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After reading the topic about the Daedalus Developers located further down on the board, and seeing all the controversy surounding it, I was left with a question: Why have developer teams at all? It is a well known fact that many of the best EV and EVO plugs where produced by a single person (Frozen Heart and FF for starters). Working with a whole bunch of people from all over the world seems counter productive (The ATMOS folks all live in the same general area I think, so this dosn't apply to them). Also, why have a president, vice president etc. The whole idea behind a team is to work coperatively on projects, with nobody taking priority over anybody else. Take Corsair for example. Captian Skyblade, the self appointed president of that team, is, in reality, just a graphics developer (okay, so he came up with the story too). Did he write the code? no. Did he make all the graphics? no! Does that make him qualified to put a big, poumpus proclimation "President of the corsair developers" in his sig? No!!. And now people are making their own spinoff companys so that they too can feel the false sense of power that comes from being (smug voice) president (/smug voice) of somthing! I don't meen to insult you Captian Skyblade (your graphic talents are outstanding), but I really don't like your atitude when it come to the Corsair Developers. I found the way you got all mad at Crazy Chipmunk for joing another project selfish and revolting.
Thank you for reading my ranting. You may now add your own...
------------------ (/mindless babble)
Indeed.
To be a sucessful Development Team, just do the following.
1)Get together with a general idea for a plug. 2)Brainstorm details. 3)Give each person their allotment of work. Use a Resource Allocation Table (RAT) that gives everyone which resource IDs are theirs to work with. so no conflicts. 4)As work progresses, one person will emerge as the de facto leader (unoffically, of course), and there is no need to have a "president" or whatever from the begining.
Elegance and Simplicity owns.
------------------ "The video might look old, but remember, its just British" - my Chemistry teacher **(url="http://"http://www.drippingchipmunk.com")DrippingChipmunk.com(/url) (url="http://"http://www.mchawking.com")MC Hawking's Crib(/url) (url="http://"http://www.jonpearse.f2s.com/ev3/ev3_quotes.php")#EV3 QUOTE ARCHIVE (/url) **
I agree. The Dark Beyond was done idependently(by me). Rift has a 2 person design team, but 2 people are needed because of the sheer size of the plug-in.
------------------ (url="http://"http://members.home.net/genea16/Rift.html")Rift Homepage(/url) (url="http://"http://pub101.ezboard.com/briftwebboards")Rift Webboards(/url) (url="http://"http://members.home.net/genea16/Dark.html")The Dark Beyond Homepage(/url) Apparently, common sense isn't so common...
one thing a team really helps with is that it gets you past the sense of how overwhelming your task is. i'm currently working on a series of tcs, but i'm not making much progress b/c after i've spent a few hours working on it i notice that i'm only 1-2% closer to finished in that particular area. having an extra person helps speed up progress, which makes you feel less disheartened at your progress, which speeds up progress more. granted, the team has to be small enough that it doesn't need a government structure (which will completely destroy the progress advantages), but 2-3 people can make developing much more enjoyable than developing alone
------------------ if tin whistles are made of tin, what's a fog horn made of?
I am currently doing a TC (Silent Night) and am about half way done even though I have being going at it for a year and a half. I offered to place all the systems for the thing Chipmonk is doing, but they have no centeral idea expect something about coperate sturuggle. It seems like if you are working with a large team of people you don't know, there is a high chance of it failing. Anyone who has worked hard on it will be upset because the president said I don't want to do it. I would have to say work as a team on something small for a month, to see if you can work together, and then make a big, nice product.
------------------ Silent Night will be going into beta hopefully sometime in the summer of 2002! ----==========---- "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small step for Neil, but it's a long one for me." -Pete Conrad third man on the moon
Teams only work if you know beforehand exactally what you are doing. If every person on the team does not have a specific thing to do by a specific date, you're setting yourself up for disaster. Case in point: MAGMA for EVO took me a month. The EV version took me two weeks. I did those single handedly. Quantumire SE has a team - well, sometimes. And we're still waiting.... -david-
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(This message has been sabotaged by a dancing cat (sabotaged 06-17-2001).)
