Blue Team's Game Review

I tested Blue team's game, and now I would like to reflect on my thoughts on the game:

First of all, the initial problem seemed to be the wrong version of Wesnoth, 1.6.5, which gave me an error statement, that scenario 1 was erroneous. This led to downloading the other version, which I was not happy about at all. But everything for the good cause. Unfortunately the campaign did not start playing on the first Beta version as well, as far as I tried. Still, I did not manage to open the game, because an error popped onto my screen every time I wanted to play it. I tried to download it with SVN and also manually, but no use.
My final try was downloading the other Beta version of Wesnoth:

It seemed that there is the same problem: Unknown scenario: '1_stseen'.

 Concerning the review, I must say that I can write our game review, which I found very fresh and new in this game landscape, because we had cool characters and nice concept. Due to my lack of playing skills the game did not last for long, because I was not able to kill all the enemies. Nevertheless I saw what happened there during creation process, thus it was an interesting experience.

I could add that the other group had made an effort as well, as they had nice characters and a wild storyline. All in all the course was a great experience that one could learn very well from all the mistakes that happen.

My Reflection on Open Source Management Groupwork Contribution

Introduction

Group formation was the quickest task we completed, as well as taking over the name "Red team". As red generally is a provocative colour, our group's tasks also did not  come out as well as they were supposed to. The first task was to group people under certain tasks, and I got a chronicle keeper's task. I created the Red Team's tasks and "tickets" (not in the way they were supposed to be), also marked our progress, and finally reflected on the groupwork. For documentation I used the wiki part of trac environment.

The most critical part of the course was to make everything flow. As all tasks depended on different other tasks, and since the group had difficulties with programming the campaigns, there often was nothing to document, and thus it was necessary to wait for the process to go on.
From time to time I made some changes in Trac, for example uploaded storylines or documented overall progress together with Taavi.

My task was also to support the group in other tasks, like exploring Wesnoth scenarios, and suggesting the ideas from these campaigns, which would be useful in our game. On the other hand, I helped proofread the scenarios as well as posted them in Trac. I think my task in this game was achieved all in all.
I tried to help the team leader as much as I could and was able to, as well, mostly in documentation. As well as the other team leaders, I also tested the game, which worked well for me, but was difficult to progress during low Wesnoth gaming skills.

Lessons learned:

Individually I cannot say that I could have changed anything within the group, because the development did not depend directly on certain people, it depended more or less on the workflow, and on the fact how the game was managed to be put together. It probably was stuck behind the lack of knowledge in the beginning and how to "bite" through the latter afterwards.

It was quite difficult to document any progress or what went wrong until the previous steps were completed.  As it turned out, trac was the main component in the development process. Nevertheless, most of the work was transferred to Skype or done orally, because we tried to develop the game together as a group. Next time we should collaborate more with the lecturer as well, in order to get faster feedback on our errors and perhaps some help in fixing them. Forum help turned out to be more difficult than in the first glance, because it was quite difficult to grasp the necessary help topics during the process.

Wesnoth Documentation - Red Team

The groupwork process was the following:

First our group tried out playing the games in order to understand the process which takes place in Wesnoth campaigns. All scenarios were distributed among group members so that everyone could dig into the games and suggest their ideas for good game development, and understand how the game was created.

Secondly the group members looked at the code in order to find associations connected with our group's possible campaign scenarios and understand how it worked. A lot of effort was used to get a decent understanding of the code meaning and trying to find the ways of implementing the code into our game-to-be.

The third step was to create a storyline, which was a different story from our initial concept. Since we did not get any feedback to our initial story, we decided to change it. The storyline was written using imagination and proofread by other team members.

Code was created in parallel with story development. The initial concept where noone would have been killed, was changed, because the outcome was not as successful as necessary. Thus finally a new concept was created where units were killed in the end. During code development forums and other resources were used for help, also teamwork was really strong.

Maps and images were also created during story development, to keep everything in concordance. Maps were created using Map Editor of the Wesnoth game, and images were created in Photoshop as well as in Fireworks.

Meanwhile the whole process was documented as it progressed.

Our group members used skype as well as meetings in order to keep the workflow running.

