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Post by elmer on May 18, 2022 15:04:45 GMT
When I started 3 months ago, I took the habit to use this wiki as a helper for my devs. It's already a lot of information gathered here. Maybe we could focus on this one and update it? Adding an example section? www.archaicpixels.com/Main_PageYes, Archaic Pixels is one of those sites that new developers all find and come to rely on. There were folks that wanted to updated that site a few years ago, the last time that the topic of improved documentation came up. The problem is ... the site's owner doesn't hang out anywhere that folks can find, and doesn't respond to emails. Even if they did, and gave some current-developers write access to make new edits to the wiki/site, there's still a question of whether it makes sense to use someone's private domain/wiki that could disappear at any time, especially when they don't *seem* to be active in any of the communities that people are familiar with. FWIW, Archaic Pixels did disappear for a while a couple of years ago, so it's not guaranteed to exist forever. Honestly, IMHO, if we're going to have a centralized "organization" on github that hosts the "latest-and-greatest" definitive version of the toolset, then we should just use github's built-in wiki capability and document the toolset in the same place where people go to download it. If someone wants to create a PCE development/HuC wiki on my github HuC project, I can give them write-access to start creating it. Whenever this new organization is created, I'll transfer ownership of my github repo to the organization so that it can keep its place as the most-in-common upstream fork that is being actively developed.
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lunoka
Gun-headed
Diving into retrodev
Posts: 55
Homebrew skills: art, music
Fave PCE Shooter: Burning angels
Fave PCE Platformer: Ninja Spirit
Fave PCE Game Overall: Valis 3
Fave PCE RPG: Neutopia
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Post by lunoka on May 18, 2022 15:42:26 GMT
Honestly, IMHO, if we're going to have a centralized "organization" on github that hosts the "latest-and-greatest" definitive version of the toolset, then we should just use github's built-in wiki capability and document the toolset in the same place where people go to download it. It sounds pretty good to me to go this way if archaïcpixels is lost in the 4th dimension forever. It would perfectly make sense to store the wiki aside the github project at the same place. Plus I assume online text editors are available to work on the wiki part.
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Post by gredler on May 18, 2022 16:04:15 GMT
Git would be great but again it's putting the ownership in one person's hands. I don't want to put this on Paul, but I do think we can lean on the community to support and moderate a wiki/web hosted page for developers.
I don't think everyone has game dev ambitions and skillsets but do want to support and contribute somehow and I think moderating and approving accounts etc is a great way to involve them while also creating a location for information that is decentralized.
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Post by elmer on May 18, 2022 16:41:26 GMT
To give some hope about the progress of turboxray 's deflemask based sound engine for huc, here is a recording of me testing it on the express using the usb2ted and a test rom I made for checking out music and sfx, As one of the few people with a USB-equipped TED2, you may be interested in one of the tools that I uploaded in the new ASM examples. There's now a Super System Card hack that lets you use usb2ted to upload a CD overlay for testing on real-hardware. You do still need a bootable-cd in the PCE's drive, but it should make it easier to test on real-hardware without burning so many CD-Rs.
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Post by elmer on May 18, 2022 16:49:46 GMT
Git would be great but again it's putting the ownership in one person's hands. I don't want to put this on Paul, but I do think we can lean on the community to support and moderate a wiki/web hosted page for developers. I don't think everyone has game dev ambitions and skillsets but do want to support and contribute somehow and I think moderating and approving accounts etc is a great way to involve them while also creating a location for information that is decentralized. Errrmmm ... have you missed the discussion of there being a github "organization" to own the base-repo in order to provide a central location for downloads, precisely to get passed the perceived problem of "putting the ownership in one person's hands".
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Post by DarkKobold on May 18, 2022 17:00:09 GMT
Git would be great but again it's putting the ownership in one person's hands. I don't want to put this on Paul, but I do think we can lean on the community to support and moderate a wiki/web hosted page for developers. I don't think everyone has game dev ambitions and skillsets but do want to support and contribute somehow and I think moderating and approving accounts etc is a great way to involve them while also creating a location for information that is decentralized. Errrmmm ... have you missed the discussion of there being a github "organization" to own the base-repo in order to provide a central location for downloads, precisely to get passed the perceived problem of "putting the ownership in one person's hands". What's preventing this new organization from being created now? Are there technological hurdles that are in the way? I found this on github. It says any organization owner can add another organization owner. What it doesn't seem to say is can an owner remove another owner? docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-peoples-access-to-your-organization-with-roles/maintaining-ownership-continuity-for-your-organization
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Post by dshadoff on May 18, 2022 17:09:35 GMT
Right, a Git Hub Organization is something separate - it isn't under the control of an individual, unless there is only ever one designated owner - which is exactly the problem we are trying to solve.
