System Concepts - Forum Purpose

Open: Focusing On "Big Picture" Technical Practicalities To Get Open Uru Online

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Mac_Fife
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System Concepts - Forum Purpose

Post by Mac_Fife »

The following hopefully expresses the reasoning behind the creation of the System Concepts forum, and what it hopes to achieve.

Firstly, I guess the forum title is bit vague: System and sub-system are somewhat amorphous terms - I was struggling to come up with something succinct and "System Concepts" was the first thing that came to mind. If we come up with something better then I'm sure JW will change it :) . I'm also not too comfortable with it being described as a "project" as I don't think there's a tangible outcome in this case.

I don't mean to decry the MO:UL forums, but the forum headings over there were oriented towards the GameTap MO:UL model and made structured discussion of the Open Source version a little difficult, which is why we ended up here - a place that is "guild neutral" and without the baggage of history. There's since been some re-organisation of the MO:UL forums, but the threads that were already started are still too tangled for many people to want to spend the time trying to follow.

What I was looking for when I first spoke to Dot, was somewhere uncluttered where we could discuss the practicalities of how we take Cyan's material and get it working on the types of platform that the fan base are likely to be able to provide. I wanted to look at the wider aspects, rather than the narrow focus items (KI enhancements, client upgrades, fan created content, and the like) taking up much of the space on the MO:UL forums just now.

I get the impression that a lot of people, somewhat understandably, have an expectation that "it'll just work" ("it'll just work" is a term that we often use jokingly at work when concluding a discussion of a task fraught with technical risk). I believe it'll be harder than that. We cannot replicate the Cyan/GT configurations, so we need to explore what alternatives might work, what the implications of any compromises might be, etc.

It's certainly not about trying to create "The One True URU Implementation", before anyone makes that suggestion, but I think we need a stable baseline implementation (somewhere) before embarking on those other creative initiatives make sense.

I believe that there are a number of people out there who each hold snippets of knowledge, that if pooled together, could benefit the whole community (I think the handful of posts so far is already starting to show that).

Thanks.

Editted to acknowledge the changes on the MO:UL forums
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Re: System Concepts - Forum Purpose

Post by rarified »

I agree... that is part of why I proposed the "Documentation Project". To get a better "high level" view of the existing architecture so it can be understood before making plans to change it.

I also think that the first effort to get the existing software running will be much more difficult that people are expecting. It always is with handing off a large system to new caretakers.

I've already sent out some PMs offering hardware and software resources to some of the more visible folks in the community. I'll happily wait to hear if there is interest in what I can provide -- even though it's from home on a DSL that can't support a lot of production load. At least I can offer a development/engineering sandbox.
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