Messages

16

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 02, 2009, 08:29:59 AM »

If it's any help, I could provide hosting for a fully owned wiki on my own server, with full access accounts. I'd even buy a domain name if required, and could ensure the software remains up-to-date - however, if other people are provided with access to the server, then it wouldn't have to be left down to one person.

I realise I'm probably not the most well known member of the rogue community, and I haven't really been an active member until recently (last couple of years), but I do feel it would be sad to see a well known and respected community resource disappear or die to to lack of support.

Because I feel a free community project should remain free, I'm not the sort of person to ask for donations - I'm well enough off I can provide more than enough for the community without it.

That is a very generous offer, and you're at least a well enough known member of the community that I recognized your name.  So you're 'fame' is greater than you think ;-).  I think it would be great if more than one person could have access as it is entirely understandable that somebody may have unexpected pressure on their time and not be able to keep up with things.

I don't have any real experience with *nix, but I'm willing to help as much as I can bearing that in mind.

[EDIT] If we don't go with Scautura then YourWiki looks like one of the better options for Wiki Farms.  Triangle Wizard has a wiki there and it seems to do alright (including personalized wiki logo).

17

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 02, 2009, 07:49:58 AM »

Edit; I absolutely agree that the wikifarm isn't an ideal solution, but I think that this backup script could be put to some very good use. We could maintain a torrent of the most recent backup of Roguebasin, for instance. The backup would only need to be updated every so often, maybe every other month or less, and then as long as the torrent had sufficient seeds, it'd stay alive

I'm going to try to import the backup into a temporary second home at a MediaWiki GNU FDL wiki farm.  If nothing else it will be a good "restore check".  I'll edit in progress notes here.

RogueBasin            | MediaWiki 1.6.10 | GNU FDL          |              |
======================+==================+==================+==============+
BusinessWiki          | MediaWiki        | GPL              | Free(3 user) |
EditThis.info         | MediaWiki 1.5.5  |                  | Free         |
Referata              | MediaWiki 1.14.0 | User choice      | Free/paid    |
Russian wiki community| MediaWiki 1.5.8  | Negotiable       | Negotiable   |
Wikia                 | MediaWiki 1.14   | Creative Commons | Free         |
Wiki-site.com         | MediaWiki 1.11.0 | User choice      | Free/paid    |
Wikkii.com            | MediaWiki        |                  | Free         |
YourWiki              | MediaWiki 1.15   | User choice      | Free         |


Any other suggestions?

18

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 02, 2009, 05:32:24 AM »

I am not too keen on using a wiki farm, as that's what we had first, and we discovered it was best to have full control over the content..

Yarr*, I know what you mean, but frankly I can't afford a decent internet connection nevermind proper hosting.  Perhaps a wiki farm might make a good temporary backup spot and test ground.

* Feeling a little pirate-y today.

19

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 01, 2009, 08:20:45 PM »

Isn't there an easier way to import and export wikis?

I'm sure there is, but I daresay it requires admin rights and possibly a bit of technical expertise.

20

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 01, 2009, 07:28:42 PM »

Further support for the idea of an easy way to backup and mirror Roguebasin is the Interactive Fiction archive: http://www.ifarchive.org/. They have many mirrors which help the archive greatly by keeping their bandwidth costs low. This has the added benefit of preventing the disappearance of the ifarchive even if the "main" site goes down.

Interesting, but more technically advanced than what I'd be able to cope with. 

Even a copy that required a certain amount of manual or automatic translation would probably be preferable to no copy at all. I'm not sure if the Creative Commons license is compatible with the GNU FDL, but I would suspect it might be. Wikia looks perhaps like the best option, so long as the licenses are compatible.

I've been looking through the options available for wiki farms.  I think there are some that are MediaWiki and GNU FDL.  Don't know whether they're any good as well though.

**********************************

Anyhow, to summarize some of the options available:

Option 1: Create a read-only backup at a free wiki farm using MediaWiki.  Update the backup with changed pages every month or so.

Pro
- Content is safe (and everybody can see it's safe ;-).

Anti
- Monthly backup will be a tad fiddly / annoying.
- Does not solve any of the problems with spam, non-ascii characters, etc.

Option 2: Create a backup at a free wiki farm using MediaWiki and allow editing at the new location.

Pro
- Later versions of MediaWiki will (hopefully) cope better with spam, odd characters etc.

Anti
- Keeping the two versions synchronized might be stupidly difficult.

Option 3: Create new 'RogueBasin' at a wiki farm and encourage people to go there instead.

Pro
- Can take advantage of later MediaWiki versions.

Anti
- Lose nice domain name, lose Google ranking, possibly annoy Slash and Bjorn for trying to 'steal' their wiki.

Option 4: Obtain reassurances from those responsible for the current RogueBasin that the wiki content is properly backed up.  Encourage additional admin access users for server / wiki to deal with technical problems.

Pro
- Keep all the current good stuff.

Anti
- Current admin may be too busy with real life and may not want (or be able to) allow other people at the admin level required.

21

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 01, 2009, 06:36:31 PM »

I'm concerned about this too. I definitely think we need an easy way to backup/mirror roguebasin. Roguebasin has an export page, but it would require typing in the name of every page on Roguebasin, to my knowledge anyway. However, unless there's an easier way to do this, this might be the best option. We could use the export utility to export every page in the wiki, and then migrate that content onto another mediawiki. If only there was some kind of script or program to automate that process...

