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Revision as of 04:38, 8 May 2010 by Bruno (talk | contribs) (AAR)

What is Community Gaming?

Open game sessions intended primarily for members of the Fedora community. This includes regular users as well as official contributors.

What is the point?

The point is to give Fedora community members a way to have fun and socialize with each other. A secondary goal is to have this strengthen the community.

Status

Pilot. Two sessions have been run. I run at least 3 more.

How to

Participate in a session

Pretty much just show up at the announced time. Though if you know you are likely to participate, it can help with planning to add yourself to the list of people interested as how the games are set up may need to be tweaked based on the number of participants.

This is social gaming, so behave well. Some good natured ribbing is OK, but be extra polite when playing with people you haven't played with before.

Please be on time, as for some games, accommodating late arrivals may not be practical.

Volunteer to organize a session

Choose game

Pick a game in Fedora (not add-on repositories, and preferably not using third party data downloads) that you think will be fun to play socially. Preferably people with any supported version of Fedora should be able to play together. If the game isn't compatible between releases, be sure to note which release will be used for the session. We want significantly different games played over time so that more people (with different tastes and available hardware) will participate.

Pick date and time

Currently we are thinking Friday nights through Sunday afternoons are good times for games. Getting a mix of start times for the various sessions so that more people will get a chance to participate is a good thing.

Pick communication channels

This is social gaming, so the participants need to be able to communicate. This could be using in game communication if it is supported, IRC (for now we'll use #fedora-games) or Fedora Talk. The communication channel should be part of the announcement. Having people not playing be able to observe or listen is a good thing. Be sure let people know where to initially meet.

Let people know

You should fill out a game session entry below on this page. For now send a message to the users mailing lists with details and a link back to this page for people that want to announce their intention to participate.

Be sure to tell them where to meet up (IRC, lobby, Fedora Talk, etc...). Also letting them know what packages to install and/or any other special set up ahead of time will allow people to be ready to go at the start time.

Servers

For now we don't have Fedora servers to use. Some games provide public lobbies and using those will normally be fine. In other cases it might be necessary to get a co-sponsor for a session that has a static IP address so that it can be pre-announced for participants.

Upcoming game sessions

  • Session 3
    • Sponsor: Bruno
    • Game: ???
    • Time and Date UTC: ??? (Some time in May at a different time than sessions 1 and 2 used. Probably Saturday afternoon in NA and Saturday evening in EU.)
    • Time and Date EDT: ???
    • Estimated session length: ???
    • Communication channel: ???
    • Other notes:
    • Likely participants (sign up below):
      • Bruno
  • Session 4
    • Sponsor: Bruno
    • Game: ???
    • Time and Date UTC: ??? (Some time in May or early June at a different time than sessions 1 and 2 used.)
    • Time and Date EDT: ???
    • Estimated session length: ???
    • Communication channel: ???
    • Other notes:
    • Likely participants (sign up below):
      • Bruno
  • Session 5
    • Sponsor: Bruno
    • Game: bzflag (again)
    • Time and Date UTC: ??? Probably in June
    • Time and Date EDT: ???
    • Estimated session length: I'll hang around at least two hours, but will play significantly longer if people are interested.
    • Communication channel: Fedora Talk (optional voice chat usable by cla-done people), #fedora-games for pre-game issues and emergency fall back and bzflag's in-game chat. The game is pretty fast paced for social text based chatting while playing, but in the first go around no one else tried Fedora Talk. The game server will be games1.wolff.to using the standard port set up as a private server. I'll try to get conference room 0 (x2010), but if that's busy I'll get another one and announce the extension in #fedora-games. If something bad happens, #fedora-games will be a fall back, but once things get going I won't be monitoring it. More details as I learn more.
    • Other notes:
      • bzflag allows players to join at any time.
      • 'yum install bzflag' to get the game.
      • I had to use 'modprobe analog' to get my game pad driver loaded (though you can use a mouse effectively to play).
      • I am not any good at this game and don't expect good tactical advice from me.
      • Last time we played on HiX. That's a fun map, but I'll look at some others.
    • Likely participants (sign up below):
      • Bruno

