It’s allready there:
http://infinitybattlescape.com
I’m a Discourse supporter. Just to counterweight a little.
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I like Discord too.
It’s still being very actively developed and if you think you can make something better (like Imgur album one-boxing) you can submit a pull request.
I think the website needs a lot of work/an overhaul, but I’d rather they focus on the game. They’ve asked for a volunteer web developer so we’ll see how that works out.
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I’m kind of disappointed that indiegogo is used for further funding, I looked foward to the dedicated battlescape page. But without a web developer its understandable that they went this way.
I just think a “real” funding site would have been far more convincing than a cloned kickstarter page on indiegogo…
On the topic of web forum + page:
As I understand it, currently the forumsoftware and the main website are not independent from each other, and because of that every minor update is hard. I personally think thats the wrong way to do it. The core of the forum software should never be touched in any way except for updates and patches. Surely there must be a way to extend discourse without messing with its core, and if thats not the case then that kind of sucks ass.
I like discourse a lot from my perspective as a user, but If it is not suitable for extending it then I should be thought about If its still the right tool for the job.
I would really like to hear what their concrete plans for the website are. So far they said the want to build it with Ruby on Rails for the backend, and Ember for the frontend. But I don’t know how the game data comes into play. Will the game servers also run the website? Will the game servers communicate with the website via JSON? Will game data directly be fetched from the game servers by ember? Will the game servers store the user data? Or will the website server store the user data and handle authentication?
How will it all fit together?
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They still plan to do their own thing. In the meantime they wanted to have a place for people who “missed the kickstarter” … due to Paypal reasons for instance … to be able to pledge. After all they promised we will be able to upgrade our pledges. Handling payment is really tricky though and something that must not fail in any way. I find it a good intermediate solution, which it is.
The core of discourse hasn’t been alterered significantly. The only thing that has been changed is the login system and account creation, not so much changed but interfaced with. There are a lot of plugins out there that would allow for extension of discourse and writing own ones are easy and don’t need alteration of the core code. What most people forget though, is that discourse has most of the features they ask for in the base package, they only would need to be configured, set up accordingly.
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The dedicated funding page is still in development. IndieGoGo is used for the transition, otherwise we’d have to wait many more weeks which means more lost funding. In fact, I personally think we already missed the boat as there was a lot of people waiting to pledge right after the KS campaign, but have now already turned to other things. Additionally, IndieGoGo gives us additional exposure through a different platform.
Discourse is still new and gets updates very often ( sometimes weekly ) so it’s just not possible to not touch it frequently.
One of the main issues is deployment through azure. I’m not exactly an expert on it ( I don’t handle the website ) but my understanding is that every time you want to update something, even a minor thing like a single line in the website code, you have to create a package and re-deploy the entire thing. There is no way to upload the individual file that has changed. The system is built that way, we can’t do anything about it.
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I think there are a whole bunch of payment solutions for Ruby on Rails available that do all the hard work.
This one seems to be the most popular: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/projects/activemerchant
Using this it should be fairly easy to create a funding page for somebody that has Ruby on Rails experience.
I can only speak from my own experience of course. I work with the Symfony2 framework (its somewhat similar to Ruby on Rails (Rails was one of the insprirations for it)) and integrating payment is with the help of good libraries is really simple.
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Hm, that doesn’t sound very nice indeed. I don’t know If thats the exact service you are using but the azure website says:
Continuous deployment with Git, TFS, GitHub, and Visual Studio Team Services
Might be useful:
http://blog.stevenedouard.com/heroku-meets-azure-easiest-way-deploy-rails-app-azure/
An Azure App Service Web App is different from Azure Compute Cloud Service, which I think is what INS have.
Edit: I don’t know though… they may have something different.
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@I-Novae: are there any plans to make the official forum design more “spacier” or “futuristic” until 2017? I know this has not high priority but I am a big fan of immersion thorough all modules of a product (website, forum, game).
There currently is no plan to do that due to a lack of resources. Maybe at some point in the future.
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Another way to connect forum and website: https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-single-sign-on-for-discourse/13045
It seems custom fields (like the pledge tiers) could also be implemented this way: https://meta.discourse.org/t/custom-user-fields-for-plugins/14956
Might be worthwile to check out, this way the forum and website could be maintained separately.
Is there a particular reason to keep the hosting on Azure? AWS seems like the better choice for hosting websites these days, and replacing live sites is fairly straightforward. You have to create a new image, but you can use ASGs to bring down old instances and raise new instances simultaneously. Besides, there’ll be a lot more people around that are familiar with the AWS infrastructure.
Where I work currently, we use AWS for some of our infrastructure, and our commit > live process is relatively painless (could be more painless, but we did it kinda dumb). It’d be automated if we’d bothered to get around to sorting out our automation process too 
From what I hear it’s slightly cheaper, but in comparison to what I’d say they’d use it’s a drop in the pond.
Edit: Apart from game distribution on S3
I was assuming you’d use AWS for web only, then Azure for game services. The cost of the web services should be a drop in the ocean compared to the games services
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