Mine, Yours, Ours: Way to Upload Add-Ons by Development "Teams"?

[Thunder Chicken]

I find myself a terrible mesh maker, and I simply can't get interested in making meshes. However, I rather enjoy coding crazy physics for various add-ons in Lua and am working on helicopters, wheeled vehicles, boats, etc.. with a lot of other folks collaborating and putting in the effort to make meshes for these vessel types.

People are generally pretty respectful about crediting everyone's efforts on a project, but at the end of the day, only a single user can upload an add-on to the Orbiter Hangar. Even with efforts to acknowledge the contributors, only the user that uploads the add-on gets the "credit" of add-on reviews, the dopamine hit of seeing the number of downloads, and acknowledgement as an add-on developer.

I was wondering about the possibility of a procedure being developed where uploading such collaborative projects could be done as a "team" where more than one OF user could be associated with a particular add-on upload in OH? This might promote a healthier add-on ecosystem as everyone on a team could play to their strengths, making good meshes or good code, and there would be more user custodians of said add-ons to access them and keep them updated through future Orbiter versions.

Thoughts? Possibilities?

 

[Matias Saibene]

I find myself a terrible mesh maker, and I simply can't get interested in making meshes. However, I rather enjoy coding crazy physics for various add-ons in Lua and am working on helicopters, wheeled vehicles, boats, etc.. with a lot of other folks collaborating and putting in the effort to make meshes for these vessel types.

People are generally pretty respectful about crediting everyone's efforts on a project, but at the end of the day, only a single user can upload an add-on to the Orbiter Hangar. Even with efforts to acknowledge the contributors, only the user that uploads the add-on gets the "credit" of add-on reviews, the dopamine hit of seeing the number of downloads, and acknowledgement as an add-on developer.

I was wondering about the possibility of a procedure being developed where uploading such collaborative projects could be done as a "team" where more than one OF user could be associated with a particular add-on upload in OH? This might promote a healthier add-on ecosystem as everyone on a team could play to their strengths, making good meshes or good code, and there would be more user custodians of said add-ons to access them and keep them updated through future Orbiter versions.

Thoughts? Possibilities?

That's a brilliant idea. Count on me to code hard-to-find bugs (evil laugh).

Aside from the joke (a terrible joke), I think the idea of teams is a good one because it also distributes the workloads better and, as you said, it gets the most out of each user.
It would also be possible to reduce public release times.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Before I switched roles at work, I used to really enjoy farting around with Anim8tor. I have a virtual stack of meshes... somewhere. My intention was to use them with multistage. But... real life... y'all know how it is.

If I can find them, I'd happily make them available for use to a coder.

 

[n72.75]

Didn't wr have the ability to add up to 10 authors to an addon here? Or did I completely imagine it.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Didn't wr have the ability to add up to 10 authors to an addon here? Or did I completely imagine it.

Not that I can see in the current add-on submission interface:

https://www.orbiter-forum.com/resources/categories/orbiter-addon.1/add

 

[misha.physics]

I saw that feature, but I don't know how it works:

 

[Thunder Chicken]

I didn't realize that option existed after you created the add-on.



I guess the remaining question is how much access/control do the added team members have?

 

[Lucy]

I didn't realize that option existed after you created the add-on.

View attachment 41666
View attachment 41667
I guess the remaining question is how much access/control do the added team members have?

Documentation on this appears to be a little bit scarce, but the option in the ACP that controls whether this is enabled or not has this to say on the matter:



It does not appear to be especially granular or adjustable. One of my design goals for OHM when it was a separate site was addon "teams" like this but with specific assignable roles for members so their privileges on an addon could be managed by some notional team lead; I'm happy the functionality appears to exist in the XFRM replacement but it does seem a tad basic.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Documentation on this appears to be a little bit scarce, but the option in the ACP that controls whether this is enabled or not has this to say on the matter:

View attachment 41674

It does not appear to be especially granular or adjustable. One of my design goals for OHM when it was a separate site was addon "teams" like this but with specific assignable roles for members so their privileges on an addon could be managed by some notional team lead; I'm happy the functionality appears to exist in the XFRM replacement but it does seem a tad basic.

Thanks for this information. I would think this would be fine for small project collaborations (e.g. a coder and a mesh-maker) like I am thinking of. Bigger projects like SSU probably would benefit from something that looks more like a professional development group with a hierarchy.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

@Xyon One question that popped into my head - let's say two users collaborate on a project, and one uploads the add-on as owner and adds the other user as an addon team member. If the owner leaves Orbiter Forum for any reason, can the second team member assume the ownership of that addon? Certainly the second team member could simply re-upload the addon as a new addon with themselves as owner, but then you would have two nominally identical addons out there, and the download stats and feedback for the first would not be associated with the second.

If it is possible to reassign ownership to the same addon, I'd assume it would be something that they would have to request from administration, and I don't know if you have control on your end to permit that.

 

[Lucy]

@Xyon One question that popped into my head - let's say two users collaborate on a project, and one uploads the add-on as owner and adds the other user as an addon team member. If the owner leaves Orbiter Forum for any reason, can the second team member assume the ownership of that addon? Certainly the second team member could simply re-upload the addon as a new addon with themselves as owner, but then you would have two nominally identical addons out there, and the download stats and feedback for the first would not be associated with the second.

If it is possible to reassign ownership to the same addon, I'd assume it would be something that they would have to request from administration, and I don't know if you have control on your end to permit that.

Yes, we have the tools to change the owner of an addon. It's how I uploaded the old versions of Orbiter and made them belong to Martin.