PGD *TEAM* Challenge?

[WILL]

So what would everyone think of doing a team challenge for the next PGD Challenge mini-competition?

So far some really successful competition entries have been by a team submission. Though it hasn't been necessary to work in any size group (2+) there is of course a big difference in the way you work and the amount of stuff you can get done when working in a "development team".

I'm still thinking of doing another competition sometime in the winter, though time hasn't been my friend since my daughter was been born in late Sept. Sorry for the absence!

Also with a "team" challenge, it would allow for slightly bigger themes that I was thinking of (inspired by games and other cool projects I've been eying like Little Big Planet, Minecraft, Black & White, some older 90s and 8/16-bit era stuff, other technical-based themes and the like) at one point or another.

So far the smaller is better format is doing just fine so I don't plan on getting too big, but I would like to encourage and have more people try out the "team experience" for making games.

What do you good folks say? Would you commit to a team up for at least one mini-compo or will you only do a challenge if you can do it solo?

[SilverWarior]

I'm up for it.
This way I would atleast have someone to help me out with the game UI since for now I'm having most difficulties in this area.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Well, if I'm lucky to find someone (like I do in the previous challenge) then I may join a team but right now I haven't anybody.

[pstudio]

Personally I'm not hot on this idea. I have no problem with working in groups. Currently I'm involved with two projects where I work together with other people, but I don't think it is a good idea, to make the PGD Challenge a solely team based competition.

I think you will exclude many, if you make it mandatory to be in a group. I'm not sure if you mean the groups has to consist of PGD members or "random" people from outside PGD. If it is the former there are issues like Development Environment incompatibility (different Pascal dialects, libraries and target platforms), country and language issues and the fact we aren't many on this forum.
If it is the latter, I can't see why we must find some guy to form a group with, besides doing indirect advertising for PGD. And I don't know many (not to say noone) irl that uses Pascal.

The idea with the PGD Challenge was, that it is a small competition were everybody can participate and wont be overburden by the amount of work a half year competition would require. Making the challenge team based to allow for bigger themes seems to contradict with what the PGD Challenge is about. IMO the competition should allow for single and group submissions like the two last compos.

[User137]

I haven't actually even tested any environment yet, where i could develop same project with another person in realtime. SVN is 1 sort of choice but never tried installing its server part, and it's not realtime. Could share through google docs too i suppose, if i'd find a partner anyway. It would mean many of us forum-goers would propably have to team up, and that will cut amount of participant projects on already small forum.

But also making it group based challenge is silently hinting of wanting higher standard end results. Well, it will greatly depend on tools each groups have in their disposal. Single person can well do far superior projects if his tools and skills are that good. I'd also vote for allowing single-person submissions.

[SilverWarior]

Once I have done some programing with one of my friend using Remote Assistance which is built into Windows (Windows XP and newer).
What Remote Assistance offered me is to see my friends desktop the same way as if I would have been there and watchong it on his monitor. And even more it alowed me to actually temorrary take controll of his computer. I could move his mouse cursor, I could type text as if I was typing on his own keyboard. What I couldn't do is hear any sounds that he heard.
So Remote Asisstance actually just streams a video from other computer to yours and sends information about mouse movment and keyboard preses ono that computer. The only drawback is that it doesn't support capturing graphics contents shown on Overlay surfaces. Also it tends to crash on changing the monitor resolution. Also video updates aprox 2 times per second if there is not much utilization on remote computer otherwise it is even slower.

Anywhay it alowed me to find a bug that my friend had in his project and at the same time it alowed me to see how Delphi XE looked and how it is working with it. Without seeing that I would probably still be programing in Delphi 7.

I have seen some programs which offer similar capabilities (even for Mac OS if I remember corectly) but the only drawback of theese programs is the fact that you need to be registered on ther special servers and all information actually goes through that servers so security of information is questionable. Windows Remote Assistance on the other hand uses direct comunication between the two computers.