A few posts back I was talking about collaborating on a route with others, and last night was the first baby step in that direction. MadMike has started a new route based on the "Lewis and Clark Railroad" (LINC). It drives through the Washington mountains running along a river (it has a name... just need to find it). Currently my roll will be strictly QA, but I will be assisting Mike as needed to hopefully speed up the process of filling in landscape.
Just to be clear, this route is Mike's vision. I respect him as an artist and value his experience and I refuse to steal his thunder so I will not be posting about the progress of this route, rather I will be discussing my findings on how to better collaborate on any route built in RailWorks.
To start things off we created a new folder in my LiveMesh SkyDrive and provided him with full rights to it. Mike can now add or remove files as needed and it will be shared after a few minutes of waiting. The second thing we agreed on was what my roll was. It would do no good for me start altering the route without his knowledge and possibly overlap his work, or even worse break the route with an object he (or I) don't have in our assets list. He is the foreman. Then I needed a map. Mike has an understanding of the area and was giving me a run down of the route and its environs, but I was lost. I needed to orient myself and the boy scout in me was screaming for something 2D and pointing north. As it happened Mike did make a route map which was posted up at RWA. I simply downloaded it and placed it in the shared folder so I didn't need to run to RWA every time I wanted to look at something. I think in the near future Mike may add area markers to the route so they will show up in the in game 2D map. Finally I made up a bug list. Since we don't have a formal bug tracking system (that would be overkill), I made up a simple text file where I classified bugs as Major, Minor, and Feature Request. Each issue will start with a date stamp then a description.
Major
- 2011-07-13 Need to replace the GN track
- 2011-07-13 Track at 45.78735/-122.50894 is hovering off the ground
When Mike is done fixing something he will add FIXED to the line so I can verify.
Major
- FIXED 2011-07-13 Need to replace the GN track
- 2011-07-13 Track at 45.78735/-122.50894 is hovering off the ground
And then I can move the line to a section called Resolved so we don't need to bother looking at it again.
The process is all still "work in progress". The last thing we need is to start feeling like this is "work" so we will make adjustments as needed. Please feel free to monitor the progress of the LINC from MadMike's post at RWA.
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