Info

This meeting will last approximately two hours.

Agenda

Core Agenda Items

The Next Meeting (10 mins) - Priority 1

• May 12th?

Developer Availability (10 mins) - Priority 1

• Henri's schedule
• Jason's schedule
• Matt's schedule - too much beby mekin'

Infrastructure Issues (15 mins) - Priority 1

• Slow wiki / jira performance (for Henri)
• IRC Bot needed with searchable HTML logs
• ... ???

Base System Design Status and Update (30 mins) - Priority 1

• Current Status
• Items required to begin design
• Current stumbling blocks?
• Future plans

Project Organization (45 mins) - Priority 1

• Team Divisons - how is each project / team organized individually?
• Interteam Workflow - how do teams ask other teams to do work for them?  How do they decide precisely what is supposed to be done(e.g. the art team asks for a tool that creates widgets, when all they really need is a whatsit, or maybe the team doing the work has an idea for a better widget?)
• Decision Making - Who makes decisions and how?  What happens when there is a disagreement?  How is that disagreement handled?
• Organization - large net projects tend to get chaotic, esp. with disparate teams with large knowledge silos.
• Change Management - How does information regarding changes get made?  For instance, the coding team switches to a new build system, which requires the infra team switches to modify the nightly builds process.   This change also impacts the tool builders and the art scripters.  How is this change disseminated to everyone?

Ironsong Family Document (20 mins) - Priority 1

• General C&C
• Filling in the gaps...

Previous Meeting (5 min) - Priority 2

• Are there any items which need to be placed on the page? 

Optional Items

Refine asset categories and types (10 min) - Priority 1

• Check out the asset types in Meeting2007-04-14
• What's wrong?
• What's missing?

Security levels (10 min) - Priority 1

• What security levels do we need?
• Are there any that we do not need?

New skill ideas (30 mins) - Priority 2

• Tactics and leadership
• Bards and singing
• Locally scripted chat
• Weather prediction

Demo GUI specification - Priority 2

• Add to DemoGui and make it nicer

Werewolf powers and other skills - Priority 2

• Werewolf powers described in the blog RTSan:/2007/02/06/Werewolves and cheating
• Tactics and leadership
• Bards and singing
• Locally scripted chat

Seer and cleric skills and differences - Priority 3

• How do regular seers and clerics differ?
• How do seer skills manifest themselves? What's the UI like?
• How do we balance seers vs werewolves vs others?
• What are the downsides to being a seer?

Cleric guild clothing - Priority 2

• Review the images so far.
• Choose elements that are there to stay
• Think about new directions to go in
• Different uniforms for different people

Herbalists - Priority 3

• Discuss the new Herbalists document.

Generic human project - Priority 3

• What kind of a polycount should we aim for?
• How important is sculptability?
• How important is facial animation?
• Some samples of lowpoly humans.

Dragonhunters - Priority 5

• Discuss the new document if it can be entered in time.

World Development - Priority 5

• Viking Laws and Government
• The Guild Information and Backstory
• Berrin backstory
• Pantheons for Laurelin and Vikings

Renaming Objects - Priority 5

• We need to rename a number of items in Laurelin, including its inhabitants.
• Needs more research before discussing...

Outcomes / Decisions

Core Agenda Items

Next Meeting

• May 12. 2007 1500GMT

Developer Availability

• Henri's schedule - fairly busy for the rest of May, June will
  be slightly more open. July will be wide open.
• Jason's schedule - fairly open May - July
• Matt's schedule - waiting for answer from Matt for May-June, July+ busy

Infrastructure Issues

• Performance - Wiki / Jira performance for Henri is very slow, for Henri.
• Wiki
  • watches aren't as nice as they could be (watches are only once a day) needs to be 30 mins - 1 hour
  • No notifications for personal pages
  • Plug-ins to search for notifications / watch filters?
• Jira
  • Plug-ins for automatic linking to [WikiWords]
  • Link in Jira to Confluence pages
• IRC Bot needed with searchable HTML logs w/Bookmarking
• Offline editing for Jira and Confluence
• Content Management : pictures / reference
  • easy system to use (version management)
  • backups
  • sharing of resources
  • local caching
• Quality Management Systems (more on this later)