Creating a wiki on some other platform - regardless of the number of contributors or reviewers - is still subject to the hosting platform (and the person who holds the agreement with the hosting platform); this is the same weakness that Archaic Pixels has/had. GitHub isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future, and if it does, there will be a few people in place to deal with it.
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Post by DarkKobold on May 18, 2022 17:18:47 GMT
Right, a Git Hub Organization is something separate - it isn't under the control of an individual, unless there is only ever one designated owner - which is exactly the problem we are trying to solve. Creating a wiki on some other platform - regardless of the number of contributors or reviewers - is still subject to the hosting platform (and the person who holds the agreement with the hosting platform); this is the same weakness that Archaic Pixels has/had. GitHub isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future, and if it does, there will be a few people in place to deal with it. This is the point, put the wiki on the same organizational github, or even part of the HuC repo. Then, even if github goes down, most people will have pulled the most recent version. Rather than starting it on elmer's github, why don't we just start the organizational github now? What's stopping us?
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Post by dshadoff on May 18, 2022 17:22:27 GMT
Just trying to get the starting points lined up, but that's the goal.
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Post by elmer on May 18, 2022 18:25:34 GMT
What's preventing this new organization from being created now? Are there technological hurdles that are in the way? While it's sweet that you have such faith in the power of a faceless organization to somehow bring all PCE development work together ... the reality is that even with the tiny group of individuals that we've got who are actively interested in improving the toolchain, we're all still individuals with our own interests and motivations, and so we need to have some agreement about how this new organization will work in practice. Or to put it another way ... it is absolutely pointless to create an organization to be this unified location that folks-like-you can use, if we all just immediately fracture off and work in separate incompatible forks anyway.
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Post by gredler on May 18, 2022 18:30:23 GMT
Git would be great but again it's putting the ownership in one person's hands. I don't want to put this on Paul, but I do think we can lean on the community to support and moderate a wiki/web hosted page for developers. I don't think everyone has game dev ambitions and skillsets but do want to support and contribute somehow and I think moderating and approving accounts etc is a great way to involve them while also creating a location for information that is decentralized. Errrmmm ... have you missed the discussion of there being a github "organization" to own the base-repo in order to provide a central location for downloads, precisely to get passed the perceived problem of "putting the ownership in one person's hands". Yeah I must have missed that, that would be awesome. So my misunderstanding is that we don't have a central huc git with branches per tool engineer, and this would be part of that? Huc root general git - turboxray branch - Elmer branch - uli - 3.21 branch Then use pull requests moderated by community members to update text documentation and the actual "latest community approved" versions to the root from the individual's branches? I've not created wikis on git but would love to learn and contribute and have some questions if anyone knows. - Can we stylize it to have a cool pce style? - Can wiki pages have embedded images and videos? - Does it have open editability options or do potential editors need to be approved by an admin? - Is the formatting syntaxes html, bb code, or rtf that can be copypasta from a doc? I started outlining a bunch of tutorials for artists but have been hesitant to format it because I am not sure how the end format will be
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Post by dshadoff on May 18, 2022 18:51:05 GMT
You can study the MiSTer organization for example... and even though I'm a member, I'm not 100% knowledgeable on all of the details of how it *can* work... just how it's being used in principle over there. github.com/MiSTer-develThe organization "owns" all of the repositories, and anybody can fork, modify, and submit a pull request request back, which would be reviewed/accepted by the repository owner and/or organization owner. Repo owners must be members of the organization, but need not own the organization. For example, I own the ADCTest_MiSTer repository, but I'm only a member of the organization. The main wiki that they use is on the Main_MiSTer repository : github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wikiit is modifiable by... probably anybody. I have seen other wikis which aren't modifiable, so I'm pretty sure that there are varying levels of access which can be set up. I'm not clear on the various review patterns available, but at the moment our problem doesn't seem to be "too many people making updates and violating editorial style"... so maybe that's not the most important thing right now. For HuC, the plan was to merge and then move the repo to the org. It would still likely be a 'fork' of Uli's, but other people would create their own forks while they work on functionality, then send it back up to the organization for integration. Is there anything stopping somebody from developing and then *NOT* sending their work back up ? Nothing... but at least everybody who is currently doing anything inside of HuC itself agrees in principle with this, and integration of changes should be smooth. But also, this was going to be a nice of consolidating knowledge, so that you don't need to go to my GitHub for some things, to elmer's for other things, to turboxray's for other things, etc. Not just because of confusion when there are multiple "huc" repos, but *simply understanding what knowledge and tools actually exist*.