(This message has been edited by Meowx Design (edited 06-17-2001).)
Well with the coming of Nova, there will be so much involved making the plugins that you'll almost have to have teams. Plus a lot of times the programming doesn't need that much work (I think one or maybe two people are best) but writing and graphics can need more people (say around 2-3 writers, and 2-4 artists). Now I know that most plugins won't need that many people, but some could quite easily.
And re the Captain Skyblade thing, he is the person who originally had the idea for Corsair Developers. And, more importantly he motivates like crazy. He is incredible at graphics, but he's also a good leader. I personally think he's a good president for us.
/me realizes that the above paragraph may seem a little boot-licky and off subject, but it's true
------------------ Diddly, Recursive: adj. See Recursive
nighthawk, you nailed the reason, at least for me. And NNNormal, I have a very very specific idea of what needs to be done. We simply have a govt struture so that we have someone to organize the whole d*mn thing. If Me and gwydion were to just get a bunch of people together and tell em what to do, it would be chaos because everyone would want to do it a different way. We have put everybody on specific tasks. And skyblade is a good president. He keeps te troops organized. Granted, i completely understand why he was pissed off because me and gwyd started daedalus almost the day after I joined corsair. It wasnt planned. It was just a spur of the moment type thing. We've resolved it and so no more commentary on that is neccesary. Someone needs to know exactly what needs to be done. That way everyone works together well. If we were all in the same room, it would be different. But we aint. So we need someone to organize it. And thats me and lord gwydion. NNNormal, you were not recruited because i found someone else earlier. I knew what needed to be done and he could do one of the resources you, and i quote, hated doing. Developement teams add some liveliness to it all. Hell, I started to do EV:FE on my own and after working on it for a week i realised that it really would take me like a year to finish. Teams speed it up, it just takes a while to get going.. Especially cause we are new. If you really want to check out how we are doing and what we are doing for that matter go to our website and go to the boards. there is a link in my sig....
------------------ "If you can dream it, you can do it."
Quote
Originally posted by Captian LeGrenadier: **After reading the topic about the Daedalus Developers located further down on the board, and seeing all the controversy surounding it, I was left with a question: Why have developer teams at all? It is a well known fact that many of the best EV and EVO plugs where produced by a single person (Frozen Heart and FF for starters). Working with a whole bunch of people from all over the world seems counter productive (The ATMOS folks all live in the same general area I think, so this dosn't apply to them). Also, why have a president, vice president etc. The whole idea behind a team is to work coperatively on projects, with nobody taking priority over anybody else. Take Corsair for example. Captian Skyblade, the self appointed president of that team, is, in reality, just a graphics developer (okay, so he came up with the story too). Did he write the code? no. Did he make all the graphics? no! Does that make him qualified to put a big, poumpus proclimation "President of the corsair developers" in his sig? No!!. And now people are making their own spinoff companys so that they too can feel the false sense of power that comes from being (smug voice) president (/smug voice) of somthing! I don't meen to insult you Captian Skyblade (your graphic talents are outstanding), but I really don't like your atitude when it come to the Corsair Developers. I found the way you got all mad at Crazy Chipmunk for joing another project selfish and revolting.
**
It's actually an interesting issue. One of the main reasons single programmers are more successful is because they alone have the entire vision of the plug-in and know exactly what they want to do. This way, there's no time being lost in emailing people for work or trying to get others to get things done. There's also no flashy websites or development boards or IRC chats.. none of that convoluted crap to gum up the development process.
The same is true for many aspects of life.. For example, in Hollywood, a movie written by one person is almost always going to be better than one written by three people and later hacked during shooting. Quite simply, one voice brings unity to the project that would be lost in the team setting.
