agentgonzo
Grounded since '09
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2008
- Messages
- 1,649
- Reaction score
- 4
- Points
- 38
- Location
- Hampshire, UK
- Website
- orbiter.quorg.org
Reading about the OFMM and having sat and watched many VSAs come and go, I got thinking about how to achieve VSAs in general in terms of passing on the misison from one orbinaut to the next. As far as I can tell, the general way of 'handing over the batton' (so to speak) from one person to the next in a long-term mission/VSA is to email/post them a scenario file. This isn't the best way and it got me thinking what the best way would be.
An OMP server running all the time was what I first thought of, but for various reasons, that never seems to work out for VSAs. So we're back to scenario files and how to distribute them. Being a softie (software developer, not a wuss) this got me thinking about [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control"]VSC[/ame]s and using them for orbiter. Apologies to those who are not knowledgable about VCSs, but I'll skip talking about them to get to the point.
You could have a Version Control server set up* and store the scenario file in it. Probably having the (Current State).scn one is best as that updates when you exit orbiter and is loaded by default when you start orbiter. You could also (if you wanted) have all the addons/vehicles/config files stored in it so when you have a new person join your VSA you don't need to go through the problems of "it crashes when I start", "oh, you need these addons installed" as they can just pull/fetch/checkout the whole lot and it's ready to go.
When you are about to do a mission, you pull/checkout the latest revision which updates your scenario file to where the last member left off and then fire up orbiter and away you go. Using this nice addon it will automatically fast-forward realtime from the last save if you want to do realtime missions so you don't have to worry about editing the scenario file to update it to the next mission. After your mission, you just commit the changes (which should hopefully just be the scenario file) with the commit log being your mission number and summary and then it's instantly available to everyone else. With revision control, you don't need to worry about losing/messing up the files or anything like that as they stay safe and if you screw one up you've not lost everything.
You could probably have two scripts 'beforemission' and 'aftermission' to run that will do the svn/git stuff for you so that people not familiar with them can just double-click a batch file and it'll do it for them.
Just a thought that I decided to share in case it's of use to anyone
*There are plenty of ones on the internet that you can use - sourceforge and probably a lot more that allow SVN/Git access. Or if you are using Git, you don't even need a central server, you can just push updates to eachother, though that does involve your computers being on at the same time.
An OMP server running all the time was what I first thought of, but for various reasons, that never seems to work out for VSAs. So we're back to scenario files and how to distribute them. Being a softie (software developer, not a wuss) this got me thinking about [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control"]VSC[/ame]s and using them for orbiter. Apologies to those who are not knowledgable about VCSs, but I'll skip talking about them to get to the point.
You could have a Version Control server set up* and store the scenario file in it. Probably having the (Current State).scn one is best as that updates when you exit orbiter and is loaded by default when you start orbiter. You could also (if you wanted) have all the addons/vehicles/config files stored in it so when you have a new person join your VSA you don't need to go through the problems of "it crashes when I start", "oh, you need these addons installed" as they can just pull/fetch/checkout the whole lot and it's ready to go.
When you are about to do a mission, you pull/checkout the latest revision which updates your scenario file to where the last member left off and then fire up orbiter and away you go. Using this nice addon it will automatically fast-forward realtime from the last save if you want to do realtime missions so you don't have to worry about editing the scenario file to update it to the next mission. After your mission, you just commit the changes (which should hopefully just be the scenario file) with the commit log being your mission number and summary and then it's instantly available to everyone else. With revision control, you don't need to worry about losing/messing up the files or anything like that as they stay safe and if you screw one up you've not lost everything.
You could probably have two scripts 'beforemission' and 'aftermission' to run that will do the svn/git stuff for you so that people not familiar with them can just double-click a batch file and it'll do it for them.
Just a thought that I decided to share in case it's of use to anyone
*There are plenty of ones on the internet that you can use - sourceforge and probably a lot more that allow SVN/Git access. Or if you are using Git, you don't even need a central server, you can just push updates to eachother, though that does involve your computers being on at the same time.
