I've been speaking with a manufacturer of graphics related hardware device.
Let me just keep it generic for now, even if the list of names to guess from
isn't very long.
We were discussing the idea of setting up a contest with one of their units
being the grand prize. They would benefit of course by getting more
exposure of their product to the flight simulator community. We would
benefit by drawing in more users to come take a look at FlightGear. And it
doesn't hurt to have a positive relationship with various graphics
manufacturers so FlightGear can reasonably support the features in their
software and hopefully help make sure their hardware and drivers work well
with FlightGear.
The prize for the contest would be one unit of this company's flagship
product. Value would be in the range of $300-400 let's say. It might be
possible to find additional prizes (?) and maybe if this works well it might
be possible to offer future contests like this.
To the cynical out there ... yes, this is marketing. But it is marketing of
a good product that I have personal experience with and have no problem
endorsing. It's a product that is of direct interest and relevance to
flight sim users and can make the simulation experience more immersive
and/or cheaper depending on your perspective, and a contest like this could
benefit us if the contest is posted on other forums and we draw more people
in to give FlightGear a try.
Two contest ideas were presented. 1) A screen shot contest (that implies
setting up a way to accept screen shots, and someone has to evaluate the
entries and decide on the winner ... could be a lot of work if word of our
contest is spread around and we have many entrants.) 2) Another idea would
be to setup some sort of FlightGear scavenger hunt. Entries would be done
through some web site, entries with the correct answers would all go in a
hat and the winner would be drawn out randomly. I like this second idea
because to enter the contest, you have to download and install FlightGear,
and then learn to run it well enough to explore the FlightGear world and
find the answers to the contest questions.
Above all, I want to keep things as simple as possible.
So my question to the developers is this:
1. Do we like the idea of a scavenger hunt type contest? If so, what types
of questions would we ask or what things would we ask people to find? I
assume we would keep this to the default scenery area. And we should keep
the questions/goals reasonably simple and easy and quick to discover.
2. Since this is marketing, wow, it would really make sense to coordinate a
contest with a new release ... but that puts pressure on us to do a release
sooner rather than later ... should we push for a November or December
FlightGear release and schedule the contest soon after that?
3. Would anyone out there have experience or be willing to help setup a web
page for participants to register. I am imagining something pretty simple,
where registrants can enter their contact info, and their answers (multiple
choice?), and maybe snag their IP address to try to weed out as many
duplicate entries as reasonably possible. I don't want contest management
to turn into a huge overwhelming burden for me or for someone else. (How
much do we worry about people trying to cheat or register too many times?)
4. Is a scavenger hunt too much of a barrier ... forcing people to download
FlightGear and actually learn a bit about it might be too hard or take too
long for some folks, and they would simply give up and not be able to
register ... or answers could get posted on the net and they could skip
having to look at FlightGear entirely?
There's no rush to decide on a plan today, but a grand prize has been all
but offered to us and I think this could draw a lot of attention and
interest to FlightGear.
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
_______________________________________________
Flightgear-devel mailing list
Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
