One of the things that we've talked about doing on the new CCN site is having a Wiki for people to post and refine game designs and whatnot.

To get a start on that and to test out its usefulness, Samw3 did an excellent job and installed it on my server this morning (big props Sam!). Sam and I already intend to use it for hashing out designs, but you all are welcome to use it as well.

Basically, it's a freely available Wiki that you're welcome to clutter up with your personal notes and designs. Use it as a place to upload screenshots or even files (though we've got SVN set up on that server if you want formal source control for your project).

Getting server space can sometimes be a pain for developers, so we thought we'd offer our services free of charge. We can test out the functionality of this Wiki, and if people find it useful, we can possibly even integrate something like this in the new CCN site when we get that up and running.

So right now, we've got the Wiki set up. Other services that are available:
Subversion (source control)
Bugzilla (issue/feature request tracking)
DAV Share (sortof like FTP, but works over HTTP and through proxies -- used for the BDL game)

Please let me know if this is something you can use, and how this could be more useful to you.

Thanks!

In Christ,
clint

[This message has been edited by HanClinto (edited November 08, 2007).]

Hanclinto, man of action.

I could see this wiki being a great place to gather knowledge. The subversion access will be great for projects. Good work!

Edit: I added a page to the wiki. Do I get bonus points for being an early adopter?

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|steveth45|
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[This message has been edited by steveth45 (edited November 09, 2007).]

quote:

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Originally posted by steveth45:
Hanclinto, man of action.

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--clint

Edit: BTW, I think what Steve said about it being a good place to gather knowledge is a good idea. Sam and I have been working to catalog the old Game Elements post into its own Wiki Page. I'm thinking of expanding my old instructional page on how to make Isometric Game Art into a Wiki page on there. As a general question to you all -- what other CCN threads or articles should be nominated for update on the Wiki?

Aside: Maybe that could be a good place to add more detailed information about each of the Speedgames as well, that would be out of place on the main Speedgame website.

[This message has been edited by HanClinto (edited November 09, 2007).]

God Bless!

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

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MM out-
Thought travels much faster than sound, it is better to think something twice, and say it once, than to think something once, and have to say it twice.
"Frogs and Fauns! The tournament!" - Professor Winneynoodle/HanClinto
I reserve the full right to change my views/theories at any time.

quote:

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Originally posted by Mene-Mene:
Other than han or Samw3, I think i was the first. But I forgot to post here.

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However, you *were* the first to create your own User Page and start populating it with your projects. w00t!

--clint

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Q.E.D.

Is there any type of security? Like security over code? Members may not necessarily want others seeing code or perhaps artwork. I am also seeing scattered remarks about disallowing non-licensed people from seeing TGB code. I am really confused because some people say the TGB default TorqueScript code is fine since that is publically available in the demo, but I also hear you are not supposed to release that code. So, I am confused.

As for a game server, CCGR has two dedicated gaming servers, but not sure what their future is. Arch?

quote:

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Originally posted by ssquared:
Is there any type of security? Like security over code? Members may not necessarily want others seeing code or perhaps artwork.

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Anyways, at this point, it's pretty much targeted at projects where people are looking to help refine their ideas and work on them collaboratively, and don't mind sharing information. Perhaps we should look into making a closed-source portal for people who want to be more private in their development...

If we had something like that, would people use it?

--clint

I would like to get it to the point where you could control the access to your own project and grant users read and commit status to it.

As for wiki's they are meant to be open. I'm not sure how secured pages would work, but we can look into that.

As far as I know, the goals are:
1. to augment CCN by fostering community and collaboration between christian developers.
2. to provide tools that equip and enable christian developer teams to more easily manage their projects.

Clint might want to add his angle to this tho..

God Bless!

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

I am tending toward thinking a secure SVN will more likely draw people to use it. I guess it really depends, though. If the intent is for open source projects only, then no need for securing. But I think there will be plenty of people who will want security.

My own preference, and others may obviously have different opinions, is I want to keep some stuff private and some stuff I don't care about.

Just my thoughts.

I've thought about putting a personal SVN on my computer just so I can have a history. I could have actually used this for the CCN speedgame. But I much prefer this new site. It's a great way to collaborate and would be nice if someone says, "I want to help" and I can just add them to a project and they suddenly have access to the SVN project.

quote:

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Originally posted by David Lancaster:
Why don't we put the Han Clinto appreciation and Bible David Lancaster threads on there?

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I SECOND THAT!!!!

Edit: HanClinto - you have a PM

[This message has been edited by mastallama (edited November 10, 2007).]

quote:

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As for a game server, CCGR has two dedicated gaming servers, but not sure what their future is. Arch?

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Q.E.D.

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MM out-
Thought travels much faster than sound, it is better to think something twice, and say it once, than to think something once, and have to say it twice.
"Frogs and Fauns! The tournament!" - Professor Winneynoodle/HanClinto
I reserve the full right to change my views/theories at any time.

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All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!! chown -r us ./base
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless.'' -- Tao of Programming Book 2

"Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh."

Any fool can know, the point is to understand. -- Albert Einstein

My Programming and Hacker/Geek related Blog

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

Use the Upload File link on the wiki's toolbox navigation menu.

God Bless!

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

We're also trying to look at what other extensions we should implement -- feel free to look over what we're thinking about or leave suggestions on the Site Improvements page, where we're trying to catalog some of the cooler extensions that would be good for us.

Cheers!

--clint

Sam rocks! (puts Sam on his shoulder)
Clint rules! (puts Clint on other shoulder)

Long live Sam and Clint.

Seriously very cool. This is going to help lots. May God bless you guys lots.

