FreeOrion

The community at Free Orion has its ups and downs, but lately it seems like it is very down. Any idea of how to liven up the community and get more progress going?

A new release often helps, although we can't just do one whenever we want, since there is now a fair amount of preparation required to put one together.

Having a few game design discussions of some significance might help, although that requires me to spend the time to set one up and for there to be a relevant topic, that's not content related.

In general though, having someone post an interesting brainstorming topic and follow up on it over a week or two will often result in more people dropping by to take part in the discussion, whether or not it's an official design discussion.

Maybe we should put together a list of things "everyone" can do while we wait for progress on combat programming. ... We should encourage people to pick a certain element of gameplay that can be modified/improved without code knowledge etc., similar to what bigjoe is doing now.
Also we should consider implementing some interim combat code, similar to what we previously had, but showing ship components/stats and taking them into account for battle resolution. (The basic idea being to make free orion fun to play before we have 3d combat ready.)
I intend to continue contributing once I have a new computer that supports OpenGL 2.0... as soon as there's a new iMac version

That is listed on the Programming Work page. Likely it would help to have a design for the combat simulation written up, though. Feel free to start a thread about it; you don't need an OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics card to do that.

There is actually quite a lot to do for graphics while waiting for programming, but that hasn't really spurred to much activity in the past few weeks. I submitted 4 different icons in about 2 days and pd has only commented on 3 of them in the past week. Still waiting for feedback on the last one that was submitted on the 15th. About a year ago we would have had about 3 different users submit an equal amount of content and dialouge would have been copious.

I think there are two things that may liven the community on top of what has already been mentioned.

1st) A super newbie friendly list of a good place to start. I know graphics is still hard for me to sometimes find what I can work on, imagine how a newbie feels.

2nd) A proactive recruiting program where we scout for others who might like to participate.

3rd) An actual playable game, no matter how simple, with very basic combat.

Just my 2 cents.

True, but it's always a big motivation when you see something you've worked on appear ingame. Anyway, I've started a related thread on brainstorming.

I was thinking more about the combat mechanics / simulation, rather than the UI...

That is, we have various ships with speeds and stealths and numerous weapons with ranges and powers and rates of fire and such, and somehow the game has to determine which ones destroy or escape or are destroyed in a confrontation.

How about a new guy joins and starts talking a bit?

Like, say, myself.

Are there any lessons we could take from the old game Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021 that might be helpful for freeorion?

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Ben Overmyer
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Thats an entry to the to the genera i've never had any experience with... perhaps you could start a thread and outline said lessons for discussion?

I think what Geoff says covers the bulk of it: the average user doesn't have much to contribute to begin with, aside from some frantic testing. But the testing is pretty much done for this version, it's been played from beginning to end many times over now.

And while I like posting new topics with sparkling new ideas, there's only so far you can go without some new content to work with.

Basically the brunt of the users is eagerly awaiting version 0.4.

(And for my bughunting sessions: I'd like to see some old bugs I detected to be resolved first; same goes for brainstorming I guess - so a new release candidate would be awesome)

(On Redcap's idea: Perhaps we could make a small youtube video demonstrating the playing basics, hmmm)

At least the SVN log seems pretty active:
http://freeorion.svn.sourceforge.net/vi ... /?view=log

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