is possible outside of direct Cyan involvement. The client remains in sync with the MOULa client, and as far as I can tell the MOSS server is very close to implementing the behavior of MOULa servers.

To provide a contributor with a restricted access instance of Minkata I do have a small amount of work to do, but it is not going to take months or years. So that service may be attractive to some.

Depending on needs and licensing availability, the server Minkata runs on has the resources to do such things as batch rendering that may speed up work as content starts to take final form. That is a topic for another thread as well as some individual discussion.

TL;DR -- Minkata can still be helpful to content providers, but I need to know about who wants and needs help.

_R

[Treehugger]

Hi, rarified, thanks to you and JW for the info.

Hope the reference to you not doing as much kicking right now isn't an indication of ill-health?

If so, a further wave of good wishes will be heading your way from me and I'm sure from everyone else too!

[rarified]

Thanks Treehugger! Good thoughts and energy are always appreciated!

_R