Build and Shoot

I need to poll the crowd on some basic information-management stuff - docs, troubleshooting, feedback. I'm concerned about the number of "community artifacts" we've already generated - both documentation and other project resources:

• Comments inlined in source code
  Text files stored with the code
  Game assets stored with the code
  GM's HTML docs(with custom templating system)
  Iceball public thread posts
  Iceball Club posts
  IRC logs in at least three channels: #buildandshoot, #aos.development on Quakenet, #iceball on RenovatorsOfTerror.
  Github commits
  Github issues
  Github wiki pages

If these things overlap too much, or are used partially and then abandoned, we'll shoot ourselves in the foot by having information that's lost, outdated, or in the wrong place when needed. But if we can get these things right development will go faster and better.

To help figure out what we need, please answer these questions:

As a player...

When you need help running the game, where would you try going first? Second?

Do you consider bugs and feature requests differently?

Would an in-game feedback box be helpful? Do you imagine yourself using it, if we made it fun?

How do you try to stay updated with news of the game?


As a developer...

Did you have a specific problem when getting started with Iceball? If you had more than one, which was worst?

Do you find auto-generated API docs useful, or do you prefer to just look at the code?

How do you like to keep up on issues and feature development? (e.g. bugtracking, IRC, Trello, mailing list)

List text formats you are okay with: ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Markdown, reStructuredText (and any others that come to mind)

Would it be helpful if we worked on summarizing and syndicating updates better? For example, would you subscribe to a mailing list that made a daily digest of changes to code, forum posts, the bug list, and wiki pages? Would you like having an IRC bot that polled for all of the same changes in real time?

As a player...
I'd head to IRC for help first. If nobody were around I'd look for the Iceball thread. I think having a more official-feeling place to go for help would make things easier - a dedicated subforum (or an entire site).
This is possibly more as a developer than a player, but I would much rather a bug be fixed than a new feature be added.
I don't see myself using an in-game feedback system. It could be helpful but I think it would open the door to complaints about things irrelevant to development.
I stay "updated" through IRC.

As a developer...
The only problem I had getting started was pretty minor, just some makefile tweaking (specifically getting the path to the lua headers right).
I find documentation a lot easier to work with, but sometimes looking at the code is a great help in understanding exactly what's going on. As I said before, IRC is my primary medium of communication and that's how I stay up-to-date with most things.
Plain ASCII is great and Markdown is pretty natural to read and write, plus it translates directly to HTML. I'd have to say Markdown is my favourite text format.

The mailing list and IRC bot suggestions are both great and I'd love to have them.

As a player...

When you need help running the game, where would you try going first? Second?
IRC, then the code. Then probably forums.
Do you consider bugs and feature requests differently?
Bugs are more important, features are more fun. (same for when I'm programming)
Would an in-game feedback box be helpful? Do you imagine yourself using it, if we made it fun?
I can't see it being too helpful. We can already poke the devs on IRC, forums, and github.
How do you try to stay updated with news of the game?
git log and git diff HEAD HEAD^ and IRC

As a developer...

Did you have a specific problem when getting started with Iceball? If you had more than one, which was worst?
Getting the damn thing to compile the first time took a lot of patience and is a big turn-off to many people I've asked in IRC. Now, though, the main problem is figuring out what to do next. Probably because I'm not very imaginative, not exactly sure what GM wants/doesn't want, not completely familiar with stuff, want to avoid making large decisions, inexperienced at making games, etc etc, but figuring out what to add or change usually takes longer than actually doing it. This is probably mostly my fault though.
Do you find auto-generated API docs useful, or do you prefer to just look at the code?
It's helpful when you really need it or if you're confused about something, but grep has been the greatest help. I'm a "read the code" guy, I guess. Understanding what happens serverside vs clientside is still difficult, some clarification there might be nice but if I cared enough I could figure it out.
How do you like to keep up on issues and feature development? (e.g. bugtracking, IRC, Trello, mailing list)
GitHub issue tracker is best, IRC second. No mailing lists, please. Trello might be nice but we already have an issue tracker.
List text formats you are okay with: ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Markdown, reStructuredText (and any others that come to mind)
I can get used to anything.
Would it be helpful if we worked on summarizing and syndicating updates better? For example, would you subscribe to a mailing list that made a daily digest of changes to code, forum posts, the bug list, and wiki pages? Would you like having an IRC bot that polled for all of the same changes in real time?[/quote]
No mailing lists, please. IRC bot might be nice, but DerpyBot already does code changes and github does notifications about bugs and whatnot. Mostly I use git log and git diff HEAD HEAD^. A git hook that builds noob distros might be nice.

As a player...

When you need help running the game, where would you try going first? Second? #Iceball or #aos.development
Then annoy the heck out of GreaseMonkey on the forums.

Do you consider bugs and feature requests differently? Yes.

Would an in-game feedback box be helpful? Do you imagine yourself using it, if we made it fun? It would be cool. I would use it.

How do you try to stay updated with news of the game? I check the forums as much as possible. But if there was a website for Iceball that would be best.


As a developer...

Did you have a specific problem when getting started with Iceball? If you had more than one, which was worst? I am still having problems trying to get it to build... But it's not really related to Iceball, it's more of zlib.

Do you find auto-generated API docs useful, or do you prefer to just look at the code? I do both, I look at the code first. Then if I have a problem I look at the docs.

How do you like to keep up on issues and feature development? (e.g. bugtracking, IRC, Trello, mailing list) IRC = master system.

List text formats you are okay with: ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Markdown, reStructuredText (and any others that come to mind) Why I might ask? What would they be used for? Also ASCII is an encoding scheme, not a format.
Buuuut:
HTML, BBCode.