Base System Design Status and Update

• Current Status
  • June for Henri
  • Apr - May Jason has been writing small bits of code learning C++
  • Interviews and Technical Use cases were the last things worked on
• Items required to begin design
  • Tons of use cases
  • Figure out things which our game can / will do
  • Lots of time :^o
  • Organization / Infra / PM (more on this below)
  • Improved Workflow - everyone doing something that is within their reach
• Current stumbling blocks?
  • We don't know all the things we want to allow in our world
  • Jason is still learning C++
  • The problem is too large for one person
  • Henri's time is limited until June-July
• Future plans
  • QMS / Workflow Needs a lot of improvement (Basics)
  • Henri will speak w/Matt to seek out any loose ends
  • Jason will speak w/Matt to see if matt can help thru June and to what lvl he'll have time
  • Finish up the use cases we have in progress
  • Think up problems we might have in our game (game engine capability / hacking)

Project Organization

• Team Divisons - how is each project / team organized individually?
  • Media - 2D, 3D music, sfx, world development, literature
  • Coding - game engine, DBs, Tools, Infra coding (a little)
  • Administrative - Backoffice work, HR, Licensing, general work that supports actually making the game
  • PM - Team Leads, QM, Workflows, MLs, needs to be completely transparent so everyone can see why decisions were made, complaints, changes
  • Infra - server admin, back ups, network connectivity, www admin, revision control systems, security administration, infra coding (a lot)
  • Interteam Workflow - how do teams ask other teams to do work for them? How do they decide precisely what is supposed to be done(e.g. the art team asks for a tool that creates widgets, when all they really need is a whatsit, or maybe the team doing the work has an idea for a better widget?)
    • Team leads negotiate tasks to be done within their team what should and can be done and then take those results to the other teams
    • Requests for new work go through team leads. depending on the type of request it can be in Jira or (less preferrably) email
    • Meetings - standard meeting templates. complaints / suggestions / iteration meetings (progress meetings)
      • Regular QM meetings to discuss items of interest (progress meetings / iteration meetings / complaints & progress on resolution)
      • Intrateam meetings - workload currently underway / problems / C&C / availability
    • Mailing lists - each team gets a list, general, announcements, miscellaneous (junk)
      • archives
      • searchable
      • viewable in different ways (by thread, date, author, etc.)
  • Jira
    • basic workflows + modifications per area
    • voting on issues - jira users (everyone) - developers get to see who voted on what. security can be used to restrict votes when req.
• Decision Making - Who makes decisions and how? What happens when there is a disagreement? How is that disagreement handled?
  • Large Decisions
    • Team lead brings options to the team (could be in a meeting or and ppl can comment and possibly vote
    • Votes can occur on the wiki or in jira (depending on what is being decided)
    • When no decision can be reached and the group cannot decide
      • Vision issues are left to the counsel
      • Technical issues - team leads get the ultimate say and get to guide the decision making process
  • Small Decisions
    • Can be handled in any way the team decides will be nice for them
    • These things should go through jira / wiki / personally
• Organization - large net projects tend to get chaotic, esp. with disparate teams with large knowledge silos.
• Status updates (a newsletter every so often perhaps)
• Availability calendar - when they're available / what they're working on
• Change Management - How does information regarding changes get made? For instance, the coding team switches to a new build system, which requires the infra team switches to modify the nightly builds process. This change also impacts the tool builders and the art scripters. How is this change disseminated to everyone?
  • Jira - the job goes here first
  • Mailing lists - announcements for changes / outages
  • Wiki is responsible for recording changes - could be hooked into wiki so that CVS would update wiki
  • Database change notification tools
• New members - introduction template - FAQS for newbs - who do things belong to / licensing - why do people need to contracts?

Ironsong Family Document

• Arine
  • Arine has a brother
    • The brotherhood of the wolf demand the first born
    • The brother is a gentle giant
    • He has limited abilities for a seer
    • Likes nature
    • has telepathic abilities but only uses them with nature and never with people
    • he can be roused to anger by harming his family or nature
    • Arine is extremely protective of her brother
• Aric
  • really like the unique telepathy abilities (he can see the thoughts from people / things long dead).

Previous Meeting

• Henri has updated the Outcomes section in the previous meeting: Meeting2007-04-21