Main difficulties:

1. Keeping all units alive was tricky, because it was difficult to create. This was changed so that all units get killed in the end.

2. There was a problem with image paths when the team tried to insert images of the characters in the game.

3. The forum was not useful in terms of code change, because the code had not been translated properly or it was difficult to find. This part would have been easier if it would have been done in the lecture, together with the explanations.

4. All team members depended on the other team members, and when there were difficulties, the work did not take place as planned.

Wesnoth Game Documentation - Storyline [explicit lyrics, not for kids] - Red Team

The story was created by story managers, and is the following:

Introduction

Rocco lives in a muddy village which is a very cool place for spending time, chatting and drinking coffee, but one can never become wealthy enough, that is at least what Rocco thinks. A nearby city has everything necessary to have fun with, and to do nice business. Rocco loves coffee and has proper knowldedge about running a cafeteria, but in the village called Pärnartu, people rather need bread and butter and have no means for spending time in cafeterias. As Rocco has no money for opening even a kiosk where he could sell coffee, and as he is a man of big business, it is 100% clear that he has to move over to a more urbanized area.
The closest urbanized area is a city of Bruzzano, where a spoiled son of Bernhard, Eduard, runs the chain of Cafeterias "Wobernard". Rocco applies for the position of the Chief Paristant of the "Wobernard" chain, but he is forced to sing and dance on the table. As he refuses to do it, he does not get the desired job. Being offended by arrogant urban bitch-asses, he decides to take some of "Wobernard" cafes by force. It is simple - you have to beat the shit out of the managers of the cafes, and then you can run the cafes as you wish. Having a terrible day full of blood and screaming is better than whole life without work in this god forsaken place.

Analysis of Wesnoth Community

Readings, analysis of the Wesnoth community and brainstorming on better campaign building.

The community is built up based on different pages with all the support one needs for game development. Inside the community there are all kinds of possible variants in order to help users to develop the game. Different categories lead to different pages, for example there is a download page and source code page, etc. The best feature besides the forum, is perhaps the online IRC channel possibility to get help.
The main source of information even for those who dare not to read through the information, is the forum. It is divided into sub-categories, which lead to certain topics. The variety of help provided in the community is large, thus the community proves to be very helpful for the beginners and advanced users of the game.

How to build campaigns better? I will add a few thoughts how I see that campaign building could be improved.
- collaboration between people even more intense (using various sources for project development),
- faster feedback during campaign development, better if immediately delivered through a chat client or an IM solution,
- brainstorming about new campaign code solutions together with a group in a real-time discussion,
- suggestions for innovation in the game
Otherwise I cannot see any new solutions to add, because the forum is sufficient enough to find all the necessary information for game development.

The Validity of Cory Doctorow's Business Model as a Writer

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, and a blogger who writes stories, contributes to different magazines and edits a weblog Boing Boing. He also acts as a visiting lecturer at Open University (UK). Besides fictional stories he has published several collections of non-fictional stories which comprise his thoughts about different issues [1]. He also is the supporter of Creative Commons as a distribution method [2].


His business model is simple: besides publishing his books, he also releases them under Creative Commons licence in the internet. First, he encourages the readers to read his books, and also promote them, which is free advertisement. With the help of his readers he gets reviews and may sell more of his printed books, and as he says in his interview, one will get even with the few lost copies and a lot of free publicity.

In his interview he explains that the bigger the publisher is, the less scared it is of publishing Creative Commons content online together with releasing the printed versions. He is satisfied that his books sell in print and are downloaded [2]. When I consider myself, I like printed books or original CD-s when they are from my favourite authors/bands, and I prefer to purchase one if I really like it. I think this is the idea behind his works as well, because not everyone prefers online books. Doctorow also suggested a model of getting a refund for his works not via direct donations, but he suggested that people should buy a copy of his work, and then donate it somewhere where it could be useful. I think this leaves a generous impression of the author, and people are willing to buy books in such purposes.

And to finish up with, Cory Doctorow seems like a cool guy who can easily survive by having a Creative Commons model in his book delivery to the people who love reading his books.


Links:
[1] craphound.com
[2] Interview with Cory Doctorow
[3] Wikipedia: Cory Doctorow

Study of Three Companies Using Copyleft

Write a case study about three IT companies using Open Source as a part of their business strategy (one of them could do it a its main business, e.g. Red Hat.

