Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
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Dorn
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Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Dorn »

So the other day I couldn't level up because of a linking system between website and game. Fortunately, zelk was on hand in tech-chat as she so often is and heegz and I were able to resolve it.

If zelk had left ALFA the solution may have been quite tedious.

It got me wondering about some things. As a CEO of a modest organisation, I have disaster recovery plans and succession plans, and redundancy built into my organisation. These things work because I pay people to make them so, and if they don't, I can fire them and get other people who will (to be extraordinarily blunt and simplistic).

We don't and can't and perhaps shouldn't want to if we consider ourselves a small community rather than a business.

But it got me thinking about what happens if Zelk and Foam were to not be here for whatever reason.

Do we have systems that are nice to have, but that could 'break' and be problematic, but are not critical to logging into NWN2 and having a DM and group of players have some fun?

Are we in a position for others without a decade of coding or web infrastructure experience to take up the operation of ALFA?

Should we think about tweaking/removing some things to make ALFA idiot-proof?
playing Nathaniel Ward - Paladin of the Morninglord and devout of Torm (cookie cutter and proud of it)
HEEGZ
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by HEEGZ »

Possibly. I have held the view for at least a year and a half, that without zelknolf/foam/basilica around the project would die pretty quickly for technical reasons. Also, I'm not sure that they would be willing to put in the work to future proof the project at this point in time.

I had typed about three more paragraphs of explanations and speculations and possibilities but have deleted them. Our techie people can speak for themselves if they wish. My personal view is to enjoy ALFA as it is now until it is abandoned by those who keep it running.

Thanks guys/gals. 8) 8)
Zelknolf
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Zelknolf »

Probably wise to keep in mind that my background isn't computers. It's educational psychology, rhetoric, literature and linguistics. When I started doing tech work for ALFA, I was near the least qualified, if not actually the least qualified, member of the community to do so. I wasn't given training or education; I got some of my questions answered, usually in the form of short answers that left me with a lot of Googling for clarification-- the rest was just trial and error.

So,
Are we in a position for others without a decade of coding or web infrastructure experience to take up the operation of ALFA?
I have two answers to this.
To "Can others, who have mastered fields outside of computer science, do this?" Yes, absolutely.
To "Can someone in ALFA do this?" I'd have to say "It doesn't look like anyone else has the necessary curiosity and drive, and there's nothing I can do to change that."

We could be, mind you; I think that I serve as an example of why. There's nothing magical about computers-- they're orders of magnitude simpler than people (and don't go turning that into nerd jokes; that's objectively true. Human brains are the most-complex things in the known universe by a wide margin), and countless people consider themselves experts in working with other people.

Unfortunately, the community at large is both intimidated by technology and unwilling or unable to expend effort to hold onto the people who aren't, (outside of one or two forum posts a year saying some brief pleasant thing). Barring some dramatic change to the culture and priorities of ALFA, we're likely to remain precarious for the foreseeable future. But then we're also down to 30 players; this might not matter much longer.


On the topic of removing features, I should probably say that the sorts of visible user-facing features that you're likely thinking about aren't going to be the ones that cripple ALFA if the core people are gone for whatever reason. Dumb things like trouble leveling up will happen regardless of what we do to the ruleset, and NWN2 shipped with its own set of "special" issues on that topic. The likely doomsday scenario is just the database crashing one of its tables and then new connections from the servers failing. Each one would be disabled and would start refusing all logins at its next restart. We have done enormous amounts of work to make that easier to fix and less common to break, because nobody likes that scenario and it would be nice to have a vacation someday, but somebody needs to be around to fix that, and we can't completely remove that possibility without discarding persistence.
Analogkid
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Analogkid »

why not see about getting one or two individuals who would be willing to learn the basics of what's needed to keep things going in case of absolute emergencies, or perhaps the simplest things and go on from there
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Zelknolf
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Zelknolf »

I probably should've said directly instead of just implying. I comment that people are scared of technology and give up because acquiring backups is a constant goal, with there typically being someone in the process of sniffing around and trying to get started on the topic, but the overwhelming majority of people just quit.
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Analogkid »

So when can we start the training? :p
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Zelknolf
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Zelknolf »

If you're looking to be a backup to Foam/Basilica/Me, you should start with documentation about the toolset and verify that you can build and deploy areas; then read up on NWScript and make sure you can make functional changes to the game behavior (note the documentation about events from the toolset); then you'll want to study up on SQL to make sure you can query and edit databases (probably wise to understand a bare minimum about SSH here, so at least get that there is a security layer to deal with when doing that); you should read up on C# and CLRScript once you're through all of that, but that's strictly-speaking optional (our CLRScript projects need much less maintenance, on account that C# is a real programming language and we're not doing a bunch of stupid developer tricks to make NWScript behave like anything real).

We won't have the resources to walk anyone who is interested through the whole of any of those topics. This is just the reality of what means we have to work in-- we can get answers to specific questions, the sort that arise when a person is doing the self study and hitting snags in trying to apply it, but even that can be inconsistent-- and waiting for time to be available for training is going to mean mastering the first step some decades after ALFA has closed its doors forever.
shad0wfax
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by shad0wfax »

As it stands right now we have enough to keep ALFA running and keep servers being updated with new content without Basilica, Foam, and Zelknolf but not necessarily with great scripting.

What we would be sorely lacking is ACR updates and ACR support and more difficult technical issues regarding the vault and our Azure infrastructure.

In other words we could probably "coast" on ALFA and continue to update areas, quests, monsters, and items but would probably not have deeper innovative capabilities.

Losing any one of the three mentioned would be problematic. Losing access to all three mentioned would be devastating.
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dergon darkhelm
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by dergon darkhelm »

I was near the least qualified, if not actually the least qualified, member of the community to do so
The 50 year old guy still mapping his dungeons on hex paper wishes to clearly claim the title of "least qualified". :)
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Zelknolf
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Re: Future/idiot proofing ALFA

Post by Zelknolf »

dergon darkhelm wrote:The 50 year old guy still mapping his dungeons on hex paper wishes to clearly claim the title of "least qualified". :)
Heh, when I started in ALFA I was using the graph paper from my math class. Folk learn, and our community largely runs because of that. We just also hope that more people steel themselves for the reality of learning outside of a classroom.
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