[glob2-devel] A personal roadmap, and some pompous arm-waving

[Andrew Sayers]

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about glob2, about what needs
work, and about how I can help.  I would like to implement a GA, because
I think it would be a Cool Idea, but I've stuck it at the back of a long
queue, because the project has as many people working on Cool Ideas as
it can take, and not enough working on bread-and-butter issues.

This isn't meant as a nasty or negative post, but I'm afraid a lot of it
will be a tour of things I think glob2 is doing wrong right now.
Basically, I think it's about barriers to entry.


The idea behind glob2 is a very attractive one.  At first glance, it
looks like Warcraft done right, and with far more of a sense of fun.
The game draws people in, but the community doesn't yet do enough to
keep them in.  There are three groups of people that need attention:
would-be players, would-be developers, and would-be contributors.

People that would like to play the game have the problem that it's very
difficult to find out how it works.  Glob2 is surprisingly complex,
the tutorial and Joey campaign aren't that instructive, and neither is
the website.  Although I really appreciate Nuage's help with answering
my questions on the forum, it seems as if he's the only one that
understands much of this stuff.

People that would like to develop the game have the problem that they're
given very high-level overviews of the text, and code that would be very
easy to understand if they already knew how the game worked, but not
enough information to approach one small area of the project they'd like
to work on.

People that would like to contribute to the game have the problem that
the tools they've got are quite basic, and they're locked in to working
on the program the way that the in-game editor wants them to work.  It's
quite difficult, for example, to spell-check campaign text.


In the run-up to a 1.0 release, I think the best thing I can do is what
I've started doing on the wiki - documenting every aspect of the game,
in a way that ordinary players can understand.  Dizzz referred to it as
a player Bible, which I think is a good analogy.  In the long-run, I
would like (someone else) to write an abridged Glob2 primer, but the
first goal has to be completeness.  I think I can promise to work on
this solidly and on my own, and have a useful document out in time for a
1.0 release.  I will though need to keep asking people to explain how it
all works in simple terms :)

I do seem to be picking up a bit of information about code here and
there, and there are some improvements to the comments that can be made
before the 1.0 version - for example, if people could put a few lines at
the start of each file and class explaining what it is, that would be
very helpful.  Nct has done this for SGSL.h and SGSL.cpp to show how
this would work.  However, once version 1.0 is finished, I would hope
there would be a period of reflection on how the game works and what
should go in a potential version 2.0, and that some attempt to write up
code from the point of view of a novice was part of that.  If I'm still
around when that happens, I would be more than happy to help in the
process, and to turn the results into a code guide, as mentioned on the
wiki.

TMM is starting to write a new editor, and we're talking about increased
support for scripting, but the other thing I think contributors need is
an improved format for storing maps, which can be more easily expanded
to include things like customised images and whole campaigns in a single
file (so you can easily send them around on-line).  Again, if I'm still
around after 1.0, I'd be interested in working out a system based on zip
files, with campaign text, script, and map as separate files inside the
archive.  It would be easy to add directories for images, tiles, fonts
etc., and for the second and further maps in a campaign.

        - Andrew