The weeknotes are an important part of the open working element of this project, as well as a means of organising my own thoughts and finding some clarity, as the overwhelm is REAL, believe me! Its been several weeks now, and I don’t feel like I’ve really done anything. I have ticked off what I’ve done in our weekly checklists. I KNOW that I have done LOADS of reading, thinking, talking, interviewing. But it feels like wading through jelly. I think any project like this goes in stages, from excitement, to confidence, to wobbles, to existential dread, then back up to slight optimism again. Right? Beuller? Beuller?

This week we have a couple more elements to add to our open working arsenal.

We have started a YouTube channel, where we will stream some online and in-person Minecraft LAN Clubs, we will upload development and testing on our new server.

One of our developer team members Smuudge has created a GitHub Profile where we will upload the code that the team create for anyone else to use in the future, it is all open source.

We had the first development team meeting this week to talk about roles, realistic goals and how to translate the findings of research into reality.

DISCUSSION:

Ubuntu vs Windows = I would prefer Windows, not being a techie, and peri-menopause makes learning new things more difficult now! – but to create an efficient server that can function as I envisage it, we need to use software called Pterodactyl which is free, open-source game server management panel. This needs Ubuntu. Not Windows. It’s ok. I can do this. I’m grateful to the grant allowing breathing space for all the learning I need to do!

We are going to use the main machine to run the server, with a virtual machine for back up.

We considered using mod packs for different gaming experiences, but after looking into it together, installation isn’t always as accessible for people not used to computers, so we are putting that on hold for now.

Purpur not paper. That is honestly not a typo. We had a whole conversation mostly made up of words I didn’t know, that were random jumbles of letters shoved together, but it all boiled down to Purper not Paper. This means that we are using the server software Purpur. Purpur is based on the server software called Paper, which is itself based on Bukkit. So Purpur seems like it will be the best for our purposes. Thanks to Josh’s excellent diagram it does all make sense now – see below.

This is our plan for the prototype

The green bits in the above plan are what we are aiming to have – not completely finished, but set up enough to check our coding and safeguarding – by w/c 11th December. Fingers crossed, as would love to have screenshots or screenshare to share at the Playback sessions. The amber bits we will work on Jan- Mar 2023, and the red sections are for if we have time in Jan – Mar 2024.

The above plan is a working doc on Excalidraw – again, cheers Josh for the heads up on that, it’s really useful. So we are adding, changing it as we come up with new ideas or challenges.

With this initial phase of development, we are happy to allow ourselves to test and to fail, to find out what works and makes the best use of our resources, and also future proofs our server as much as possible.

I’d better go and get learning all about Ubuntu…

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