Suggestion: Centralize Design Work in a RFC Repo

[raconitrus]

There's a lot of tgstation design chatter happening all the time all over the place - on Github, in the official tg discord, in any of the various discord servers for tg downstreams, here on the forums, in deadchat, etc.

Included in this chatter is a lot of problem solving and brainstorming people do on how to fix perceived design challenges the game currently has. If there happens to be a PR currently up addressing the challenge, then that usually gets linked - but otherwise people are just reinventing the same wheel in each of these spaces!

So, here's my pitch for a tgstation RFC repo, similar to those used in other open source projects (like rust, react, bevy, and many others) for encouraging major feature contributions:

• It would be public and linkable from any discord server, especially adjacent servers and tg downstream servers, where design jabber frequently happens out of line of sight to any related ongoing WIPs there might be
• It would serve as a collection of "prior art" in tgstation design work, so that people seeking to solve a design challenge don't always have to reinvent everything from scratch to succeed
• It would serve as an easily accessible public record of possible design direction that the headcoders would accept, regardless of whether those designs ultimately get implemented
• It would serve as a real, official process by which you can get your major PR concept approved by headcoders without having to weigh the risk of taking a shot in the dark by making the entire PR first and seeing if it gets denied, which lowers the barrier to large feature contributions

Something similar to this does currently exist in the #player-dev-projects forum on the tgcord but I think this is insufficient because it's not trivially linkable from other servers, is difficult to search, and isn't an official or documented process for getting a design reviewed.

[Mothblocks]

i think specifically being able to propose hackmd posts on github could be a good idea since we don't really use the google docs type stuff often anyway

but the actual proposal of this very much seems like the "multiple standards? we should have just one" joke. discussion tends to happen in discord because it's very fast paced and convenient. for important topics, we ask people to take it to design docs. for example...

It would serve as a real, official process by which you can get your major PR concept approved by headcoders without having to weigh the risk of taking a shot in the dark by making the entire PR first and seeing if it gets denied, which lowers the barrier to large feature contributions

this is already solved with design docs as they exist now

[raconitrus]

I think the solution to the "multiple standards" problem is almost always to have one standard agreed upon and adopted by the major players in a field. Open PRs are routinely linked to in discussions on every platform for example, but the same can't be done for any WIP design work.

BTW I do think the existing process could use some more reification in the contrib guidelines, I couldn't find any mention of it in the current guidelines.

[Jacquerel]

To be clear when mothblocks reference a "multiple standards? we should have just one" joke she means this:

[TheFinalPotato]

I don't think conversations need to be more centralized then they are now. We have a place to discuss design, tgcord, and sometimes people talk outside that. That doesn't mean the place is bad or broken.
I also don't really like the idea of building a record for accepted/rejected ideas, at least long term.
This isn't a project where the correct opinion is concrete and never changes. We want to allow the people who succeed us the freedom to disagree, because we were wrong.
Design docs are useful for making concrete the intents behind a change, but I don't think we should strive to build a legacy of decisions

Oh also I don't really mind if downstreams have design convos separate from us. We expect them to disagree with us, at least partially. If they wanna chat they can, we have a place for that (tg cord), but I feel no obligation to include them. I view them as incidental to the codebase. SS13 isn't really centralized after all, we've to some extent achieved the goal of open source (ignoring the firefox problem that comes from a built up community/admin team)
I feel like you're looking for a level of professionalism that is not upheld whatsoever by this project.

[Cobby]

is this not hackmd design documents?