Right, so we’ve got a whole lot of dedicated community members, but they seem to be grouping across a lot of different places:
Whalesdev forums are all but dead now, and yet new people are still arriving there and attempting to post constructively - which is fine if they find TDW’s mod page, but I suspect many of them won’t check out mods straight away. I know I never used to go on the mods pages.
Can we brainstorm ways to direct them here? I’m sure Whales would be more than happy for a notice to be put at the top of his forum linking people to here, and informing them that this is the current, most active and advanced version of the game!
Equally, we seem to have about 3 different IRCs currently in use - the #whalesdev one, FZ’s #zerorelativity, and the #cataclysm-DDA one. Sure, they’re all useful (and FZ’s isn’t technically cataclysm related) but it would be good to decide on which one is the “main” one and perhaps try and spread the word?
Are we in danger of missing the forest for the trees? Are we like city planners so eager to make green spaces that we’re forgetting to put in a town hall? Are we like a kid who has so many LEGOs that nobody wants to be his friend? Probably not. But we should think about trying to centralise the community a little.
I’m not sure if it would go over well to advertise DDA specifically on the old forums, since there are other branches… But an announcement being clear not only about non-development, but also that there are mods being actively developed seems like a good idea.
I’d feel the same about the IRC, but I don’t use any of them.
#cataclysm-dda is the official channel for dda, mostly because DW isn’t comfortable hijacking #whalesdev for discussing dda development and support. I idle on both, but I’m mostly active on #cataclysm-dda, and it seems to be the same with the other active developers. As far as promotion is concerned, if someone starts asking questions on #whalesdev and the conversation turns to dda I mention darkfyre and #cataclysm-dda.
I think quakenet would have been a better home, but I’m also not willing to go off and do registration and commit to idling in another channel to try and make it happen
Good point all around though, I just updated the FP on my mod thread in Whales’ forums pointing here.
I half way wonder if I should go through all my posts on the whalesdev forums where I said “if vehicles are broken, try my mod or TDW mod” and replace it with “If vehicles are broken, try DDA”. Of course there’s a vehicle bug I need to gunt down in DDA HEAD that I have to squash before I can do that >_<
Yea I’m totally that kid, then I figured out how to make things out of legos that other people want to play with, so I went so deep into nerdy I got popular, go figure
Well, note that the entire point of me setting up the website and the domain was that we could really start dealing with something like that. As it stands, DDA is the core development branch, hands down. The DDA chat is the one with active developers. The DDA page is the only place to get easy downloads without digging through forums.
At the very least, posting something in Cataclysm General Discussion would probably be a good idea.
Getting our name out there, getting linked from other places and ending up higher in the search rankings, is (I think) a key to success at this point. Anything ideas that help on that front is appreciated, but this is definitely the place to be, imo.
Definitely make a post on the whalesdev forum encouraging people to come on over. Ask whales for permission if that makes you feel queasy for any reason. Words like “New! Improved! Shiny! Cataclysm-DDA smells NICE!” to make it clear where the future of cataclysm lies, that it is no longer “just a mod”.
A dedicated domain wouldn’t hurt.
Make a post(s) on reddit: subreddit r/roguelikes (and r/games)
You could even make a subreddit of your own.
Post something in the dwarf fortress forums. I recall there being a section for other games. Lots of people there who might be interested. After reading the other threads here I realized there already is a lot of interest there. A dedicated post by you guys would probably go over well!
Most of our traffic is from the bay12 thread, I think, at the moment.
If you want to do any of those things, feel free to help out. At the very least, setting up a basic roguebasin page (and linking from the Cataclysm page with a message that development is continuing on this branch) would be wonderful.
As far as domain names, I’ve been looking into them, but many of those worth getting are already taken. Except, of course, CataclysmDDA. Which I may yet grab!
At the very least, setting up a basic roguebasin page (and linking from the Cataclysm page with a message that development is continuing on this branch) would be wonderful.