Wow, this topic is so active!
Diane wrote:
yks wrote:
Perhaps a page about CQB in
http://www.moddb.com to get people interested? For now it is possible to upload locked alpha, screenshots, videos to gain more interest before unlocked 0.224 hits the web?
This had all been discussed before when there were plans to develop CQB again in 2013. However, any publicity or promotion for CQB was going to be put on hold until there was actually an active version released and not done prematurely because we do not want to follow the path of promoting a mod that does not come to fruition - as we have done in the past - thus disappointing a potential community - again.
It depends who you try to reach with advertisement. If you don't want to get average people that can't understand the game is not finished and can't be indulgent, just don't talk to this kind of people.
That said, you need some advertisement if you want to have a sufficient player base to test the game and report bugs and request features, to have some people hosting servers (same reasons), and you need some advertisement if you want to get reviewers and contributors. So, it's easy, just do advertisement on techie places. Advertising CQB on techie places will allows you to reach people who are enough educated to understand that the game is in development, and enough educated to forgive which is not finished, and enough educated to host servers or to review or contribute.
So before doing advertisement is mainstream place, just do advertisement on techie places, open source related online news paper are probably the better ones, because you know in advance the readers have a technical level above th average. But to be able to do that, your project must be open source. Coroner said many time he is not against that.
The better advertisement you can do is to say
“Hey, our project is not dead, come play with us, play with the game and play with our code”, it's the best way to advertise your project to educated people.
As I said before, I can write articles on a french open-source related website named
linuxfr.org as I already do for
ET:Legacy and
Unvanquished projects. Even if it's a french-only website, I know each time I write something about Unvanquished they get a big visit boost (the last time I did it, more people come from this french-only website than from the international
phoronix website in the same month, that says something), also some contributors to this project and people hosting servers come from this website (I'm not the only one
), because the audience of this website is well educated and enjoy playing games.
The better you can do to get contributors and an educated player base is to say
“common play our game and hack our code”, if you never say
“hack our code” you will only get consumers, and consumers never forgive, and consumers are childish.
luka wrote:
coroner wrote:
Like Diane said - the first step will be the actual release of an unlocked 0.224, preferably stand alone.
What will unlocked CQB 0.224 bring ? as we already have dim mod.
Unlocked CQB will bring that:
coroner wrote:
Install ET:L, unpack CQB 0.224, start it, done.
looking good.
Also, CQB_dim does not work at all on my system.
luka wrote:
TC:E was already greenlit a year ago.
It is good to know, that measures the potential popularity of CQB, but currently the best thing to do is not to look for Steam customers (that will be ruthless), but contributors.
About the whole
“I'm a veteran and I want to see coroner doing something I want” thread, I just want to say, since TCE is dead since 2007 and CQB is dead since 2011, the better wen can do if we want to see something alive is to let coroner do what he want. Sometime “we are many” is just another law of the strongest which is not fair.
“we are many” can't force someone to do something he don't want to do. Democracy is a group deciding things for the group itself, a group deciding things for an individual is not democracy.
Caesar77 wrote:
I agree with Illwieckz on the open community aspect,
it should be on Github so it can be forked and be openly worked on.
ET:L has a lot of bugfixes and better security, TC/CQB could really
profit from that.
Coroner expressed his fear about fork. I think this fear was valid 10 years ago, not today. Usually people fears fork because they fears to see the project going out of control. There is some tools today to prevent that.
You can't fight against fork, the only thing you can do is to make it your allied. Each time someone downloads source code from your project, he is doing a fork. So if you want to keep control of this fork, you must use a tool that allows you to track his change, so you must use a DVCS. DVCS like Git does not fight against fork, they use the fork as the only way to contribute, so fork is more than an allied. Using a platform like GitHub not only allows you to track changes in someone else's fork, but allows you to track forks themselves.
Forks are like animals: wild animals are dangerous and useless, but trained animals can help you to hunt and feed yourself, can help you too work, can protect you, and can save you. With trained animal you do more than you can do with wild animal and more than you can do with no animal at all.
DVCS like Git and platforms like
GitHub are just the best way to get trained and civilized forks.
There is two kind of forks, wild forks and trained forks. Trained forks are fork done by contributors to hack your code and allowing you to merge his changes, so it means life. Wild forks are fork done by people that does not want or can't contribute. This last kind of fork is very rare, and in the most case, it happens because upstream is dead, so it's a good thing because it means life too. You know, Unvanquished is a Tremulous fork, but Tremulous is dead, so it's good. Same for ET:Legacy, the official Wolf:ET engine is dead, but because Id Software allowed volunteers to fork the engine, we can play Wolf:ET. Fork is life.
The more your project can be forked and be forked, the most it is alive. So, please do not fear to see your project beeing forked. When Caesar7 says about your project
“it should be on Github so it can be forked” he means
“so people can contribute”, because nobody can contribute without forking, fork is the first step to contribution. If you want to keep forks in control, just use tools that gives you that power: Git and GitHub.
So, the better advertisement you can do to get educated people is to open the project, put it where developpers are and invite people to play and hack, and invite open source techie websites in many languages to talk about your project to educated techie people.