Hi, I would like to start a small disscusion on subjects surronding Virutal Companys, so please take some time to put ur toughts here. All types of companys has a frontside and a backside, when it come to VC one frontside must be that anyone anywhere can join and work in the team. A backside of this is that we have different timezones and the comunication can suffer hard backstabbs when the time diffrence makes it impossible to get hold of one of the team members. There are alot of diffrent views on this out there so post yours. More to come. Kent Bengtsson Edited by - Kent Bengtsson on 3/8/00 2:21:39 PM

I run a virtual game development studio. And we have a time-zone difference. The biggest TZ difference is 8 hours.

I find that it works ok. There''s two forms of communication that we use. 1) We have a mailing list. 2) 2/3s of us use ICQ which means we know when someone else is online and can have a chat session.

Mark Allen
Lead Programmer
Tashco Studios

I don''t think timezones is a big problem as long as the communication (synchronous as well as asynchronous) flows.
You also have to have a very dedicated team and you have to know they will do their work without fuzz and that they won''t trick you, i.e. sharing resources and suddenly you see it in another game or similar.

I say get to know your team and make up some basic rules for how the communication and work will flow, like make them report to you atleast once a week or something, showing or explaining what their status is.

Ps. I think there is an article here on gamedev on Virtual Development, haven''t read them myself though.

Good luck, fellow swede

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Daniel Netz, Sentinel Design
"I'm not stupid, I'm from Sweden" - Unknown