Ironically, from a development standpoint, we seemed to be making the most progress when their was the least organization. But more broadly, I don't think organization is bad, just that when there is too much of it, without a well-understood reason for it, can start to become bureaucracy, which at least for me is a great way to make any development job less enjoyable.
I agree with Flintlock that working on an project without other developers or users gets quite lonely (whether or not it's open source, IMO). It's probably not at all coincidental that the project I've worked on longest - my Civ3 editor - is the one where there are
users! Maybe some of the other things I've written had users too, but if so they didn't make themselves visible, so I only revisited them if something was intellectually interesting enough to draw me back, which was rarely the case by itself. All the more reason that I think getting something
playable and
interesting, drawing in users, is important. Even if it's not very good yet and a lot changes.
Flintlock said:
You guys should have mentioned this earlier and with specifics, like what PR you're waiting on exactly and why, so whoever's involved could focus on getting it merged. I hope you weren't waiting on me and my unit animation PR. From my perspective there wasn't much interest in that PR so it slipped out of my mind as I went on to work on other things both inside C7 and unrelated to it. In any case I just went ahead and merged it, finally.
We probably didn't make that visible enough. The main one I wanted to build on was the popup refactor one by pcen (who is not at CivFanatics), although I had some concerns that if I did more map work, I might cause conflicts for your animation one, and thus more work. But great to hear that it's merged! From my viewpoint it's one of the biggest leaps forward so far.
Bruce Reynolds was it for Civ 2, for Civ 3 it was Soren Johnson, too.
Thanks! I knew I was missing someone, but didn't know it was Soren again. Now it makes sense why he mentioned that he kind of invented borders spreading culture in a recent interview... that was in Civ3 and he was the designer for Civ3.
Districts in my eyes are really no good idea. A list about good features that really should be in a "new Civ 3" combined with the reasons for it, could be a very good idea. Most of the features from other games of the Civ series, that I would like for Civ 3 too, are listed in the Flintlock patch thread and a few additionally in pms to Flintlock. One thing that is definitely needed, is making the late game more attractive. A civil war feature as it was in Civ 1 would be nice, the danger of breaking away cities when becoming a very dominating power on the map proportional in number to the expansion of that civ (something that happened with the former Soviet Union). Maintenance costs connected to the single units and not only to the form of government would be nice, too.
But this kind of illustrates my point about design by committee. Everyone has different ideas. Everyone can list them in a thread. Mentioning any idea is likely to result in someone saying it should be done differently. But if anyone ever wants to actually build something, they're going to have to make some decisions about what to include.
So, one option is someone with the motivation to build something is going to make their cut of it. That is more or less what has happened so far with C7, with WildWeazel making a proposed cut and then trying to get things lifted off the ground, with some success. Another option is someone who might not be the developer proposed a holistic vision - not one idea here, two others there, but a game design - and maybe it gets enough excitement to cause something to happen.
For me, the infinite proposing of ideas and debating them is, at this point, exhausting. Not that I'm entirely uninterested conceptually, but as a community we've been saying for 15 year now, "it would be cool to be able to do X", "a successor should be able to do Y". If we're going to wind up with something more coherent than "whichever features the programmers decided sounded interesting at the time", I think there need to be more comprehensive visions, and fewer individual feature suggestions.
The good news is, there's some precedent for just that sort of coherent design in terms of scenarios
.
The modders of the
Civ 2 scenario league are creating a lot of wonderful ToTPP scenarios with features that we in Civ 3 can only dream about, but they are limited by not having working animated units and movement sounds for their units and by still only having 7 civs (+barbarians) in a game.
That does indeed appear to be quite active. The next version of Civ on my to-try list after my current game of VI - II/Test of Time.
Yes: PASSION! - Which comes from enthusiasm with and from deciding what that PROJECT is! -
For me it's actually largely driven by having a goal I am excited about. Which might sounds the same, but with a project of this size, smaller sub-goals are actually more important for maintaining passion from a practical standpoint. The
overall goal - make a cool game, defined however it is - might provide enough passion to start things, but it is such a large task that the passion will wear off before it's anywhere near done. Which is probably the exact stage of the project we are in right now - we made a lot of progress when there was excitement in November, things slowed down in December, that gave time to realize how much was left, and it's been hard to get the engine started back up.
Even if we
do have a brilliant, cohesive, game-level design emerge, I think it will be important to have those smaller milestones and goals. The "Babylon" milestone, despite its flaws, was serving as that goal for me in the part of December when we were still developing at a decent pace.
Of course I'm also that developer who will go to the quarterly meeting about "this is what our quarterly deliverable plans are, and why we think they're the right ones", and if it makes sense, it makes me more excited to work on them. As often as not, it doesn't in the corporate world, but every so often it does, and when it does I'm more motivated. The overall project might sound impossibly large, but delivering Milestone X is doable, will deliver value for the user, and is worth doing!
... 
- VAI - Very Artificial Intelligence (aka. my oft used, "Artificial Idiot.")