1. California-based company Cloudera uses Apache Hadoop for a huge amount of data processing. The company uses Open Source to collaborate and extend their products. Besides products, they offer services, support and training, which, according to them, lowers data-processing costs and new information. It also offers different extentions for Hadoop project. The project runs on inexpensive servers.

Cloudera desktop makes it really simple to use Hadoop, and the company hopes to win their customers' support with an easy-to-use solution. You can download the goods free of charge, but it also has a premium option.

For more information take a look at: www.cloudera.com


2. CubeTree is a social network-based free enterprise collaboration set. It has multiple functions and it can integrate feeds and different other platforms (Twitter, GDocs, etc.). It is open source and includes Debian, MySQL, etc. There is also a CubeTree API available for developers. This platform ensures that future enterprise collaboration will be social network centered. The platform is a cloud service.


CubeTree business strategy involves premium version, which gives bonuses to the user. It gives more storage, and other benefits, but the cost is really low, so it would not matter if you pay or not.

For more information take a look at: www.cubetree.com

3. Linux is an open source operation system, which Red Hat has made its source of profit. In their business strategy they use a subscription model, with what one can get a reliable and secure service. Paid users can access latest upgrades, access to Red Hat Network, and support for seven years. The company gives users a safer system guarantee, task automation, and other such benefits. Red Hat Linux is also available for trial download.

Copyleft principle

1. Study the principle of copyleft and write an analysis about its three variants (strong, weak, none) with real-life examples.

The strong features of copyleft licence are the possibility to make software modifiable and leaving the source code open in order to let others improve it or make their own versions of it. The modified version should also be distributed with accessible source code and it should go with the copyleft clause. This enables the best possible solution for creating software, modify and improve it. For example the very same game we are developing, Wesnoth, is created by collaborative force, as is Mozilla Firefox and its extensions. These and other software solutions are in regular use by very many people nowadays.

In order to ensure that full copyleft is applied, it is necessary to determine in the copyleft that no copyright terms should not be applied and it can only be distributed under the same terms as the original version.
Different copyleft variants are strong, weak and non-copyleft. The weak copyleft derivatives might not have the same outcome as the original copyleft, or no copyleft at all. For example GNU Lesser General Public Licence and Mozilla Public Licence.
Full copyleft means that all parts of the work can be distributed only under the same licence as the original work. Partial copyleft allows only partial copyleft changes.

Copyleft is applied only when a person wants to redistribute the software, instead of restricting the distribution, it allows modification and further distribution.

Open Source Management tasks for Feb. 1

Task 1. Read the arguments of both schools (FSF and OSI) and write a comparison.

According to the two articles the main difference in the two movements is the philosophy behind them. Open Source is basically the methodology behind software developemnt,  but with free software there raises a philosophical question.
The term for free software is ambiguous in its meaning, where people do not quite understand what "free" means. "Free" in free software means more of a freedom to do things, not without cost.

Basically the two movements are the same, there is a little difference in thinking, a lot of opposing between the two movements, but the outcome is almost the same with minor differences.

Task 2.Installing and playing Wesnoth. Write a game review.

Battle for Wesnoth is a game which can be played both online and offline, and also as a single-player and multi-player game. It still reminds me of Heroes 3, which I played when I first had an actual computer at home (in the end of 1990's). The game left a great impression with sleepless nights and dreams about leaders moving in the playground. However, the game was not open source, nor was it free.
A good thing about the game is that you can play it, you can modify it, you can download others' modifications and modify those as well.
The point of the game is to beat enemies and help the leader finish his campaign. My favourite soldiers are archers who can stay unharmed the longest, because they shoot from far.
The whole map is based on hexagonal shapes, the base is made up of hexagonal shapes, as are the paths and the trails. You can move only a certain amount of space in order to kill the enemy. It is a game where you switch turns to fight, and you cannot get the enemy in one move.
It seems to me that the game is easy to understand and play, but at first lack of instructions makes it a bit difficult to understand (but you'll get acquainted with it soon since it is quite simple in essence).
The game is enjoyable to play and if one had more time this might become engaging.