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Post by DarkKobold on May 18, 2022 19:05:44 GMT
What's preventing this new organization from being created now? Are there technological hurdles that are in the way? While it's sweet that you have such faith in the power of a faceless organization to somehow bring all PCE development work together ... the reality is that even with the tiny group of individuals that we've got who are actively interested in improving the toolchain, we're all still individuals with our own interests and motivations, and so we need to have some agreement about how this new organization will work in practice. Or to put it another way ... it is absolutely pointless to create an organization to be this unified location that folks-like-you can use, if we all just immediately fracture off and work in separate incompatible forks anyway. This level of condescension is completely rude and uncalled for. The goal is to unify so "folks like me" have a singular version to work from, rather than having people fighting over which repo to use. Nothing stops people from creating their own fork, but they create it understanding it won't be used by "folks like me" until it gets merged (or branched) in the main repo. I want anyone, even those not involved in dev, on this forum to have a singular github to point to, and say THIS IS IT. Use this repo for dev, when you're starting out. Its not a faceless organization, its us coming together to say we have a central repository. People can fork for their ego projects, whatever. BUT, if they want those changes to actually be used, they have to put them into the central repository.
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Post by elmer on May 18, 2022 19:13:32 GMT
So my misunderstanding is that we don't have a central huc git with branches per tool engineer, and this would be part of that? Huc root general git - turboxray branch - Elmer branch - uli - 3.21 branch Kinda, I guess ... or not, depending upon how I understand what you've written. The simplest form would be to transfer ownership of my current repo to some new organization, let's call it "tgdk". So, if you look at the current tree of forks in github, that would make my name disappear, and it would be "tgdk" that created the fork off of ArtemioUrbina/huc Then I go and create a new fork off "tgdk" to continue my work, and "turboxray" deletes his current fork, and instead also creates a new fork off "tgdk". "uli" remains as the root ... but he's not active. HuC users just go to the root "tgdk" project to get their updates, and that's where the wiki lives, and where people edit it (it can either be set up as public, or set up to need an account). (BTW, while it's not automatic, you can copy wikis from one fork to another.) There can't really be a HuC v3.21 within the repo, because it is just older versions of the same toolchain, and there would be conflicts. Now once you see that structure, you'll realize that it's not very different from what we already have, and that if dowstream-developers don't actually send pull-requests back upstream to "tgdk", we're just going to have exactly the same situation that we've got now, where dshadoff has a fork with changes in it that are out-of-date binaries that wouldn't get accepted in "tgdk" anyway, and where turboxray has a bunch of what he has said are "not-public" changes that aren't ready to go into "tgdk", but yet they still being used by some folks here for their own HuC projects.
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Post by DarkKobold on May 18, 2022 19:27:04 GMT
For HuC, the plan was to merge and then move the repo to the org. It would still likely be a 'fork' of Uli's, but other people would create their own forks while they work on functionality, then send it back up to the organization for integration. Is there anything stopping somebody from developing and then *NOT* sending their work back up ? Nothing... but at least everybody who is currently doing anything inside of HuC itself agrees in principle with this, and integration of changes should be smooth. But also, this was going to be a nice of consolidating knowledge, so that you don't need to go to my GitHub for some things, to elmer's for other things, to turboxray's for other things, etc. Not just because of confusion when there are multiple "huc" repos, but *simply understanding what knowledge and tools actually exist*. This is my exact point. We have people joining daily, and it feels like there's a competition as to who's repo to use. That isn't fair to new people. Also, I'm not comfortable idea of starting anything public, like a wiki, on anyone's private github. Gredler is chomping at the bit to start contributing to a "public" wiki, but one doesn't exist for him to work on.
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