[Ardanet-developers] documentation effort and current goals

[Ris M. <rm...@ne...>]

Hi Team,

 

I reviewed all the documentation last night and I believe everything we've
discussed and planned is now documented somewhere now, so this is good
progress.

 

What remains to be done for documentation is mainly organization.

 

There are a number of topics we've discussed, but we don't have the end
results of the debate put together in one place.  We've got the original
design somewhere, then some comments somewhere else, then some more comments
somewhere else, and so on.

 

I enabled the Wiki area that sourceforge gives us.  I think this would be a
good way to organize the updated information, which is the next step.  I
suggest the Wiki because it will be easier to maintain than the obtuse
Documents area with lots of cross-referencing involved.  I haven't put
anything into the wiki yet, but we need to go through all of the other
documentation, and the design discussions archived from this mailing list,
and break it up into various discrete pages about one topic at a time, with
links to all the related info, and additionally create an index.

 

We need this documentation to be organized in a way that it's easy to find
the latest thinking about any particular issue.

 

So I'll be working on this, and anyone else who wants to chip in is welcome
to it.  That's also one of the nice things about the Wiki, is that we can
all hammer on it at the same time with minimal conflicts, as long as we're
editing different pages at the same time.

 

Wikis are pretty flexible - that's the point - so feel free to dive in on it
and start editing.  If the arrangement you come up with turns out to be
inadequate, it can be changed. <-- convincing myself here, as well as you.

 

I promised Josh Hunholz that I would make documentation my top priority
until he felt caught up.

 

Attn Josh Hunholz: Did I succeed?  Do you feel like you understand where
we're at and what we're doing?  Any questions?

 

 

After reviewing the docs, I also saw that when I opened the sourceforge
site, I set two goals:

1)       bring up the network framework

2)       bring up the GUI framework

 

As of last night, we accomplished the initial bringup on both of those, and
we have a shell we can chat in and build on.  So this is a great milestone,
but now I need to set the next two top priority goals.  I'm going to make it
3 goals this time.

 

1)       Prepare for Worlds '07

a.       Prepare handout materials for Ardanet promotion

b.       Get my game back in shape, practice rolling high numbers, etc

2)       Finish documentation effort

a.       The Wiki unless someone has any better ideas

b.       I should lay out a project roadmap to plan all the steps and
milestones, so I'll count that as part of this effort too

c.       Actually, finishing this documentation effort is part of preparing
for Worlds, so that anyone I encourage to visit the site will have the best
possible documentation.

d.       This also includes creating something - anything - at
http://ardanet.sourceforge.net/ 

3)       Enhance the GUI framework for dockable frames with the general
features of how to manage all the views

a.       We have 2 game views already, so this should qualify as a
demonstration of N views, so step 1 is accomplished with the GUI framework

b.       Next step is to enhance it with the more advanced windowing
features to make sure this framework will be viable

c.       Actual "game area view" content for the views will come later

d.       I will define more precise requirements on this goal soon.  There's
a good list in the original NetMECCGv2 Ideas document, a bulleted list
showing the key features of the dockable frames.  I want to get these
features done before creating a bunch more game views for all the different
areas.

 

We got the last two goals done in a month.  Let's try to get these 3 done
before Worlds, July 27, 2007.

 

-- Ris