Ryzom

Hi,
<Intro> (may be skipped)
After being away from this great game/project for a long time I recently came back. Seems there might be a chance where I could combine work with pleasure, at least somewhat.

I'm happy to find the community live and well even though the mind-set has changed from the early days. Not necessarily to the worse, just different.

I started playing Ryzom as a way to hopefully get my doughtier interested in computer science. She was then 16 (I think), and we played for a year or two (or three...). Anyway, she's now 22 and as many uni students today she's a fan of Mac (I myself am a hard core Linux guy). But we couldn't get the game to start... A lot of spread (and probably wrong) info about disabling various settings in client.cfg circulates the net, which among other motivated me to write this letter and why I think it's good if correct information is placed somewhere very visible.

I found this little tutorial on the ryzom game-forum leading back here ("Ryzom Core Client for Mac OS X") - actually a hint from in-game as I'm not very fond of forums. And hear and behold, installation worked like a charm - with some quirks. Wiki wasn not updated for a while, paths are all wrong (or there are just more than one way to get something installed on a Macbook and I don't have a clue how it fits together). Had never ever used a MacBook but after some head-scratching, pieces of the puzzle fell into place and the update worked. She's now a happy puppy...

</Intro>

I've always found it hard to enter big FOSS projects. It takes a lot of time and effort and one needs to dig deep to find the motivation. The biggest problems always seem to be information, organization & coordination.

So I tried the Linux installer tonight, but again the wiki wasn't updated (http://dev.ryzom.com/projects/ryzom/wiki/LinuxBinaries). The patcher worked excellent, just not the way it was described. Game started up once, but the second time it crashed. It's perfectly understandable that the wiki isn't open for edit by anybody. But information like this perhaps shouldn't be on a wiki if it's not going to be editable. (I'm using Oddmuse for my own purposes and there are a lot of different plug-ins enabling all sorts of extras, like comment-feedback and locking of pages. Not suggesting a change, just making a point of that it's possible and that various solutions exist ;))

Instead, what I'd like to say is:

1. A comment/feed-back field would be great on pages like the one referred to, something like what stack-overflow uses. Works great for specific topics and both comment and main topic actually improves over time. I.e. instead of information getting a burden to maintain, it maintains itself and gets better. Doesn't work for all use-cases, but worth considering.
2. Forums like this are not always a good way to handle this sorts of issues. Perhaps the question has already been asked 100-times but either asked differently of the search-tool is just flawed. Forums tend to get bogged down with too much information over time. Mailing lists tent to work better & various ways exist to combine the two. IRC just doesn't work. Far to many sit behind corporate firewalls and/or have been sitting there for years and are to tired to even consider getting started when they get home.
3. Issue in the bug-tracker. Hmm, seeing far to many of those - for too dependent on the quality of one writing the issue and ofen misused in organizations to measure effectiveness (easily tricked). Not going to recommend that approach unless use-case is crystal clear, which in my case it's not as I'm on a non released version of Ubuntu.
4. Make sure "Last updated date" is part of the page. It took me way too long to even think of that there's a history.
5. A field with bug-tracker would be good. Both real ones, copies and rejected ones. That would make it easier to know if the issue you have is really new, or has been known for a while and is being worked on or has been totally forgotten.
6. A hint as how to add the PPA a litte bit smoother:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kervala/ppa
   sudo apt-get update

Cheers //Aprak

P.S. Uploading the client.log here, but I'm dead certain it's not where the problem lies. Seems something goes wrong when it's checking for updates and crashes even before the client gets started. I'd like to have a look at the start script if someone points in the right direction (i.e. where to find it). D.S.
//A