Version Control and Merging Content

[Pollution]

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[daplunk]

While I'm not positioned to provide the answers you seek I would suggest that Beta access is not going to be the solution you need. That's a test environment and test environments change. If you are making content that you intend to sell then I would be waiting for the official launch to ensure your content is created under release conditions and not test conditions.

LW have already stated they are launching with specific content with plans to increase the amount of content over time. Player submissions (from my current understanding) will not be included in the first few waves of the content market but once available will be put through a gating process of some kind to ensure the quality remains high.

The only reason I saw this is because there is no rush. You will have opportunity to play with the new features prior to the content market starting to take external submissions.

Disclaimer: None of this information is official and I could be incredibly wrong ;)

[wurzel]

My understanding is that it's not about player created stuff ("for a 3PP"). In the case of commercial content I guess that time is important.
Let's say some company introduces ogre player character rules. Another company has the same idea, with a different realisation. But since the second company is just second a lot of intereted players might alread have bought the first company's ogres.
Beta may be a test environment and not the real thing, but I think it at least gives an indication which way the development is going.
Version control in itself might be important, but I think it's all about content management here. The ability to merge different content streams and in this process select which flavor of ogre should be usd is something extremely important. I'm sure the Lone Wolves come up with a solution but so far I haven't read about it.

[Gord]

Daplunk is corret. You definitely don't want beta access for this. Too many things can change that could mess you up. I'm still dealing with fixing things from a year ago. These are not critical to the realm of course but are usually formatting related. Not important unless you are trying to do something commercial but they do take time to correct.

[rob]

You'll be able to see how all this works for yourself in a couple weeks (ish). A few short notes...

I'll be writing up a bunch of conventions and best practices for sharing/publishing content. My target was to have this ready by the big December release, but it's going to be delayed until late in the month (see my P.S. below). You WILL want to review this list, and you WILL want to make some tweaks before anything is deemed "done". I'm guessing that there will be a few things that will be more than just tweaks, such as converting everything to the proper game system structure.

The reason for this list will be to ensure that content from different users all integrates smoothly with each other. I don't think there's anything in the list that will be surprising to anyone. The vast majority of stuff is things we've outlined in assorted places in the past. But having stuff work smoothly for users far outstrips having something out quickly in terms of importance - in my opinion, at least.

Game system conversion has been getting lots of testing by us internally. It's going to be in the hands of the Beta team in an interim release we're putting out in the next couple days. If they find anything we've missed, we'll get it fixed. So it's going to be in place for the big December release.

I don't know if what you're trying to do with the Bestiary is an appropriate approach. To be honest, I'm not 100% clear on what you even described - which could simply be due to all the meds I'm taking right now to keep going. Be aware that the level of granularity you can easily control is NOT individual topics, which sounds like what you want, so your ideal scenario may not be feasible. Bring this subject up again after Christmas and we can work through the best way to achieve the end goal you're seeking - or get as close to it as possible.

The export/import mechanism has the concept of versioning built into it. But I'm not sure it's designed the way you specifically want it to work. The design WILL support things like errata from publishers, so it will allow you to achieve the desired end result. You'll need to wait until you can play with it a bit to see how it actually works so you can utilize it appropriately.

There is NO automatic delivery of anything to anyone. That was the original plan, and is still the long-term plan. However, please remember that we decided to go with an alternate approach that is built around the export/import mechanism. As indicated previously, that has some huge benefits and some limitations. The key limitation is that we'll make updated versions of content available when errata is needed, but users will not get it automatically. They'll need to download the new version and update their copy of it within their realms.

Another ramification of the alternate approach - this time a big benefit - is that we don't need to spend many months rolling out everything in multiple phases. We're not going to release everything all at once, but technical complexities with this approach will be greatly reduced. That's always a good thing. :)

Hope this helps!

P.S. I've been extremely sick for almost three weeks now. I need to stay focused with the severely limited energy I've got so that we get everything out before Christmas. I'll delve further into all this stuff once I'm healthy and the ginormous release is in everyone's hands (i.e. after Christmas). Thanks in advance for everyone's patience. :)

[daplunk]

If I could reach across the interwebs and slip a sleeping pill in your drink... I would.

Don't kill yourself over us mate...

[Pollution]

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