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.

Wesnoth game review

It's a bit difficult to review the game when u have no option for comparison.

On one other course we where suggested to try out Second Life build. We built our own citizen with character who started to live their life in virtual world. Even though Second Life does not look like real globe it has real interactivity, improved design, live communication. Besides the entertainment it is also a great way to make publicity like Estonian foreign affairs embassy did with its building to present our country.

Shouldn't the game make you feel more alive or even below the reality? One has said that the difference between a man and boy is the cost of their toys. Shouldn't I be then excited of the toys that are surrounding me? With Wesnoth it felt that the creators could have done better job with the design. Still there seemed to be a nice story behind curtains. It just needed to be explored. Maybe it was the lack of skills on make the play more attractive.

In computer games I prefere the ones that cause short adrenaline impulses like rally games and football or something with external remote that would make the real life feeling when playing e.g tennis.

A true review of the Wesnoth game will be made after we have built a new campaign on Wesnoth open-source strategy game. Most probably we will go wild on creating the character and scenarios in our wonderland.

Comparison between FSF and OSI

This summary is going to compare differences between FSF and OSI wrote in articles "Free software for freedom" and Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source".

According to "Free software" supporters "open source" software does not solve any problems but creates ones. In open source glorification article Eric Raymond explains that after the Netscape there where big arguments about confusing "free" software. Does free mean "no money charged?" or does it mean "free to be modified by everyone?" So did the other article explained the ambiguity problem. It also points out that "open source software" provides chance to "look at the source code" which is much weaker than the "free software." Term "free" has given certain advantage over open source. By leaving aside ethics and freedom it is much easier to "sell" the software to certain users, especially businesses.

Like mentioned in our first OSM lectures: "Free and open-source software is actually about development and distribution mechanisms."

To sum up these two movements have just his own rights on their corners. They are not an enemy to each other than proprietary software is.