Maugrim is going to return to the topic of Quantum Star SE today since planning is advancing in my quest to rebuild the Quantum Star SE web presence.

Back in the old days the phpNuke approach was what I used for the game, unfortunately phpNuke proved more than a little insecure. Also the policy of charging for each new version of phpNuke for a month’s period was annoying to say the least – a month to get a free version to fix the prior two month’s security exploits? The need to install 3 external add-ons for simple security measures? phpNuke sucks in this department…

Anyways, step 1 was reinstating the forums with a standalone version of phpBB. The new forums have allowed a much needed update to its layout. We currently run 4 sections: General, Quantum Star SE Evolved, Quantum Star SE Generations and Quantum Star SE Development. This allows a more focused set of topics within each category. It also fits in our policy on transparency. I’m keeping private discussions to a minimum – usually only for sensitive or restricted discussions. One example is our long burning desire for fresh ship images. We currently have a talented artist working in that department, but we’re keeping this completely private until we formally arrange the correct copyright credit and permissions.

Step 2 was the much needed bug tracker courtesy of Mantis. Mantis is an excellent light weight bug tracking system. Gone are the days when bugs were tracked solely through the forums. Forums make really bad bug trackers (at least above a certain threshold). The addition of the bug tracker has proven extremely successful. At the time of writing there are close to 60 reported bugs (all publicly and anonymously viewable) in respect of the Generations branch. The number is not surprising given QS2′s legacy of instability and lazy programming (my fault in part – I didn’t put the effort required into it at the time). What is surprising is the quick and easy adoption of the bug tracker by the small user base. After expecting some level of resistence to the change I found I was even able to push for a formal bug reporting policy with few protests.

This is an excellent change – with a policy and tracker in place, tracking and squishing bugs is an order of magnitude easier for developers. The more recent changes to our Mantis configuration adding anonymous reporting, removal of CAPTCHA verification, and moving Ikoda and Hades up to Administrators has helped pave over what was a very ad-hoc and inconsistent area.

Next up is either going to be the migration to Subversion, or the public website. The website content I’ve being outlining for a few days. Basically I’m aiming for an information first approach. Users fresh off the Google search page should be able to figure out the project in 5 minutes flat – what it is, its development status, features, development guidelines, requirements etc. News will still be a front page presence – but it won’t simply leave the detailed project information pushed aside into scattered forum posts, the release tarballs, or a minimal Sourceforge paragraph. That path leads to uncertainty, ignorance and a bad user uptake trend.

Subversion. Well, fingers crossed. Its relatively difficult to get SVN hosting for free without using a canned host like Berlios (which no longer accepts game projects), GNA (which is restricted to GPL compatible licenses) or Savannah. Sourceforge does not even offer Subversion yet. I’ll look into this more. With my early plans to push for better branch management it might be as simple to go with a paid host – dedicated SVN hosting can’t be all that expensive and not like I can’t afford to indulge an enjoyable hobby in PHP games! :-)

I’m going to sound off once more about something mentioned earlier. Richard K who has very kindly offered to create ship images for QS recently made some private submissions (no previews yet – I want a clear copyright in place for RK first). Their quality is outstanding – they make the current QS images look like third rate cartoons in comparison. Even worse RK mentioned he could alter their appearance adding weapons and armour. ;-) Once I get around to it I’ll adapt the large resolution images for the game – once I have the HTML/CSS bit done. Images are one way of adding atmosphere to a browser based game and these have blown me away so far.

Related posts:

  1. Beta Release and a new Project
  2. Bugs, Bugs, Bugs…