Ideas for unscheduled testing?

Armadillo of Doom

Group Founder, Lover of Pie
aa
Oct 25, 2007
949
1,228
The reason I ask is that as of late, a lot of members have been trying to get servers going for testing on a more regular basis. While this is pretty awesome, I want to see if perhaps we can do the same. The big hurdle is simply getting the map onto the server. Lacking a direct upload, this means it has to be added by an admin. So what do you think is a good way to get maps onto the server? Should we have a separate thread for requesting that a map be added, or perhaps just pm me? Adding every single map that gets submitted here is rather impossible, and some people may not want their map added right away. So what do you all think? I would love it if you guys could just cobble a group together and go test a map at your convenience, instead of the rather strict 'once per week' thing we have going atm. So lemme hear some ideas!
 

Nineaxis

Quack Doctor
aa
May 19, 2008
1,767
2,820
I think this is vital for the contest, testing once a week only on one day really limits the number of playtests we can do before the contest ends. So if we could get the server regularly running playtests with quite a few people that would be great. I think having them uploaded per gameday works, so once someone gets their map in one saturday and we can see it is working and stuff, they can votemap to it or something anytime.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
Perhaps you could have "upload moderators"? Pick some people to give the right to upload the map, then it's more likely someone will be around within a few minutes to do so, without having the havoc of unrestricted uploads.
 

Armadillo of Doom

Group Founder, Lover of Pie
aa
Oct 25, 2007
949
1,228
Even w/ 100 such moderators, I don't think it would be possible to have someone available in a few minutes, at all times. What I think is more reasonable would be having the map added w/in a day. Mon-Fri. I get home between 12:00pm and 3:00pm. Even when I have a heavy workload for school, I usually find at least 20min. to browse the forums. Another possibility would be to have an 'upload to server' option that you can check off when submitting a map to the site/database. This would send a pm to those responsible. I'll have to check w/ our webmasters about that one.
 

MrAlBobo

L13: Stunning Member
Feb 20, 2008
1,059
219
yeah, the forum should be able to send an automated pm to a mod by clicking a button, in fact since this is vBulletin you should be able to find a script that does exactly that...

and anyways...for when you need to test "right now!" me and my server usually have nothing better to do if you message me over steam :p