News:

Simutrans Wiki Manual
The official on-line manual for Simutrans. Read and contribute.

10 years Tikiwiki: Review and Perspective

Started by Frank, August 08, 2016, 02:04:52 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Frank

original in German

here the English version, a translation of captain crunch


10 years Tikiwiki: Review and Perspective

I want to use this year date (although this is not quite true, more on this later) as an opportunity to make a little a review.

The choice of Tikiwiki had been made more or less by Issac in the year 2005 (I hadn't taken part in Simutrans then) and he installed it on his server.
Then version 1.8.something had been current. By the end of the year 2005 Simutrans was at version 0.88.10.5.

In the course of the overhaul of the then much lacking and outdated help files work on the wiki began.

Because of the fact that I saved a backup of the structure of the wiki, I could set up a new installation on my own server with these contents after Isaac's server installation got lost. This was summer 2006 and marks the administrative responsibility of myself for the Tikiwiki and the first server move.

Subsequently I realised that the server would not be adequate. Therefore in 2006 also the server simutrans-germany.com had been newly procured. Until the end of 2007 the wiki got completed as far as possible. At least concerning the underlying help files. Also the developer section had been built and completed as far as possible. This had been possible because I had been given access to the pak64 source files. Here also a thank you to prissi.

In the years 2006/2007 several updates had been made.

Based on the content from end of 2007 (then Simutrans got 10 years old) arose among others the pak96.comic and the pak192.comic. The time between 2007 and 2010 had been a very active time in Simutrans. Also the pak128.german has its roots in these times.

If I remember correctly in 2008 another server move happened. In the years 2006 until 2008 there had been abundant SPAM that had to be deleted two to three times a day.

In October the SimuTranslator had been installed in parallel on the server. Why the former server did not work anymore I cannot tell. Here I also want to mention the fathers whom we have to thank for the SimuTranslator.
Tomáš Kubeš, Tomáš Morava, Pavel Spilka and Ondřej Švejdar who created the Translator as a research project. First for the pak128. Later also other sets and the program texts had been added.
Today the SimuTranslator hosts beside the program texts of standard and experimental also diverse graphic sets.
Further the help texts can be edited and translated there. Also diverse web pages and programs can be translated there.

The years 2009 and 2010 were coined by Susanna. The Swedish part traces back to her. She also contributed much to the English part. The Portuguese part can be traced back to An_dz. He also did much for the English part.

During this time version five of Tikiwiki was installed. The most updates had been installed relatively unnoticed.
Sadly this cannot be said of the update to version six. On behalf of an error it had to be returned to version five.

Because of the many updates from version 1.8.x up to version 5.3 it had to be assumed that the database was not consistent anymore. Therefore I made a fresh installation when I updated to version 9.3 in 2012 and the pages all had to be imported manually.
Here I want to thank An_dz, IgorEliezer, whoami and the other helpers.

Last year happened the now fourth move of the server.

The currently installed version is 15.2.

This is the rather turbulent history of eleven years of the Simutrans Tikiwiki.

In what follows I want to say a few words about the future.

I would like to wish that more people would contribute to the Simutrans Tikiwiki. Many names from the years 2006 until 2010 can be seen rarely or not at all. Also many web sites disappeared or are heavily outdated.

And this is the big advantage of a wiki. The contributers can change and preserve and continue the heritage of the former contributers. Not always everything is the holy grail of wisdom and perfect. But over many years there has been created a reference work that needs to be kept up and cared for.

Next year, that is 2017, Simutrans will be 20 years old. I wish that there will be, alongside this brill program with many beautiful graphic sets, also a reference work that is as complete as possible and available in many languages. The same naturally applies for the translation of the program and the help in the game.