Featured Holiday Hackathon 2018

[Cervator]

GCI has finished as of a few days ago, hooray lots of new stuff and cool students! Prizes won't be announced till early January though, oh the suspense

Finalist evaluation is now in progress, and in just about a month GSOC season begins although we won't know for a while if we'll manage to participate and get in.

In the meantime we're going to try something new: a Holiday Hackathon! Usually GCI lasts through the holiday but this year the timing was changed and that period is otherwise idle, where plenty of people often have some free time to put to use. I posted a potential timeline on chat earlier, it goes something like this:

• Merging Marathon - started Saturday Dec 15th. Going to roll into the regular week as we have a lot of stuff to merge after GCI! Keeping an eye out for who is helping (whether providing review, testing PRs, or actually merging things) to optionally hand out prizes (maybe $100/50/25 for the 3 most helpful). Anybody but me would be eligible and I'd handle the evaluation and some Amazon gift cards for the prizes.
  • We're talking a bit about how to even score this and how to keep a gamified scoreboard of sorts in general. So probably best we keep it going a little while anyway, maybe halfway through we'll have an idea about what we're doing!
  • Poke me if you're seriously interested in the prizes so I can keep an eye on activity
• Playful Architecture - weekend of Saturday Dec 22nd. Several events that weekend:
  • A play test, hopefully with all the merged stuff. Likely usual time that Saturday (noon US East)
  • An architecture meeting specific to Gestaltabout what to do with it in the future and who can help do what. Please fill outthis Doodle poll if interested
  • A game design meeting for what to focus on in the near to mid-term future. New gameplay templates? Enhance current? Who might like doing what? Topics might includeevolving biomes, ourconstructed language / font, the old game identity thread, and initial ideas for GSOC 2019. Fill out this Doodle poll for that. Note this might be more high level dividing into topics to discuss further later / via forum threads.
  • May flow into further topics after each event based on contributor availability and/or the other topics listed on the Roadmap Trello
• Infrastructure Week - actually both weeks around the weekend of Saturday Dec 29th, but may aim for that weekend to do some sort of presentation / social hacking thing on new infrastructure possibilities. Some potential topics:
  • New Jenkins living in a Kubernetes cluster, possibly some enterprise Jenkins / Jenkins X if I can swing that through my employer (trying to focus on similar work during the next 2-3 weeks)
  • Chatbots and various kinds of automation (like the scoreboard thing)
  • Possible CrowdIn replacement for Weblate or at least a major upgrade (it is down again and nightly restarts don't seem to be enough)
  • Improving 3D assets pipeline

I might also try to catch back up with some of the topics from the project birthday which got somewhat sidelined by RL obstacles.

Check out the Roadmap board in Trello which now has a Holiday Hackathon listand even subscribe to specific cards there to indicate your interest and please post away / chat about further questions and ideas

Finally check out this awesome video put together by our awesome GCI students!

 

[Cervator]

Schedule for the weekend (all times in EDT):

• Friday near midnight heading into Saturday (lets call it 11:59 EDT Friday): First and primary Architecture meeting
• Saturday around noon: Play test begins
• Saturday 3ish pm: First Game design session (I might run a little late - may get pulled into an ARK stream with my wife at 2)
• Saturday 11 pm: Optional/secondary Architecture session (fallback session if we don't cover primary topics the first time)
• Sunday 4ish pm (may start early like at 3 and keep rolling): Combined final session on any remaining topics / open topics

Primary topics for architecture:

• Gestalt 2019 - planning for a final round of changes and (re)integration into Terasology & Destination Sol. Expecting @Immortius will be available to put some work into it and hoping to grab some others like @vampcat @asie @jellysnake etc to varying degrees, leading into better applying more gameplay centric friendly architecture guidance
• Dagger 2 - can we use it? @Michael has been putting a lot of work into proving the concept but it is tricky to structure it right in a vacuum or against DestSol which hasn't yet caught up architecturally with Terasology. May be ideal to apply considerations from here to the overall design of Gestalt if together they seem like a suitable combo. Alternative is to improve our existing injection and maybe extract the related code to our own lib (just generally favor using existing things where we can)
• As time allows / cover in later sessions: engine roadmap items in Trello

Primary topics for game design:

• Short term improvements to help improve the gameplay experience. What are the current pain points and who can help?
• Mid to long term larger improvements like new gameplay templates, nicer biomes, the conlang, game identity, etc
• GSOC ideas that could come from all that

At the end of the weekend I'll contact a few friendly merges that have participated in the Merging Marathon to see if they'll accept some Amazon gift card prizes

After that (and possibly during the weekend if I have idle time) it is time for Infrastructure Week woo! Nerd out about Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Dockerized CI/CD (and game server like what @qwc hosts at present), Jenkins, our various websites, internationalization, documentation, and so on. Maybe I'll try to put down another small set of concrete sessions for the weekend starting Sat Dec 29th

 

[Cervator]

@Soundwave recommends a useful looking primer on Dependency Injection, good for the architecture. Grab a cup of coffee or two then dive in

https://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html

 

[Cervator]

Belated happy New Year to everybody!

Thought I would round out this thread with a final update. Lots of good stuff happened the last two weeks

• GCI winners are about to be announced, and the GCI trip is in planning. We'll be sending a mentor along with our two winners. Still plenty of GCI stuff to still merge and put to use and plenty already in place
• We've talked a bunch about architecture, both Gestalt, Dagger 2, and more. As a result we now have an Architecture Arc board in Trello, and some more specific details about what might happen specifically to Gestalt over the next few months.
• In a similar way there is now a Gameplay Template To Rule Them All board in Trello to continue the work toward improving content both in quantity and making it more coherent and consistent, in at least one mainline gameplay template (that may extend into different end-games). Some of the Holiday Hackathon stuff will probably move in there, or already is in there
• I've reached out to three contributors about winning prizes for the Merging Marathon. Yay!
• Infrastructure Week went as most infrastructure weeks go: there wasn't a whole lot of infrastructure after all I did technically spend a ton of time on Docker and similar, but didn't get nearly far enough to apply anything to our actual infrastructure. So easy to get lost in time sinks over relatively small issues. Infrastructure is hard! But the focus at work continues and will pay off in Terasology land sooner or later
• I did some extra testing yesterday during our regularly scheduled monthly play test, using a way bigger set of modules than usual. After some time hunting incompatibilities and broken modules I settled on a relatively stable and cool set. With a few more fixes maybe we can get started on a single bigger template and test it out more properly next time.
• GSOC org apps start in about a week, and one topic that didn't get enough time was starting on the ideas list. We need this!

Next up if we apply for GSOC (probably) the participating orgs will be announced on February 26. We might come up with one more event to fit in around that time before GSOC gets too busy later on...