[Divunal-author]author efficiency (my two cents)

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Phil Christensen wrote:

> On one hand, I certainly agree with what Michael has said. Primarily,
> the documentation that is available at this point is pretty sparse.
> However, we do have to recognize that divunal is not yet a commercial
> enterprise, and having to juggle other jobs makes finding time to work
> on divunal pretty hard. In that same vein I have to applaud those,
> namely, Glyph, who are willing to pull all-nighters in order to
> coordinate day jobs with game development.

Thank you for the praise.  In kind, I would like to thank you for several 
of these:

date: 1999/08/03 15:42:40;  author: trcvs;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1
TR/CVS 0.1 COMMIT MESSAGE. Guyute IS RESPONSIBLE.

In terms of getting anything productive done, though :-), I'd like to
address the first part of that paragraph:

"the documentation that is available at this point is pretty sparse."

Not that I disagree, but I'd be *very* interested ot hear which pieces of
the documentation need revision and addition.  If I got a message every
single day on this mailinglist asking for a clarification on some part of
the Divunal societal structure or the code infrastructure, I couldn't be
happier -- as long as it was a specific, targeted question which I could
answer with something other than a long, laborious process of writing
down EVERYTHING I know about Divunal in the hopes that that was what
everyone wanted to know.

> Also, we do need some sort of plan about where exactly divunal is
> going, and what the ultimate goal of the game is (if that's possible,
> if not, as close as we can come).

I don't understand what's so unclear about where it's going, either... the
basic idea is to construct a world that's a lot of fun to interact with
other people and solve puzzles in.  Like many worlds, there is no ultimate
goal to the world.  While there are many themes, the central one is fairly
philosophical, and still evolving (although in a few weeks, I should be
able to write a concise essay describing it), and there is no "point" to
it all.  It's just some stuff.  There should also be no "main" plot. There
are a few which are more important than others, but if it turns out that
nobody gives a damn about Maxwell's angst, and they're all concerned with
the state of the underground city and Tsiale's mysterious past, well,
then, we concentrate more on developing the areas where there's interest
than where there isn't.

> I also concur that one of the number one things we need along with
> better documentation is a real TODO list. Something heavy-duty
> (allowing people to "sign up" for jobs, mark tasks as completed) and
> web-based is required. I'd like to volunteer to work on a cgi script
> for such a list.

Agreed.  Although Mike's ProjectMaster CGI sounds interesting, it sounds
like it might be much more comprehensive than what we need (especially to
start) and I wouldn't mind pulling another all-nighter to complete
something.

Before *anybody* does something drastic like that though, does anyone
listening to this list know whether or not the Mozilla 

> As far as Michael's point about rather having one good writer than two
> programmers, I have to disagree. Since the key to divunal is supposed
> to be the puzzles, what is necessary is programmers who are also good
> writers, a rare breed. Few interesting puzzles can be created at this
> time without some sort of coding.

And as I said in response to Mike's email, you're both wrong :-)
Writer/programmers are nice (Dave and I are able to run the project
because we can do both) but we need to foster cooperation between writers
and programmers.  A TODO list would greatly facilitate this.

Please consider the first item on that list (until we have an official
TODO website) to be: write a home for your archetype, if you have one, and
find someone who has one to bother and help with the construction of their
home.

> Finally, as far as the current state of the game, i'm afraid that at
> this current rate of speed, it's going to be awhile before we have
> something that's comparable to the other MUDs/games/whatever that are
> currently available. For example, take a look at Avalon
> (www.avalon-rpg.com). True, it's direction is a bit different than
> ours, but it is really mind-blowing. That's something I would pay for
> (if i were into paying for things, which i'm not ;-))....

Aye.  There's the rub.

I'm not satisfied with this rate of progress, and I'm not willing to
merely acknowledge it as the rate at which we will continue working. Since
some of the slowdown has been my fault directly (despite my few dramatic
all-nighters, I haven't been working on this as much as I should be) I am
going to pick up my slack, and I'd like to see other authors do the same,
hence my email :-)

> Still, I have to close this with one thought. Twisted Reality is cool.
> I've been trying to write a game framework like this for years, and
> some of the features we may take for granted code-wise I never even
> thought of when I was developing. Divunal can be incredible...we just
> need to work at it.

Thanks much! :-)

Although I've been driving it to completion lo these many years, TR has
always benefited greatly from the spare time of bored friends of mine.
Thanks everyone who's contributed code, docs, or even graphics for a
website.

One day, soon, I'll put together a credits file.

--glyph