Add a "Volunteer Tasks" Section to Forums

[Noone you know]

There is the constant complaint/observation/choose your word that there is not enough volunteer help to accomplish everything that the dev team would like to do, followed by someone(s) willingness to help "but I don't know how to code"

I think there are both 1) a lot of people who have a variety of useful skills & 2) a lot of tasks that aren't always programming per se, or that could be a small, isolated programming task that doesn't require access to the game's source code. I propose we look at ways to crowdsource tasks.

Ex:

Let's say we want to add sea lanes to EC. You add a thread in the Volunteer section saying you have the following tasks (purely for example):

- 1) create separate "sea zones" w/ names - requires skills with the mapping tool
- 2) create travel links & times in spreadsheet - requires Excel & familiarity w/ game
- 3) upload to a copy of the routes table  - requires mysql knowledge
...etc

The point being, many of the tasks are either non-technical, or small enough that someone with programming skills can do without the feeling of a major commitment.

Obviously at the end of the day the dev team still needs to review & load it up, with some additional work, but it can save many hours on some tasks

there are some tricks you can also do with composer & git to make small, isolated programming tasks, but that is a bit of a tangent so I'll explain somewhere else.

[GundamMerc]

I agree with this.

[Noone you know]

Perhaps I misjudged - I thought people would be fired up to have the chance to help out in small ways, but I don't see a lot of enthusiasm.

Don't expect the dev team to spend time setting something like this up if they can't even get more than one person saying they like the idea.

[Wimpie]

I like the idea, however I am not sure how much 'work' they can let other people do.

[Anaris]

There's actually very few things in BattleMaster that would take less effort to set up a way for volunteers to help with than it would to just do ourselves.

Drawing sea zones probably aren't in that list, because we would want to be the ones deciding how they are laid out, and once we do that, communicate it to the volunteers, and create the script for drawing them...we might as well have drawn them ourselves.

The one thing I can think of offhand that does fall into that category is the re-creation of the maps in the original Age of Wonders editor. This would make it easier to make changes to continents (though still by no means easy) if we wanted to do so. Additionally, as many already know, the original full-size geographic map of Dwilight (the one without the region borders and names) was lost, and the one in use today is from an earlier revision of the continent. If we had a copy of the map made in the Age of Wonders editor, we'd be able to replace the obviously-wrong existing geographic map with a correct version, which would make the dynamic map look so much nicer.

I don't think there's really anything we would need to do to enable that effort, besides provide a place to coordinate it. I would recommend using a shared Dropbox folder or something similar to keep the map file in, so that multiple people can work on it (provided they don't try to do it simultaneously). Based on my experience re-creating the South Island map, I would also recommend comparing frequently with the existing map, as things can get skewed pretty fast...

[Noone you know]

well there's a start!

Can a mod create the area described today & have someone from dev team make a ticket describing what you just said? it'll just get lost here.

later on when I have a few I'll describe the composer thing I was talking about

[Vita`]

Was looking for an appropriately-humorous item to schedule for the BattleMaster Twitter account and stumbled across this: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Battlemaster_Maps

[Anaris]

For now, since there's only the one thing, I'd prefer to add a stickied thread to this subforum.

Which I have now done, so please feel free to head on over and start coordinating the Great Map Re-Creation Project! :D