OSM project teamwork

Read teams OSM project was a great challenge for all of us.

Just few of our team members had played strategy games before so this made the whole picture little bit frightening. Lot of out time went to just play different campaigns of the game to analyze their concept and code.

As the team was quite large we had issues on finding the right time for everybody to make the development. Some part of the project we had members online from 4 countries.

Anyway my main task was to write documentation of the project which was not updated for a long time since most of the development took place the late stage of the project. Further I helped to develop the storyline and made edits in the design files. Also tested the game and gave feedback to team about any drawbacks.

Just a suggestion for next courses the supervisor could suggest few other alternative open source games for teams to develop further and the whole project length should be longer in order to get teams more excited and get more elaborated work.

Blue team Wesnoth campaign review

With a Syncro SVN client I downloaded the source of the campaign and added under the ...\data\campaigns respiratory.

While loading the campaign it gave error on maps and game closed. Later end the problem seemed to be that I tried it on The Battle of Wesnoth 1.6.5 of Mac but they had made it for the non stable version 1.7.15.

After installing the latest development version I could load the Blue teams "Icky ja Scrappy biznis" campaign.

In the first scenario Icky and Scrappy had to move to the North to kill Krusty(or actually one of his clones) and his solders. I did not find the real path to the end of the scenario and where killed in the end plenty of times and that where my gave experience ended.

What I noticed that even though in the Blue team story description they have mentioned to use strip mines, rivers and islands with oil-rigs on it they didn't had it.

Overall the Blue team has come up with a nice and gripping story which has been written in detailed. The overall idea has very good point and the reward make you eager to victory.

This whole course made kind of a flashback to childhood when playing games and having heroes against the bad guys. I wish I where just more into strategy games.

The case of Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow has build his business model on online media. He has found his niche among the online users which is a market for 1,7 billion users. That way his novels and short stories can be read by more readers. Free online version of the book makes it easy to review it. If a book is good lot of fuzz will be made around it and if it attracts the reader on could buy the paper version for more convenient reading. Seeing the list of his gained awards makes no hesitations that he has done great job on writing and distributing his work.

Doctorow has explained in the summery of Litter brother that he give away free ebooks because he prefers to have more audience in the tent than to know that everyone bought a ticket for it. Doctorow added: "By making my books available free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people to love them."

This kind of promotion as shown that screens are not good for paper books. They make good enticement for the book.

Doctorow earns lot of credit from his readers wanting to make donations so he has set ways to allow this.

He has made most of his work available online for free usage as long as it's not being used for commercial purposes. Cory Doctorow's most novels have been released under Creative Commons license which allows free sharing and derivative works.