A few rare cases certainly do exist where two motivated and talented people work together. For example, (and unintentionally self-serving) I've always been a loner when it comes to making plug-ins. Only my biggest weakness was graphics, and in order to get done what I wanted to do for F-25 2.0 and bring 2-D unity to the ships, I had to ask Weepul to help me. He's an outstanding developer and all around nice guy and got the stuff done. In this case, I had outlined everything I needed and given him plenty of artistic room with which to work, and everything worked out...
_bomb
Bomb: although I agree with you that having a single person keeps consistency in a story, it also can limit it. Different people have different ways of thinking, and when two people come together, they can make things that neither one could have done on their own.
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I think making EVO plugins is a lot easier than most people suppose. People advertise endlessly on this board saying 'I can do graphics, but I can't do programming'. In fact, there is no programming proper in EVO plugins, since Matt Burch has already done all of it for us, and there are enough utilities out there to make even ResEdit scripting a relatively painless task -- if you know what you want to do.
Compared to, say, writing a novel or a symphony, an EVO plugin, even a major TC is quite a simple undertaking. The actual volume of text you have to write is relatively small, you're making a couple of hundred quite small pictures - far less rendering time than the time to render a 3 minute DV video clip - add to that a few sounds and manipulating the various utilities to make your story work, and you've done everything you need for a big TC.
I've read a couple of novels produced by a two person partnership, and heard some collaborative music, but, by and large, the very greatest peaks of artistic excellence in music composition, novel writing and poetry, painting, sculpture and so on are the works of individuals.
I suppose what's different about an EVO plugin is that you need a certain amount of skill in a variety of disciplines - 3d design, writing, sound recording, binary logic. But not that different - many artists are now working in multimedia, including quite sophisticated programming in script languages or even in C.
Don't get me wrong - I love working in teams. I just came out of a rock band reunion, and the sound was just awesome - far bigger and fuller than any of us could have produced on our own. However, if you want to work quickly, then you need to work alone - even if the result is rougher and less polished.
Actually, this may be a good way for a plugin developer to work - producing a draft plugin and then inspiring some excellent designer to render it, and excellent writer to rewrite the text, somebody else to proof it.
I think part of the reason why multimedia lends itself to solo working even more than music is because of the way that graphics, text and scripting interact. With three separate people, (let's say Bill, Ted and Fred), Bill might write a storyline that requires a comet to explode. He gives the task of making the graphics to Ted, and of working out how to do it with the EVO engine to Fred.
Ted spends a week making the most amazing comet-explodes graphics - although he may have a shock when techy Fred compresses them down into 256 colours. Fred spends the week trying to come up with a way of making it happen. Eventually he comes back to Bill and explains that what Bill wants isn't possible, but he could do some other things.
Bill accepts that Fred knows what he's talking about, and writes a storyline where the player has to get away from the comet and onto a planet while it explodes, and watches it in the bar as a QT movie. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with the amazing graphics that Ted has made, so he sends Ted back to the drawing board for another week... and so it goes on.
Bill, if he was working on his own, would probably have realised fairly early on that his original idea wasn't going to work, then figured out what he could do, rewritten the story to match, and then done the graphics. True, Ted's graphics would have been better, but, after having animation set number 35 rejected for technical reasons, it's fairly likely that Ted will quit the project, leaving it either with no designer, or with half Ted-quality and half Bill-quality graphics, or with a completely different style brought in by a new recruit.
Just my thoughts.
BTW, once you move out of alpha and into beta, a team is absolutely definitely the way to go - never beta test your own products.
------------------ M A R T I N T U R N E R
Yeah... I guess... I have awful graphics skills, so I need someone else there at least with graphics. Not to mention I'm not the best author in the world. You're right in that case. But if Bill, Ted, and Fred all interacted, not just go from Bill to Ted, Ted to Fred, and then Fred to Bill, then some of those issues could be resolved (say Bill asks Fred: "Can I have the exploding comet?" Fred says it's impossible and so Bill rewrites the story and saves Ted trouble). So maybe the development part (writing and programming) work closely together, and only after they're sure it'll be doable do they go to the graphics department.
