| From: | Sam Jordan |
| Date: | 24 Dec 99 at 10:09:05 |
| Subject: | [warpup] official Quake Porting Project |
Hi
As you know I have already posted another mail concerning Quake
earlier. After some thinking and after some talks to people I
believe that we absolutely need some kind of 'official Quake PPC
porting project'. In my opinion it is not a good thing, if every
programmer works for hiw own and then releases hiw own port, so
that we would get tons of different ports with different strengths
and weaknesses and different level of support. Certainly it is
allowed to do so, but I would prefer if we had an organized
project, which would have the goal to develop an 'official'
port of all those Quake components.
Usually the most difficult step is the first one, as many people
maybe would be interested to work on such a project, but mostly
it is difficult to connect these people together. I would like
to do one first step now by asking for people wanting to join
a Quake PPC porting project. First I must say, that I myself
really don't have any time (in fact all my ideas and plans
would be enough for at least one year of additional work) to
work on implementation, but I'm certainly interested to follow
such a project and certainly to make it real in the first place.
The goals of the official Quake porting project should be
the following:
- Manage the porting of the different Quake components in
*one* project, which is guided by one project manager.
- Join the knowledge and the energy of the most talented
people to develop a high-quality result.
- Make sure that all results achieved by this project are
based on legal resources only, which implies that no
resources should be used, which were used for existing
Quake ports done earlier illegally.
- Take care about professional 'marketing', which means that
the project is accompanied by maintaining and updating a
dedicated web-site and by doing communication to motivate
people to use this software. This way I would like to
achieve some 'quality-seal' (hopefully this straight-forward
translation from german make sense in english :), which
distinguishes this project from other projects. Certainly
I have nothing against other ports from other people (as
long as they don't contain any code of the existing
ports) but I would like to see *one* solution becoming
a 'official' one, so that we can reduce the risk that
other doubtful ports become too popular.
Now the most important thing is to find out how to manage
such a project. As I said above, I don't have any time, therefore
what is needed in the first place, is a capable *project manager*,
with experience in software development. There must be one
person which coordinates all efforts, which handles communication
(especially leading discussions, as this is one point where lots
of projects simply enter a stagnation phase) and organisation and
which is able to push a project forward.
Second, there is certainly a need for capable programmers. Such
a project doesn't need a big chunk of coders/hackers, it needs
people with experience in software development, which are capable
to work in a team and which are capable not only to code, but also
in planning and designing the work.
Experience in PowerPC software development is a must, so only
people with enough such experience should really think of joining
such a team. For the hardware-accelerated versions some people
with good 3D-Hardware/Warp3D/OpenGL knowledge certainly should
join the team.
The most important thing is, that those people are capable of
working in a team and to accept a team manager as lead person.
Well, I really don't know if it's possible to achieve *all* of
these goals, I just want to do the first step towards a really
*professional* project. So anyone which is interested to join
such a porting project please contact me privately, I will then
connect you all. Please also say what you would like to do, what
are your capabilities and what are your practical experiences resp.
what you have done up to now. If you don't know whether you
would fit into such a project, just give it a try, I won't bite :)
As soon as somebody volunteers as project manager (might as well
be a programmer, too) I will pass the project in his hands for
further progress. I will certainly continously stay in touch with
all people.
bye