Beta Blockers: Technical Community Development Initiative
Oct 27, 2015 20:07:19 GMT -5
Hobbes, Zeek, and 3 more like this
Post by Aniketos on Oct 27, 2015 20:07:19 GMT -5
Since I rolled into Zeek's Haven half a year ago, I started rolling around some pretty ambitious ideas regarding how the community and multiplayer PZ experience might be improved. I was stoked to find a community full of members and administrators with equally ambitious ideas! Together we've created a sizable list of development projects to accomplish some pretty awesome things. I really enjoy contributing to these projects, but with all the diligence of an ADD spider-monkey crack, progress has been a little fragmented and slow as I dart between everything that we'd like to see accomplished.
To that end, I'd like to give community members the same opportunity I've had to pick up community-improvement computer development projects in a hobby capacity, so I'd like to open up a number of these projects to those with a mind for code and tech, or an interest in picking up a coding language and some new tricks. All work is to take place on a volunteer basis - I don't expect participants to forego their game-time or meet any minimum "quotas" - these projects should not be construed as anything similar to a job or official obligation! They are rather for fun, and to support the ambitions see our community, community experience, and general Project Zomboid multiplayer community grow in unique and interesting ways.
I'm also interested in seeing this initiative create an environment to share and discuss ambitious ideas within the context of how they could be implemented; I don't want to constrain Beta Blockers to specifically developing specific projects from the list the admins have compiled - members should be free to propose and collaborate on their own projects as well.
Development Scopes
The majority of our projects are centered in three primary scopes:
Experience
It's not necessary to have deep experience with any large portion of these languages, libraries, or concepts. I reign from a techy background, but I certainly wouldn't call myself "familiar" with any great number of these things - I've been picking them up as I go! My hope in assembling a team of "Beta-Blockers" is that we'll all have an opportunity to learn from one another; the majority of related projects are collaborative, and implementations are not expected to be perfect or consider all angles on first-draft as they will be iteratively improved upon by the team. It is of course good to have a knack for self-teaching - I'd like us all to share as we learn, and certainly intend to answer whatever questions and give whatever guidance I am capable of as time allows - but some capacity to answer one's own questions can go a long way
Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure
I believe that the details of these project are best kept quiet outside of the Beta-Blocker group: working without definite timelines and often working on exploratory prototypes, it's not fair to excite the community over features that will not be seen for a long period of time - or even at all. Additionally, some projects may concern exploitable features or flaws - I expect members to have a respectful measure of integrity, and discuss and consider any known or discovered vulnerabilities in confidence, as well as to refrain from applying any such information for their own gain. To this end, any members be given access to sensitive details or critical code-bases will be selected carefully, and may be removed from the entire initiative transgressions.
Credit, Ownership, & Licensing
You will be publicly credited for any contributions made to community projects. You will retain ownership over all of your contributions, however expressly grant the Zeek's Haven community an irrevocable license to build upon, modify, and deploy submitted contributions as it sees fit in the course of serving the Zeek's Haven community and supporting it's feature-set.
The exception is personally initiated projects, over which you will retain full ownership and licensing terms unless you opt to commit the project to the Zeek's Haven community project domain, or build the project on an integration of community project code.
Projects contributed to are to be handled as proprietary works unless otherwise stated - please do not disclose, reproduce, or re-use community project code-bases outside of Zeek's Haven without acquiring explicit permission first.
Some projects may undergo license changes down the road; those which may generally benefit the larger Project Zomboid community have a good chance of being open-sourced, some others may eventually be spun off into a non-ZH-centric service platform. Any changes to the license terms of a project will only affect the state of that project as it exists following the moment that the new terms come into effect - earlier snapshots retain the terms as they existed at the point in time at which they were created. All relevant contributors' permission will be sought before a project advances with backwards-incompatible licensing terms; however I reserve the right to assume an implicit approval if a contributor fails to respond to a permission query email or forum PM within 30 days.
All that said, this is an awesome opportunity to continue building Zeek's Haven into one of the most unique Project Zomboid communities and experiences, as well as to pioneer some mods and features entirely unheard of within the PZ community!
If you're interested in working on community projects, please post below or drop me a PM detailing any techs and/or specialties you have experience with, or are interested in learning. Let's build some crazy things!