It should be relatively easy to do for someone who already has admin access to the (server?)/wiki and knows what they are doing. 

There are 975 pages in RogueBasin (not counting any 'non-page' type content).  That should be doable, even if it has to be done manually (ick!).  Slash (or maybe Z) would probably be the best able to say if there are easier methods (/scripts) available.

Another solution would be having more people who are admins at roguebasin and able to pay roguebasin's bills. Though this would be nice, I think it's not as full of a solution as having the ability to easily backup and mirror Roguebasin. As long as there is only one server hosting a single copy of Roguebasin, the threat of it simply disappearing remains.

Quite.  For example the ToME wiki lost a lot of content from some sort of data corruption problem.

[EDIT] Technical considerations.

RogueBasin uses MediaWiki.  Apparently the wiki syntax used by wikidot is quite different (although some work has been done on conversion utilities.

PBWorks is apparently also quite different to MediaWiki.

Wikia does use MediaWiki - but may have a worse reputation technically?  Also Wikia is under Creative Commons license so that may cause problems as RogueBasin is under a different license.

22

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 01, 2009, 01:07:24 PM »

I use Wikidot for my wiki and I am quite pleased with the system. You can go with either a free site or a pay site. I use the free site and haven't had any problems.

PBworks was the service I was thinking of, but I haven't actually tried it so I don't have anything invested in the choice.

The question though is the content rights on Roguebasin. If it is moved to another site and is challenged, it may be a problem.

Articles in RogueBasin are those which are under either the "GNU Free Documentation License 1.2" (most of them) or a modified version that doesn't allow the content to be modified (a handful or two, I guess).  There should be no problem with copying them to another site as long as they remain under the same license.

[EDIT]

As I see it the big problem is the uncertainty.  If we knew that the wiki content was safe and that somebody (or somebodies ;-) was both actively interested in the wiki and had the relevant admin access that would be good enough.

The more minor problems seem to be symptomatic of a lack of interested people with admin access.  Non-ascii characters turning into gibberish, searches that include certain pages causing crashes, crude spam prevention and Delete category pages that rarely getting deleted. 

23

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 01, 2009, 01:01:51 PM »

Björn Ritzl is the one paying for the domain/hosting, I emailed him and he will hopefully be able to help you.

Not Björn Bergstrom ?

24

Off-topic (Locked) / Future of RogueBasin

« on: July 01, 2009, 09:45:44 AM »

For some time I, and some others, have been concerned about RogueBasin.  The person (people?) with administrator access to the wiki don't appear to be very active (to the extent that I'm not sure who they even are) and there are ongoing problems with the MediaWiki version and wiki settings used.

My greatest worry is that whoever is paying for the domain name might not and the next time I visit it might just not be there.

One possible way forward would be to copy the wiki content to a new wiki hosted elsewhere.  At the least I would be happier if I knew that someone is taking monthly backups or something.

Any suggestions, volunteers, information?

25

Programming / Re: On ranged attacks

« on: June 27, 2009, 08:54:30 AM »

Some roguelikes allow players to fire ranged attacks in the 8 different directions (Mage Guild, Adom), while others allow the player to target any tile in their line of sight (*Bands, Nethack).  Which of these do you think makes for better gameplay?

The '8 directions' (or '4 directions') approach does mean that the whole business of trick shots and what's targetable doesn't apply.

26

Programming / Re: Good ways to do LoS

« on: June 27, 2009, 05:10:01 AM »

What's your favorite way to do line of sight?

What do you think is the easiest way to do line of sight?

There's currently massive amounts of line of sight discussion going on in Angband.oook.cz and RogueBasin.

Or did you come from there?

27

Other Announcements / Re: Project: Roguelike Renaissance

« on: June 25, 2009, 02:58:54 PM »

DoppeRogue isn't quite dead yet

Yeah, I saw that you dropped by RogueBasin and updated the page link.

28

Programming / Re: Looking for a Team

« on: June 23, 2009, 10:39:41 AM »

You know some people start creating games with ascii and then build fantastic tiles, why not start with simple models?  Creating 100 simple models will get a more detailed game than 10 fantastic models.   

IMO

Gameplay >>> Looks

in just about everything (apart from pr0n ;-)

29

Programming / Re: Looking for a Team

« on: June 22, 2009, 08:04:51 PM »

Suppose I want to do all the programming work and do not want to do any models, while you want to do models, but do not want to do programming. If you drop out at some stage of development, the effort will be lost, since nobody is willing to do the remaining work in the model field. What to do then? That's why I think such team project is very risky.

Learn the other skill so, even if you're a n00b, you can bodge together something releasable if the other member leaves.  Like in JBand I'm hoping for native speaker correction of the Japanese, but I know enough to write understandable text without it.  I hoped for (and actually got!) assistance with the C programming (thanks artanis) but my newbie skills are probably enough to get something workable together.

What do you mean by 'true 3D'?

Not isometric?

30

Programming / Re: Looking for a Team

« on: June 22, 2009, 10:50:13 AM »

http://s111.photobucket.com/albums/n144/Jeheace/RL/

I'm not likely to get involved in graphical roguelikes (or other games) but I have to say that the ants look very nice indeed.