Would it be helpful if we worked on summarizing and syndicating updates better? For example, would you subscribe to a mailing list that made a daily digest of changes to code, forum posts, the bug list, and wiki pages? Would you like having an IRC bot that polled for all of the same changes in real time?
A mailing list would be awesome, heck I would help get it started.

Also feel free to completely discard my opinion as a developer, because I am a complete incompetent compared to most.

I'll edit it to match the guide if you want, but my to cents are:

1. #iceball is completely redundant. We already have multiple #AoS channels and #BuildAndShoot.
2. the clan forum and github do overlap a bit

We were just discussing this on #iceball before I saw this thread. I would much prefer using a proper issue tracker, whetehr it be github's one, my flyspray install, or any other proper issue management system. At the same time, some people may not be able to use these things (someone in the iceball thread recently seemed to be unable to even read the documentation files in notepad), so I suggested using an issue tracker, then having the club forum as a backup. The bug reports by these people are more likely to be of low quality anyway, so we could filter them and put the unique and informative ones on the issue tracker.
The reason I'd rather have an issue tracker is that it's much much easier to organise things (speaking from experience).

Did you have a specific problem when getting started with Iceball? If you had more than one, which was worst?
Building on windows is a complete bitch to get set up.
Edit: Oh, and the lack of a proper todo list (in the form of an issue tracker) made it difficult to find out what needs done.

Do you find auto-generated API docs useful, or do you prefer to just look at the code?
I'm a java developer normally, and as such, I rely a lot on javadocs. I'm not sure how good auto-generated docs would be for Lua though, but if there's a decent amount of structured info, I would certainly use them in conjunction with looking at the code.

How do you like to keep up on issues and feature development? (e.g. bugtracking, IRC, Trello, mailing list)
Issue tracker all the way. It allows you to keep up with it when the time suits you (unlike IRC) and organise/search for the info most relevant to what you need, such as search for issues assigned to you, find the most critical bugs that need fixing, etc.

List text formats you are okay with: ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Markdown, reStructuredText (and any others that come to mind)
I love markdown as it is pretty similar to how I would organise text files anyway, with the added bonuses of a consistent format between all developers/files, and easily being able to change it to HTML.

Would it be helpful if we worked on summarizing and syndicating updates better? For example, would you subscribe to a mailing list that made a daily digest of changes to code, forum posts, the bug list, and wiki pages? Would you like having an IRC bot that polled for all of the same changes in real time?
I would definitely like it for an IRC bot to give this information, like DerpyBot currently does with git commits. Sadly, github's issue tracker doesn't seem to allow for this, but I think flyspray has an RSS feed available. Whatever is used, DerpyBot has a feed reader and callback hooks available for things like this.

As a player...

When you need help running the game, where would you try going first? Second?

Probably the docs at first, then the forums/irc

Do you consider bugs and feature requests differently?

Yeah, there should be separate areas for these

Would an in-game feedback box be helpful? Do you imagine yourself using it, if we made it fun?

I'm not sure, how/why would this be made "fun"

How do you try to stay updated with news of the game?

Reading the thread

As a developer...

Did you have a specific problem when getting started with Iceball? If you had more than one, which was worst?

Instructions were a little confusing, could be worded better

Do you find auto-generated API docs useful, or do you prefer to just look at the code?

I don't know shit about code, so API docs

How do you like to keep up on issues and feature development? (e.g. bugtracking, IRC, Trello, mailing list)

The thread here, githubs

List text formats you are okay with: ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Markdown, reStructuredText (and any others that come to mind)

oh god I just play with pmf models what am I doing here

Would it be helpful if we worked on summarizing and syndicating updates better? For example, would you subscribe to a mailing list that made a daily digest of changes to code, forum posts, the bug list, and wiki pages? Would you like having an IRC bot that polled for all of the same changes in real time?

I personally wouldn't but if I knew more about coding I probably would

As a player...
When you need help running the game, where would you try going first? Second?
Text docs included. Secondly project Wiki; but since it seems to be sort of WIP: the forums ATM.
Do you consider bugs and feature requests differently?
Hell, yes.
Would an in-game feedback box be helpful? Do you imagine yourself using it, if we made it fun?
I've read they used something like that for Halo 3 beta. So I definitely imagine it to be useful. Because I'd love to see this project mature, I'd use it too.
How do you try to stay updated with news of the game?
Very poorly. Forums ATM.

As a developer...
Did you have a specific problem when getting started with Iceball? If you had more than one, which was worst?
Not really.

Do you find auto-generated API docs useful, or do you prefer to just look at the code?
The code.

How do you like to keep up on issues and feature development? (e.g. bugtracking, IRC, Trello, mailing list)
I'd prefer to see some centralized system that doesn't throw all issues ever in the history of the project in your face; that clearly distinguishes between existing and resolved issues, and between severe and light issues. I'm unfamiliar with bugtracking software, so my opinion doesn't matter much.

List text formats you are okay with: ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Markdown, reStructuredText (and any others that come to mind)I assume writing? ASCII, HTML, BBCode, Wiki.

Would it be helpful if we worked on summarizing and syndicating updates better? For example, would you subscribe to a mailing list that made a daily digest of changes to code, forum posts, the bug list, and wiki pages? Would you like having an IRC bot that polled for all of the same changes in real time?
I would @^&$* not subscribe to a mailing list that does an arbitrarily daily update of everything. If I want to know all things going down in a certain channel I subscribe to that. If there'd be a summarizing channel, it should prune redundant information IMHO. For example: list all final changes from one major release to an other.