To that end, I'd like to give community members the same opportunity I've had to pick up community-improvement computer development projects in a hobby capacity, so I'd like to open up a number of these projects to those with a mind for code and tech, or an interest in picking up a coding language and some new tricks. All work is to take place on a volunteer basis - I don't expect participants to forego their game-time or meet any minimum "quotas" - these projects should not be construed as anything similar to a job or official obligation! They are rather for fun, and to support the ambitions see our community, community experience, and general Project Zomboid multiplayer community grow in unique and interesting ways.
I'm also interested in seeing this initiative create an environment to share and discuss ambitious ideas within the context of how they could be implemented; I don't want to constrain Beta Blockers to specifically developing specific projects from the list the admins have compiled - members should be free to propose and collaborate on their own projects as well.
Development Scopes
The majority of our projects are centered in three primary scopes:
Scope | "Kaleo" Community Forums | "Origin" Central Services Server | Game Mods |
Overview | Kaleo projects are largely focused on providing a web-based interface for our community's features. They are centered around the developing and leveraging a custom JavaScript framework in order to promote robust implementations built on a solid foundation that the forum platform on it's own is unable to supply. | Origin is the glue that binds our community's various facets together and allows them to communicate, along with any third-party integration that is required. It provides a back-bone for more advanced data services and larger-scale processing than is possible using our other resources alone. | Our PZ mods are focused on improving the in-game multiplayer experience, bringing community features into the game-world, and developing measures to detect and prevent exploits that may place players on unfair-footing. |
Primary Technologies |
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Central 3rd-Party Libraries |
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Related Concepts | Kaleo Framework
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Examples |
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Experience
It's not necessary to have deep experience with any large portion of these languages, libraries, or concepts. I reign from a techy background, but I certainly wouldn't call myself "familiar" with any great number of these things - I've been picking them up as I go! My hope in assembling a team of "Beta-Blockers" is that we'll all have an opportunity to learn from one another; the majority of related projects are collaborative, and implementations are not expected to be perfect or consider all angles on first-draft as they will be iteratively improved upon by the team. It is of course good to have a knack for self-teaching - I'd like us all to share as we learn, and certainly intend to answer whatever questions and give whatever guidance I am capable of as time allows - but some capacity to answer one's own questions can go a long way
Confidentiality & Non-Disclosure
I believe that the details of these project are best kept quiet outside of the Beta-Blocker group: working without definite timelines and often working on exploratory prototypes, it's not fair to excite the community over features that will not be seen for a long period of time - or even at all. Additionally, some projects may concern exploitable features or flaws - I expect members to have a respectful measure of integrity, and discuss and consider any known or discovered vulnerabilities in confidence, as well as to refrain from applying any such information for their own gain. To this end, any members be given access to sensitive details or critical code-bases will be selected carefully, and may be removed from the entire initiative transgressions.
Credit, Ownership, & Licensing
You will be publicly credited for any contributions made to community projects. You will retain ownership over all of your contributions, however expressly grant the Zeek's Haven community an irrevocable license to build upon, modify, and deploy submitted contributions as it sees fit in the course of serving the Zeek's Haven community and supporting it's feature-set.
The exception is personally initiated projects, over which you will retain full ownership and licensing terms unless you opt to commit the project to the Zeek's Haven community project domain, or build the project on an integration of community project code.
Projects contributed to are to be handled as proprietary works unless otherwise stated - please do not disclose, reproduce, or re-use community project code-bases outside of Zeek's Haven without acquiring explicit permission first.
Some projects may undergo license changes down the road; those which may generally benefit the larger Project Zomboid community have a good chance of being open-sourced, some others may eventually be spun off into a non-ZH-centric service platform. Any changes to the license terms of a project will only affect the state of that project as it exists following the moment that the new terms come into effect - earlier snapshots retain the terms as they existed at the point in time at which they were created. All relevant contributors' permission will be sought before a project advances with backwards-incompatible licensing terms; however I reserve the right to assume an implicit approval if a contributor fails to respond to a permission query email or forum PM within 30 days.
All that said, this is an awesome opportunity to continue building Zeek's Haven into one of the most unique Project Zomboid communities and experiences, as well as to pioneer some mods and features entirely unheard of within the PZ community!
If you're interested in working on community projects, please post below or drop me a PM detailing any techs and/or specialties you have experience with, or are interested in learning. Let's build some crazy things!