What has the GDT been up to?
 

It's been a month or two since Bell announced it's official creation, so I'm wondering if anything has been done with the team yet :O

Well, right now I am trying to get some of them together to make a new website for GraalOnline.com.

So far it is going pretty well, but only very few people from the GDT are involved, I wish more would get involved.

I helped out (as a GDT) with UN's Halloween, when Streety was in need.

I idle in the irc channel with them all day, every day!

Not much at the moment, many of the GDT are rarely on IRC. I also believe that more steps should be taken to advertise our services to those in need.
And our days have been brightened because of it!

AAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW this made me smile so hard irl, I hope you weren't being sarcastic!

NINJA-EDIT:It seems that Door's shift-key is hanging: 7.4% of the time he/she wrote UPPERCASE.
While a few of us are consistently on IRC available to answer questions, the current model that the team is following is simply not working. When Bell gets back from her move, we will be making a few changes for the better.

so basically a minimal amount of production is coming from the GDT, or?

I still stick to my original opinion that the GDT is just a way to make it seem like things are happening and that the team serves no real purpose.

The "Global Development Team" does nothing that couldn't be done without a global team—in fact, I'm not even sure how much development they've been doing. Personally, I was hoping they'd take to updating the scripting documentation, creating tutorials for the various development fields on Graal, and helping playerworlds that need a little push.

I am, however, glad to see that they haven't transformed into the GST (Global Slave Team, meaning they would script for Zone at Stefan's command).

So why haven't any of these things been done by individuals yet?

Like Vulcan said, we're adjusting and figuring out the best way to organize and work. In the meantime, some of us are certainly doing things; some worked on Graaloween, some have been helping playerworlds. I myself have been working on a polling system as part of the public content releases.

However, we aren't really being utilized by playerworlds, as far as I can tell. One of the pillars of our purpose is to help playerworld staff, but we can't do that if we're not asked. :)

What?

• Tig started Testbed before he was in the GDT/PWA to help scripters learn to script
• #gscript has been maintaing their own wiki (or at least used to, not sure on the current status) for scripting
• There have been tries by people like Dusty to start guilds for developers (Developers Circle, etc) — also specialty guilds like #glevels, Scripter, etc
• Twinny and some other people have written scripting documentation in the past (tutorials)
• I (along with others) have been updating scripting documentation (albiet less than before, recently)
• I've had PMs from at least 5-6 people in the past month who have needed help on their server (on Era, one over the forums), and was able to help all of them without (Global Development Team) at the end of my name.

There are most certainly more examples, but I can't think of anything now. The best thing the team has brought is the IRC channel, and even that is rarely used by people needing help.


I hope the team is able to transform, because I really would like to see a group of players taking time to do the tasks I've mentioned before, but I don't see it happening right now. Hopefully something will happen when Bell gets back.

I am, however, glad to hear that some things are being worked on.

The point being that if those things were done, you wouldn't have said anything about them in your last post. Of course people can do those things independently, and they still can. The GDT was created to consolidate the efforts, but mostly provide general public content and help. Most developers concentrate on their own servers, rather than Graal as a whole.

Anyways, we really shouldn't be giving final judgement on the GDT this prematurely. It's version 1. There are kinks that need to worked out. :cool:

Not in the least. :)

Chris, I think you're being a bit over-critical of the team. I think it's a good idea that all these efforts can now be unified under one banner. There's still time for the team to shine yet, and I'm optimisitic of it's future :)

Is this really higher priority than other things? x_x

Here's my GS2 Tutorial dawgs.

http://public.zodiacdev.com/index.php?title=Fowlplay4

It's not nearly as complete as I'd like it to be though but it's getting there.

Your tutorial is pretty nice.

Indeed, it's quite nice, though it has a few errors that I'd be interested in correcting. I'll talk to him and see if I can get access.

I'm a web designer. I wouldn't mind helping design a new website if you guys are interested.

well, you can check out the thread here

The tutorial is shaping up well but it seems to have a lot of "This does this, voila!" and doesn't explain really why, some more actual descriptions of how things work and why they work like that would be good so that people can get a more rounded understanding of the scripting language from your tutorial.

Take for instance the section on clientside and serverside, it is saying how easy it is to split up your code and that clientside is insecure but it actually does not explain that serverside code is run on the NPC-Server and clientside code is run on the client, which is vital for someone who doesn't have much prior programming knowledge and is not already familiar with serverside-clientside programming. It doesn't explain the security differences really between clientside and serverside, and there are no details on how the serverside can be used to manipulate multiple players at a single time.