[NTLUG:Discuss] Presentation Ideas

[David White]

Hi Everyone,

I'm fairly new to NTLUG, and I thought I'd start by introducing myself - my
name is David White, and I've recently moved to the DFW area from Australia.

I'm the lead developer of a popular Free game: Battle for Wesnoth
(http://www.wesnoth.org). Chris has been kind enough to let me give a
presentation about Battle for Wesnoth and Linux gaming in general at NTLUG
in June.

In preparing for this presentation, I've realized that there are a number of
topics which I could present on, but I'm not sure how much interest there
would be in each of them.

I've made a list of some of the topics I'm looking at touching on at the
meeting. It'd be great if I could get some feedback on what people think
would and wouldn't be appropriate for the group.

The topics I've thought of are as follows:

- Demonstration of the Battle for Wesnoth game, what it is, how it works,
basic overview of the game rules.
- Demonstration of the configurability of Wesnoth through its 'Wesnoth
Markup Language' (WML) configuration files
- Overview of the state of Free/Open Source gaming on Linux. Brief
description of major games.
- Important Open Source development philosophies: Keep It Simple, Stupid
(KISS), and It Is Ready When It's Ready (IIRWIR). Why it is important for
software projects to stick to these principles.
- Overview of CVS: what it is, how it works, basic commands.
- Explanation about Savannah (http://savannah.gnu.org) - what it is, how it
works.
- Discussion of C++ and the tools available for C++ developers on Linux
- Discussion of how users have contributed to Wesnoth, leading into
discussion on how users can contribute to any Open Source project, and how
non-programmers as well as programmers can contribute.
- Discussion of the operation of a typical open source project -- 
distributed development, communication through email/forums etc.

Cheers,

David