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[György Straub]

I'm just about to see to the development of a game which will require more people than ole me, so something like a project wiki (which Derek mentioned in the gamedev.net interview about Bit-Blot / Aquaria) would be utterly useful. However, all the wikipediaing & googling around didn't help (yes, I'm a noob) -- a lot. I've found ProjectForum which has the potential to cut it -- in case I fork out a few hundred bucks. that might just not be the way to go in indie/freeware development. I also don't want to write my system in php (rather than working on the game that is).

So, does anybody know a useable and not too expensive (pronunciation: free=D) engine or alternative solution?

[Alec]

Google Docs are pretty cool. They may require a gmail account to use. (but gmail accounts are free, so!)

[lowpoly]

ya, I use a combination of google docs and google groups. While Groups is just alright at best, it's still a decent tool for collaboration, doesn't require server space, and can be kept private.

[György Straub]

wow, so simple, so beautiful -- thanks a lot, guys!=)

yeah, I can see now that g-groups has about the same functionality like a Free ver ProjectForums, but for the time being they'll do fine.

again, thanks!

[Alex May]

DO NOT USE

JCONSERV

FOR YOUR FORUM

seriously, 50% of the time I cannot even get a signal to that place. Our forum's on there though and we've made a few too many posts to change right now. I will keep mentioning it though, google groups is one I hadn't thought of (even though we've used google docs a little). Cheers!

[Bad Sector]

Trac seems to be the newest trend on project management stuff. It's basically a wiki engine, empowered with a bug tracking system, task manager (todo, etc), subversion interface (source code versioning control system so you can feel safe that your code is safe - if it's actually safe is another story), automatic timeline and possibly other stuff. You only need a server that can do Python cgi-binning, Clearsilver (says the docs), subversion (and it's python bindings) and possibly additional stuff. In other words, if you have a dedicated server or VPS (virtual private server, actually a dedicated-like thing, where you're the root, but in a virtualized environment with many others, where if you screw something up it doesn't affect them - in other words, a cheap way to have root access). For the latter, if you don't have much requirements, you may want to check out VPSLink which offers cheapy VPS systems (i have one). Don't get the lower system, though, it doesn't have enough memory to run python and an sql server (i know from personal experience).

[Guert]

To be honest, I don't thrust things the internet enough to use these kinds of tools. I always prefer to rely on a document on my cpu.

I think it all depends on how many people are working at the same time on the same file. My projects we're created using some office documents and emails. Basically, we'd discuss the issue while chatting, send us a checklist of stuff we talked about and then decide who in the team would update the document. When we felt like the document was updated enough, we sent it to everyone on the team.

We did have a good ftp site for a while but didn't work out much. Everyone was doing everything at once and some files were lost. Using a communication heavy system like we did made sure we didn't have any bad surprises.

So, I think it has something to with the size of your team too... It may not work as well when 20 people are working on the same thing but it went well with a team of 3 plus 2 or 3 occasional helpers.

Well, that's my point of view!
Later!

[Robotacon]

Web based project management systems have never worked for me when it comes to software development. There's too many files that change constantly. Try and get a CVS-server up and running instead.

Wikis are great though. I draw loads of mind maps which needs to be uploaded in image form to work within the realm of a wiki otherwise I would use one for all kinds of design documents.

[wonderpus]

give http://unfuddle.com/home a try its free

Unfuddle is a secure, hosted software development environment and project management solution for small software development teams.

[wonderpus]

or www.assembla.com that was the other one i was thinking off
assembla has bigger storage and bigger team size still for free