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

Since you have your own server, you could also take a second and install some forum software written in the 21st century. Someday I'd like to see something other than a server error when I try to send a PM.

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|steveth45|
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quote:

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Originally posted by steveth45:
Since you have your own server, you could also take a second and install some forum software written in the 21st century. Someday I'd like to see something other than a server error when I try to send a PM.

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I've looked at a couple of forum software packages, but it's hard to know which one we'd want to use. For one, I don't want HanClinto.com to be a confusing site to navigate -- sometimes when a place has source control and a wiki and a bug tracker and a forum and a chat room, it's hard to know the appropriate place to put things. For example -- I want to make a list of feature requests. Does it go on the wiki so that others can contribute, on the forum so that we can talk about it, or on the bug tracker so that we can assign it? Eventually you can figure such things out, but it's one of those little user interface foibles that we're trying to avoid.

Do you (or anyone else) know of a site that integrates wiki + forum well so that we could look to them as a kind of structural template for starters?

So yeah, we don't want to just slap something together, but we're willing to experiment with stuff (Sam did an excellent job and installed a development version of the Wiki to start adding extensions to our MediaWiki install, for things like code syntax hilighting and whatnot).

We're also not sure how easy it will be to migrate the old forum database over to a new system. (Mack, have you checked into this at all?) Sam and I talked about it a little bit, and basically reasoned that with some web-fetching scripts and some regex, it shouldn't be *too* hard. We started a page on the Wiki documenting how we could go about extracting the database information for importing into a new forum. If we did anything at this point, it is only for testing -- this isn't necessarily the way that Mack is going to take the new ChristianCoders.com -- I don't know that anyone except for Mack currently knows how that is going shape up. Sam and I are just really looking forward to the new site, and so we're trying to get a head start on experimenting and playing with the user interface so that when ChristianCoders.com really starts rolling forward on the new version, that we'll have a few iterations of user interface under our belts to get something that we really like (rather than having to dink around with the production server, which isn't conducive to experimentation at all).

Cheers!

--clint

[This message has been edited by HanClinto (edited November 14, 2007).]

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Psa 32:5 I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.

[VoHW] (Help needed) [Blog] (Contact) - Truedisciple (mp3)

quote:

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Originally posted by jari:
May I recommend trying tikiwiki, because it has forums, chat box, blogs and wiki plus many other features.
It's graphically quite plain though, if that is a problem.

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As far as the graphical look, I didn't see too much wrong with it. It has some nice skins available for it, including TikiBook (made to look like MonoBook -- the WikiMedia theme).

I really like the way that it integrates news and forums alongside the Wiki -- that's *very* attractive to me.

Edit: While TikiWiki looks very very good for our purposes, I'm most familiar with MediaWiki and I'd still like to keep our eyes open for a good Forum/Wiki integration done with MediaWiki. Even so, the TikiWiki thing really helps to see how it might be structured -- thanks, Jari!

--clint

[This message has been edited by HanClinto (edited November 14, 2007).]

I am all for the Wiki and am really excited for what it will offer the community. I am already setting up an outline for adding some stuff. I just want to be careful the Wiki does not take traffic away from CCN. I can see it becoming a new hangout and slowly see decay on CCN. I have seen this happen before.

I don't really know how to do it, but some close integration with CCN (or even other developer sites...CODN perhaps?) would be really cool. So the site becomes an extension of what is already going on here. Not a replacement. For example, the articles and showcases on our front page could link to the Wiki page for these items.

The basic gist of what we're thinking now is that HC.com will be a collection of tools to help get things done. First and foremost, it's a workshop and a toolbox.

ChristianCoders will be a place to talk -- healthy discussion is fantastic, and I love the community here in the forums.
The HC.com Wiki will be a place to work -- many times as small developers, it's hard to get access to set up a server infrastructure for sharing files, working together on design docs, and sharing them in a way such that it's easy to collaboratively edit and get feedback. Sure -- there are plenty of tools out there that give you pieces (such as SourceForge, GoogleDocs, GooglePages, etc) -- but we're trying to make it more unified and accessible. Another goal of ours is to (hopefully) get this working so that people can have closed-source projects, which many of the other free portals don't offer.

So yeah -- that's about the best distinction that we've come up with so far. We definitely don't want to compete with CCN (though if we're helping light a fire under the progression of the new site, that's good too ). If people can use HC.com, great. If not, that's okay too -- I know that Sam and I will use it for our own projects, whether or not anyone else joins us.

We're open to merging what we've done with ChristianCoders in the future, but at this point we're not about to try and migrate the community or anything. We've thought about setting up duplicates of these forums (and Sam's even written some scripts to start pulling down the CCN forum data), but that's much more of an experimental thing that I doubt we'll do much more with unless we hear from Mack.

Does that help answer some of your questions, SSquared?

Jari, thanks for the tip about TikiWiki -- Sam and I had a good time installing it onto HC.com. It's a pretty nice setup, but we're just too attached to MediaWiki to leave it behind. One of the things that we *really* liked about TikiWiki was the way it came integrated with jgraphdraw -- a really sweet browser-based diagramming tool.

As I was lamenting that our abandonment of TikiWiki would cause us to part from this really cool tool, Sam did an *excellent* job and wrote his first MediaWiki plugin to integrate the TikiWiki feature into the HC.com Wiki. \o/ Big props to Sam!

So check out the HC.com help page for instructions on how to make your own diagrams, and saunter on over to my user page to see my graffiti wall where you're welcome to add your personal artwork touch to test out the drawing tool.

Cheers!

--clint

That's excellent and fits in with what I was thinking. I see the site as a great place to collaborate and take advantage of tools to further progress our projects.

Thanks again for the hard work you guys have been doing in getting it up and running!