Historical Session notes

  • Session 1
    • Sponsor: Bruno
    • Game: bzflag (It's 3d, but a low end card seems to work OK.)
    • Time and Date UTC: 0100 Saturday May 1, 2010
    • Time and Date EDT: 9pm Friday April 30, 2010
    • Estimated session length: I'll hang around at least two hours, but will play significantly longer if people are interested.
    • Communication channel: Fedora Talk (optional voice chat usable by cla-done people), #fedora-games for pre-game issues and emergency fall back and bzflag's in-game chat. The game seems pretty fast paced for social text based chatting while playing, so I think most socializing will be done with Fedora Talk. The game server will be games1.wolff.to using the standard port set up as a private server. I'll try to get conference room 0 (x2010), but if that's busy I'll get another one and announce the game in #fedora-games. If something bad happens, #fedora-games will be a fall back, but once things get going I won't be monitoring it. More details as I learn more.
    • Other notes:
      • bzflag allows players to join at any time.
      • 'yum install bzflag' to get the game.
      • I had to use 'modprobe analog' to get my game pad driver loaded (though you can use a mouse effectively to play).
      • I am not any good at this game and don't expect good tactical advice from me.
    • Likely participants (sign up below):
      • Bruno
      • Kevin
    • After Action Report
      • There were four of us that showed up, but Kevin had video problems and couldn't really play.
      • "BulletCatcher" knew what he was doing and helped me set good settings for the server (bzfs -mp 999 -mts 10 -tk -world /home/bruno/hix.bzw -a 50 38 -j -ms 3 +r) and taught the other two of us some basics about the game.
      • bzflag appears to be a good social game, and if this service continues, it should probably be a regular game.
      • I was the only one able to use Fedora Talk, so we did some chatting using the in game methods as we were being extra social. This doesn't work when you are really playing.
      • I filed a bug with the Fedora bzflag component to include the two maps that come with the game source in the rpm.
      • A Two hour session seemed to be good for this game, though with a larger pool of players a longer session could make sense.
  • Session 2
    • Sponsor: Bruno
    • Game: Battle for Wesnoth 1.8 or 1.8.1 (teams vs AI or teams vs teams depending on number of particpants, ending when first human team member is defeated. A test or scratch build will be needed for F12 or F11 users.)
    • Time and Date UTC: 0100 Saturday May 8, 2010
    • Time and Date EDT: 9pm Friday May 7, 2010
    • Estimated session length: 3-5 hours depending somewhat on the number of players. (We'll use a time limit on player's moves to keep things moving.)
    • Communication channel: In game chat, probably we'll meet in the official Wesnoth lobby in the "fedora" room. I'll also watch the #fedora-games channel before we get started in case people are having trouble getting Wesnoth installed and working.
    • Other notes:
      • Wesnoth is turned based and there can be a significant wait between turns. This allows for kibitzing or social chatting, but will not be to everyone's taste.
      • It will probably not be possible to accommodate late arrivals as players. You should be able to observe and chat. If someone leaves early you might be able to take over for them.
      • We will meet in the "fedora" room. To do that you need to check the "Use new lobby interface" in preferences - multiplayer. "/join fedora" can then be used so that chatting occurs in that room.
      • Getting a 1.8 or 1.8.1 version
        • For rawhide, 1.8.1 is already built and you should be able to update to get it if you don't already have it.
        • For F13, 1.8 is already available in stable and 1.8.1 is available from updates-testing. However you can also get a scratch build.
        • For F12, you will need to get scratch build.
        • For F11 you will need to get a scratch build.
        • You can also use the F13 games spin from nightly composes.
      • For any of the scratch builds you should go into the arch specific part of the scratch build and download the wesnoth and wesnoth-data rpms for your architecture. Then as root you can run yum install with a list of the rpm files. Note that old save games from before 1.8 most likely won't work with the 1.8 version of Wesnoth. Note that wesnoth-data is about 260 MB and will take a while to download. You can use yum downgrade to go back to the latest official version of Wesnoth for the Fedora release you are running.
    • Likely participants (sign up below):
      • Bruno
    • After Action Report
      • Four people played and 2 people were part time observers. 2 of us started a game and then we switched to a 2 vs 2 game, calling the initial start a warm up. 3 of us that had played before were rusty and made mistakes. The newbie of the game was the hero.
      • We had problems getting start because of a bug in boost on x86_64 which was entered into bugzilla.
      • The new lobby interface for Wesnoth was still buggy and we mostly used #fedora-games before starting to play the game. In game chat worked well. We spent about 3 hours total getting ready and playing, including pregame diagnosis of the boost problem and the warm game played for a few turns. The actual team game was about 2 hours and was decided in a bit over an hour. We didn't have enough time to start a new one, so we played on for a while even though it was clear which team would win.
      • The 3-5 hour estimate was for a game with more players against the AI on a larger board. The smaller map we used worked pretty well. The real action started sooner and the game went pretty quick.