Game development is a difficult beast at the best of times. Sharing ideas, files, code, tracking bugs, milestones and releases with people in your team across the world isn't easy. At Mod DB we believe Trac is a great solution for many of these problems, with its agile and best-practice focus. It rolls subversion a wiki and bug tracker into one to create a brilliant web-based management system for even the most complex projects. With Trac you can unify your teams development efforts and ensure everyone knows what everyone else is working on.
We have just launched our own Trac page for the Desura Web Engine (code that powers ModDB.com) and are now using it to document future site functionality (roadmap) and trac bugs and feature requests from staff and you our community. We highly encourage you to report bugs and feature requests here should you have something in mind. We also hope that via this page you can finally see what the future of ModDB.com holds.
Also whilst Sourceforge and Google Code exists for the open source world, no such site exists for the game development world. We believe trac is perfectly suited for game development with a wiki that allows you to document gameplay, embed concept images, code and link it through to bugs, etc. Because of this we are currently considering rolling this functionality out for development teams. You would have complete control, trac is linked into the ModDB user system and you can make access as private or public as you want. We can provide unlimited space, bandwidth and all the tools your team needs, so you can focus on the important stuff, getting your game built!
If this interests you please get in touch. At this stage the cost of rolling out a server makes this a difficult proposition, but if the interest is there and some are willing to pay we can definately make it happen.
That's pretty cool, I've never used Trac before, but it does get a bit harrowing having different software for wiki, bug tracking, SVN and so forth so I'll check it out :)
I have, and Trac + SVN = awesome.
"[Trac] provides an interface to Subversion (or other version control systems), an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities.
Trac allows wiki markup in issue descriptions and commit messages, creating links and seamless references between bugs, tasks, changesets, files and wiki pages. A timeline shows all current and past project events in order, making the acquisition of an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy. The roadmap shows the road ahead, listing the upcoming milestones."
This is a really exciting announcement. Bravo ModDB! Bravo!
Wow this is awesome :D If we weren't covered already, I'd definitely be interested as I can't imagine any team being able to get anything done otherwise.
Whilst most teams may have SVN, a wiki or bug tracker, maintaining and hosting each individually is complicated and takes plenty of time. Herein lies the beauty of trac as it brings this functionality together and interlinks it all.
And, you (you = moddb owners) can easily expand it using the plugin system so it fits perfectly in the mod scene :D
I think this can make game development a little bit easier for some teams, it's a great idea.
PLEAESE to this, also a nice way for developers to share code, and keep track of bugs easier.
wow, thanks for this feat, i'll deff gonna look into this and probably will use this. thanks moddb for giving this extra bit aiding modders.
Now this is truly something great for the comunity.
We haven't rolled it out - we are currently awaiting the communities response and will consider our options once we hear from all of you
There doesn't seem to be a very large response on this page. But there's no doubt that every mod team will want this. You should advertise it on the front of moddb, in the headlines section so people see it better.
I agree totally, it is functionality we absolutely want to roll out because we know teams will love it. Difficulty is its costs a lot of money and doesn't earn any (no ads etc) so am currently considering our options.
Is there any way you could partially subsidise hosting to offer us cheap (but not free) hosting?
Or if not get together with some regional hosting providers and organise some sort of Moddb member fee in exchange for referrals?
This is the best idea you've had thus far. Unified tracking and hosting is one of the most overlooked parts of modding I believe, and this is a way to bring it all into one place. I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up.
I'd love to be able to have trac and other tools linked into Moddb, it's just depends on the costs that are attached to it.
I think mods that are using your modified version of trac should be able to link it to their mod's profile, so that people can report bugs and such straight from the mod's profile page. Integrating everything together should save mod developers time and effort which then can go into making the mod/game instead.
well it is integrated into the login system so yeah they can. A link could also be added to the mods profile so this is definitely an option.
I would definitely be interested if it was all linked, and not just by the login system. It also depends how much people will have to pay, which I assume will be subject to demand.
Not only will be it an excellent replacement for modcenter, you also have all the mod community there.
This would be great as this is very useful.
Sounds like it would be a good idea for teams out there that have a lot of staff. But I'm just a one man army so I would not benefit from this. :D
Trac is GREAT software we use it at work.
What a wonderfully thoughtful idea, I hope you guys go through with it.
I may have some desire to use it in the future.
Just wanted to respond to this quote:
"Also whilst Sourceforge and Google Code exists for the open source world, no such site exists for the game development world."
Ever heard of Modcenter.com ? :P
modcenter.com is closing
awsome!
Wow, I think a hundred developement teams will all rejoice samultaniusly when this is released.
Nice, so this will be some sort of Mantis come dotProject venture? We also used the ModCenter.com beta but it never really took off, due to various problems.
I've used both mantis and trac, and well I find trac amazing. It really does precisely what you want and need as a team. increases productivty, documentation, bug fixing whilst decreasing the time this takes all in one hit
Trac is more basic than Mantis for bugtracking, but not in a bad way. For a mod team Trac is the better of the two.
woah, this looks awesome! i can definitely see this increasing productivity
I'd definitely be interested in a ModDB SVN and Trac service should it get rolled out; they are incredibly useful tools that all mod teams should investigate.
I currently use OpenSVN and have previously used ModCenter - but I suspect ModDB might be able to solve the two problems of these services: ModCenter is painfully slow and OpenSVN has poor Trac setup functionality (half-complete commandline setup) and has downtime issues.
Cheers
Steve
Great accomplishment for the ModDB team. Modders will be praising you guys for this feature in the future.
ModCenter is closing our site and I'm glad they are in the good hands of ModDB.
Sounds pretty cool! We'd be interested if it does get rolled out to the public.
I'm extremely happy to see ModDB picking up on this. Congratulations Scott!!!
What a great idea!
It's highly possible that i will end up using this :)