Okay, I just want to respond on behalf of CS
CS is a very good graphics designer and leader. He has done many of the graphics, many of the spobs, the storyline, a few missions etc. He is just a part of the team as the rest. He could write the code, but we've split the jobs up to make it easier and faster. For instance instead of a two year project for one person, it is a year project for a group of people
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Well.... If Bill, Ted, and Fred were on ICQ every day (or at least tried to be) at a similar time, say 6 for example, they could give small specific tasks to each person, instead of going through and saying, give me this and ill hand it to you and you do this with it. 'Contract jobs', such as the above example , in which one person is given a job and does not collaborate with others, are not the way to work. Me and lord gwydion are quite well organized and have begun production of the TC. 4 weapons and their associated picts are dont after a single day. Not to mention the fact I have already completed graphics for about.... 7 ships. These will not be hard to create as they are loosly based upon standard EV ships and can therefore simply be created by modifying EV shďp resources and then copying them into override. This willl better lend to us a good basis for the sbips and outfit resources, as because the TC takes place shortly after original EV, the ships have not evolved in much but their looks and purposes. It is the storyline that makes the plugin, and so I have someone who is a little better than myself at writing to do the mission texts, and i will simply give him a storyline to twist and turn about with. This will ensure a variety of personalities placed in the plug, making it nore interesting. And we use the term programming loosely, as editing and creating files with resedit is a real pain in the you-know-what seeing as how those of us who cannot envision how numbers will play out find it difficult. Thus we simply call it programming cause as far as we know or care its code. and flashy sites and suh seem to help (at least me) see what we are actually doing as in early developement it is sometimes hard to see where its going.
The key to making a worthwhile plug using a team is: KEEPING IT SIMPLE
I'm working with the Daedalus Developers, and it seems simple enough to work out. Basically, if you have 1 person for each resorse(sp?), the pieces all fall together. 1-2 people for each resorce(is it right now?) would make it much harder to put all the pieces together, unless it was somthing easy to compile, like graphics or descriptions. Get the idea here? If you keep it simple, and make it clear what everyone is working on, it will be easy to complete a quality plug.
-Kevin
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Originally posted by Capt. Editor: Basically, if you have 1 person for each resorse(sp?)
Resource
Originally posted by Jive 320: **Okay, I just want to respond on behalf of CS
...Or in the case of Dreden War it's looking like it'll be done before summer (hopefully). And announcement to the world, Dreden War is in the Alpha 1 stage! Captain Carnotaur came through and now we're coming dangerously close to having a playable plugin :).
development teams just don't work except for a few exceptions either micro manage(sp?) or work with people who are geographically very close to you as well as emotionally I work with my brother and my best friend. we don't run into Bill Ted and Fred type problems because we get together face to face to face and work a part out at a time. some plugs just my brother did by himself were good but distinctively his. He has one style thats it and everything seems to have his signature story type. now when we all get together and work together we make a better plug and to Martin some times media with multiple writers is very good Titan A.E. had about 13 writers that is a good way to have characters change and my plugs involve character development because I am a writer as a hobby so we have nice story and character change only because we have a team but only a small team.
so do it yourself or with very few people.
------------------ Fry: What if the secret ingredient is people? Leila: They already have a soda like that...soylent cola. Fry: How is it? Leila: It varies from person to person
I have had a great amount of sucess working only by myself, even though I have spent a close to two years on Silent Night and plan to spent about another year. Everything is my work, but the governments have different personalities and cultures that will be shown in many ways. I have not requested any major help, but have done things like asking people to write planet descriptions to when I was getting sick of writing them. After finishing SN, I plan to make something for Nova, and I plan to do it in nearly the same way. (Only I won't make as many mistakes the second time around )
Originally posted by NNNormal: **I have not requested any major help, but have done things like asking people to write planet descriptions to when I was getting sick of writing them. **
It is easy to keep a team running if you all schedule to meet at a certain time on a certain day every week or somthing. That way you all keep in touch. Duuhhhhhh!!!!!