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Unread 24 Sep 2017, 08:09   #20
Alezzar
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Re: Redesigning the Overview

Quote:
Originally Posted by Appocomaster View Post
There seem to be two/three completely separate points in this thread.

On the first one:
The widgets are a nice idea, but will involve quite a lot of rework on existing pages - also, things like gal status / ally defence can get pretty huge, so we'd have to look at some sort of summary. Please bare in mind that, whilst this code has been refactored, the framework was put in place in ~2004 by one developer and one hacker.

On the "just spend one day and bootstrap everything to solve the issue" - please see above. There are 80 pages additional common libraries and I suspect it would take quite some time to boostrap them all.

On the "make an app" - I've seen certainly 6 developers over the last ~10 years say they had time, come in to "help make the game better", and ultimately contribute about 0 lines of code which is still in use. There was actually also a team who went to go and make an app for us 2 years ago or so, and then basically faded and gave up.

Everyone who posts assumes this is actually built with some sort of modern framework, rather than 80k of "legacy code" which has gradually been refactored a bit over 10 years part time. It's a little frustrating.
Crowdsourcing to make this into an app you'd almost have to build the game from scratch; there's only internal perl libraries to call and I doubt anyone would want to use perl to make apps. Even assuming for no graphics, it's a few months and you'd want to do it iteratively as much as you can to get value and grow the app, but you're still talking a couple of developers at a cost of ... well, conservatively, I can't see you paying external professionals less than £5-10k for it, if you take into consideration testing and matching Planetarion code. Happy to be challenged on that.
Thanks for sharing some of this, Appoco. There are a lot of people out there thinking you guys just don't try, so it is actually good to get some insight.

Creating a mobile app would indeed mean creating the game from scratch, but I do think this is for the best. Creating an app based on old Perl libraries... Well, I don't think it would last.

I'm not very familiar with the process of creating a mobile app, but the first step would be to find someone serious (a company perhaps) and get them to look at the game and tell you an eventual price. I think your evaluation is quite on point and it's not that huge sum for a game that has been around for almost two decades. I mean, how many people have fond memories of this game? We still have 500+ player base and I'm sure at least half of them will be happy to donate to an eventual crowdfunding project.

I for one can help with organizing the crowdfunding project and whatever else I can. I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of other guys willing to help with everything. After all, for many of us, Planetarion has been a safe place from RL and the issue around it, it's only fitting to give some back and try to keep it going. Sadly, without a mobile app, the game eventually will die.
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