SWG:ANH
Open the blast doors! Open the blast doors!
There's big news brewing around the SWG:ANH team lately, after a number of years of working behind closed doors it's been decided to bring everything out into the open and continue on with our efforts as a true open source project! Starting June 26th, 2010 on the 7 year anniversary of the Star Wars Galaxies launch, the SWG:ANH team will be transitioning to a open source project.
First, let's just get the one thing most people will ask out of the way up front:
This is not a production release and we are not providing any support to individuals or groups who attempt to treat it as such. If you're reading this news and expecting to immediately hop on or create a galaxy and start playing you'll likely be disappointed as that is not the goal of this current milestone.
So what is the purpose of all this activity?
To quote Steve Ballmer... Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!** Over the years there have been many who have wanted to contribute and were not able to due mostly to two reasons:
1) Drama between SWG related projects
2) Lack of knowledge/lack of real world experience
The first reason isn't much of an issue these days, none of the core team cares about rivalry or "who wins the race." We love programming and we love Star Wars Galaxies and that's about it (literally, some of us eat, sleep and breath those two things!), from our perspective anyone with those same loves and who wants to contribute can and should be able to, regardless of previous allegiances. However, that was the way of things during the early days of the emulation scene and it prevented many who would have been glad to contribute from being able to do so.
The second roadblock that kept potential developers from making it onto the team was due to the project being closed source. In a closed source environment a project is run much like it would be a commercial game studio (without many of the benefits such as a salary and favorite caffeinated beverages on tap) and requires the team to be made up of developers with real world knowledge and experience. This prevented those who are just getting into programming or those with limited amounts of time from being able to contribute.
Over the last year on the development side of things we've been steadily incorporating best practices for development to help improve the quality of code and to bring focus to development. These practices include better use of the version control system (including a move to a new vcs), performing automated builds and conducting peer-reviews of contributed code, all of which complement the quality assurance testing and bug tracker usage that was already taking place. We found that with each of these changes came increased productivity, renewed interest in the project, and more importantly a new-found interest in collaboration. The more progress that was made the more evident it was that we could and should be making everything available to anyone that is interested in helping out. Unlike any other time in the project's history we now have all the tools and practices in place to effectively take on contributions from community developers.
This leads us to several months back when the entire team had reached the decision that it was time to begin transitioning to open source. Since then we've been hard at work further refining our processes for development including how to manage public testing, holding bug fixing sprints and managing our release cycles; all in the effort to make it easy for anyone in the community who is interested in contributing to be able to do so.
It is an exciting time for the project with a number of interesting things in store for the community at large as we approach our official date for going open source on June 26th, 2010. In the meantime we ask everyone to keep things in perspective: We are a team entirely interested in the development of this game and there's no room for drama. This is a time for open collaboration between those with a common purpose and those just wishing to have a good time doing what they love.
Thanks to all who have made this effort possible and here's looking forward to an exciting few months at SWG:ANH!
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Weiterlesen...
[SWGANH] Open the Blast Doors! Open the Blast Doors!
Linear Mode
