Crossfire Meet Up or Get Together

Thanks leaf

Place holder for details for the Crossfire get together1) in Italy.

Discussions

As this is a good opportunity to meet other crossfire developpers or artists and reenforce the team, this is important we jump on this opportunity to discuss important matters for crossfire. It's indeed far easier to organize a small reflexion table around problems when people can sepak face to face. Please describe below the subjects of disscusion you want to be raised. Give headlines of what you plan to tackle so people can think about it before we meet and be able to easily express their opinion. Also, it might be interresting to write down some report after meeting of what has been decided or suggested. Fill in abstract informations in table and create a small explanatory paragraph below.

Who What Points to tackle
Tchize Crossfire advertising Player advertising and visibility in open source community
Cavehippo Media Integration Providing the support and access needed to test and approve media changes
dark.schneider Character creation In-game or off-game?
Cher Java Editor The future of the Java Map Editor in Crossfire and Daimonin
Ragnor Crossfire needs to become more fun The objective must be fun for players, not fun for developers
Cavehippo Advanced NPC Interaction Making conversation more interesting and powerful
Crossfire advertising

Crossfire project has absolutely no communication rules or guidelines, no media access point, no distribution maintainers dedicated contact. As a result, lots of distributions are distributing old version of client and server (ubuntu breezy badger: 1.7), we have no visibility amongst the open source gaming community and we have lots of difficulties to gather artists around the project. I'll bring suggestions to solve this, bring your ideas too.

Media Integration

Currently there is no fixed process for getting new maps/archs/images included in crossfire beyond 'send them to the mailing list/tracker and er….'. On the occasions that someone tries to create something, there is no real way to support them properly in testing, verification and inclusion of new content. Any substantial changes need either to be agreed by consensus (which is almost impossible with no proper way to track that) or else championed by someone with commit access - which isn't always easy to achieve.

COMMENT: I've been watching the Flyspray [http://flyspray.rocks.cc/] project since they looked the most promising (via Google searches) for a bug tracking and user voter tracking tool. However, the “vote for features” feature seems to be stalled. =-( Anyone have other suggestions?

Character Creation

Whatever to create the player caracter in-game or off-game. Close all developers in a room and give them food only when they have coded the decided feature.

Java Editor

Recently Cher made the suggestion to merge the two editor branches of crossfire and crossfire's descendant daimonin to join editor efforts. If you're lucky, Cher will bring his PC and demonstrate the latest Daimonin Java Editor.

Crossfire needs to become more fun

IMO currently Crossfire is not very fun to play. This holds both for newbies and for “old” players.

It seems to me that the root cause is that we (i.e. the developers) keep on implementing new (technical) features rather than trying to make the game play more fun.

Some random points to show my view:

That said, I'd like to find and agree on solutions to these problems, and if possible, start to implement them.

Advanced NPC Interaction

Currently NPCs are extremely limited in what they can do. They can match strings and give a reply based on that, some of them use magic ears to trigger events on certain phrases. However, there is no sensible way to hint clients towards sensible conversation options, nor is there any sense of 'state' (answering 'yes' to an NPC can do something even before they have asked a question).

Consider ways to send richer information to clients, as well as have a way to 'select' answers from either the NPC response, or maybe items the Player is carrying (invisible conversation option items?)

Informations

Arival

Arrival is suggested for the 4th of May if you arrive at Orio al Serio airport (Milano BGY)

or for the 5th if you arrive by car or train

Departure

Departure is sugested for the 9th of may

Location

Location is Pettenasco on the wondeful Lake D'Orta.

http://maps.google.com/?ll=45.81564,8.413467&spn=0.122036,0.21801

What you need to bring
Who is coming
Notes
1) g2g is got to go, that mean you must come :-D