Minutes of the Transport Empire meeting of 23072005.

Steve launches TinFoil, our channel bot. TinFoil is designed to help the chairman and minute maker during meetings.

1. Start Meeting: TinFoil (through Steve) opens the meeting.
1a. Pick a chairman and a minutes man: Steve volunteers to be the chairman and Hyronymus to make the minutes.
1b. Discuss minutes of previous meeting: Appearently everyone read the minutes of the previous 2 minutes (since the meeting last week was a disaster we don't expect anyone to seriously have read them though).

2.  Elect new management: Hyronymus explains that ChrisCF has left the stage for an unknown period of time, due to 'real life events'. ChrisCF hopes that someone with interest in the management aspects of a project like TE would take over from where he stopped. He hopes to return to TE but not necessarily as a leader. Metalcore wonders where Hellfire is as Hellfire is the leader of the code team. With Hellfire absent Steve proposes Hyronymus as the new management leader, as Hyronymus was chosen in the management team before. Hyronymus is willing to accept the job but not alone as real life caught up with him too ánd because he feels Steve is interested and capable of the job too. Hyronymus states that a '2-captains on 1 ship' solution does mean a clear dividence between tasks to avoid clashes between him and Steve. As noone opposes the suggestion to form a 2-man management Hyronymus and Steve are chosen.

3.  Progress on the Design Document: Hellfire and uzurpator were assigned to the DD writing procedure but both are absent. Hyronymus will contact both by PM, email and also post about the DD progress on the forums.

4.  Progress of the Management Group
4a. Website + Wiki maintenance: Zuu indicates that he will leave TE, at least temporarily because of study activities. This means someone else needs to be assigned as leader of the website group. Eis_os indicates that the DD is far important than a website, Metalcore and Hyronymus agree to the extent that a clear website should attract interested people to TE and can therefor be important to TE too. Because of this 'perceived importance' Steve and Hyronymus will write down some objectives for a TE website. These objectives will be presented during the next meeting.
It's also decided to keep the Wiki for TE developers alone and have a self-made CMS for the real website. The website should at least host a searchable version of the DD. Eis_os suggests to divide the DD in smaller parts, this should enable us to host small parts of the DD pretty soon. The DD will be written in XML, as eis_os suggested too.
4b. EmpireBot: As mentioned, TinFoil is the bot to help during meetings. It's not intended to become a toy bot, its features are solely meant to be functional.
4c. Available test-systems overview: Hyronymus says there might be some confusion as he put this topic on the agenda, assuming there was an overview of which OS's were available to test TE demo's on. Zuu believes PjayTycy made an Excel spreadsheet, Hyronymus will look for it on the forums.

5.  Progress of the Code Group
5a. Setup development environments on our machines: no members of the code group are present.
5b. progress on the SDL demo: Uzurpator last posted in his demo thread in June. When sending uzurpator an email about the DD Hyronymus will also ask uzurpator about the SDL demo progress.

6.  User Interface progress: no progress on the User Interface.

7.  Any other business (AOB): Purno offers his graphical help to either the website design or the game graphics. Eis_os takes control of the chairman's seat and proposes a few more things. He wonders who is responsible for new coders that are interested to join the TE developers team. Steve suggests that he and Hyronymus can do this task, noone disagrees. Eis_os thinks the FAQ should be changed to include this (also accepted). He also warns that if we decide to write our DD in XML that we should maintian our own index.

8.  Next meeting: It is decided to create a topic to tally the preferences of TE members for when to hold meetings. The date of the next meeting will roughly be in 2 weeks, exact details to be announced the coming week.

TinFoil ends the meeting.