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Any news on paid development?


Norvegia
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I'm okay with WFG not reporting what they've done with our money yet if there is no visible progress as long as they're still working on it. And I know they're still working on it. An update every month regarding the status of the funds is not as essential as plowing through technical hurdles. I feel that the lack of transparencies allow for more experimentation and risks, something I'm very okay with. After all, the fund raiser was pretty much an investment opportunity (with the goal of having an an awesome game in return), and not all of our money is going to be spent on value-added services.

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Just thought it would be nice to clear this up. Due to some disagreements with the Dev team, I decided to withdraw from the position.

It's quite unfortunate, but since teamwork didn't seem to be flowing in the desired direction and we couldn't come to common terms, I feel this is the best option.

The long delay from WFG led to me finding a new job and I would much rather stick to that. :) I have no idea what WFG will do next regarding the fundraiser money, but I'm sure they'll find some way to put it into good use.

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  • 1 month later...

Unfortunately no. We're actually still working to get some of RedFox's work during his limited work prior to the fundraiser added to the game. Since the fundraiser wasn't quite as successful as we hoped it's going to be hard to find a developer who could work for only about a six month period yet integrate into the team and maintain their work in the future.

Fortunately, open-source volunteer development is coming along pretty well with incremental performance improvements being worked on. Sorry I don't have better news.

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Possibly more volunteers the better... And the way you get them is by sending word out, advertising.

All those guys still on AOK heaven making mods, some are programmers need to come and give this game a serious look. This is the best game yet since aoe 1 and 2 with lots of potential and leniency ;)

And take my word for it I too, am an aoe veteran. WOLOLO.... ;)

Edited by burzum2
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To put that in perspective, the typical commit rate was somewhere around 0-3 commits per day. You can track every 0AD change made on the timeline.

The development pace has been quite remarcable the last week, but I fear it will slow down in the coming weeks when school/work starts. It shouldn't be a problem to have a lot of volunteer activity while a freelance programmer works on short/long pathfinder rewrite or JS to C++ rewrite. I beleive a more playable game is best way to create a larger community. :)

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The development pace has been quite remarcable the last week, but I fear it will slow down in the coming weeks when school/work starts. It shouldn't be a problem to have a lot of volunteer activity while a freelance programmer works on short/long pathfinder rewrite or JS to C++ rewrite. I beleive a more playable game is best way to create a larger community. :)

Finding one capable of doing it is a whole lot more difficult though. We can pay him for about 6 months only. So he should be willing to give up his job for only 6 months. Next to that, not every programmer can do it. There are very few who have the capabilities of improving it. And on top of it, the particular problem, the pathfinding is due to gameplay reasons completely tied to the rest of the game (the software is quite modular, but every aspect in the game requests something position based). If the the programmer we find, would want to do it purely for the money, and only invest the time in it we can pay him to invest, 6 months would barely be enough to get to know our engine.

So basically, we need a top programmer, who's willing to learn to know the project before starting to work on it, and who's willing to give up his job for 6 months.

I think trying to attract more programmers who want to work for free on a free project is a more viable approach. The money can be used for that attractive purpose rather than just for paying one person.

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As I have mentioned before, I am a programmer, and I would honestly give the pathfinder rewrite a try if I had any experience with C++, but unfortunately I don't.

Well, what makes things even more complicated in relation to the pathfinder is that Philip already has nearly finished a new pathfinder so starting afresh would be a waste. But because few of us can understand Philip's pathfinder and Philip seems to have little spare time progress has been very slow.

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  • 1 month later...
...

I think trying to attract more programmers who want to work for free on a free project is a more viable approach. The money can be used for that attractive purpose rather than just for paying one person.

I was under the impression that the money (including mine) was first and foremost going towards paying Jorma (redfox) to increase game performance. It seems to me like this is a pet project for a selected few who drove out the person we paid you (the dev team) to hire.

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RedFox didn't want to work on it any more, not for such a short period. So we either need to find someone else, or use the money in a different, but still honest, way. For the moment, nothing of the money is used, so if you think you know someone who could do the task, you can propose him.

We can't force someone to work on it either, that would be counter productive.

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To be perfectly honest there were some issues before the fundraiser even finished. We are still trying to use the code he wrote before the big fundraiser (we paid him with funds from previous smaller fundraisers). One issue we had (of a couple) was that he tended to put too many changes in a single patch. His code from that work was all tied up in one massive patch, so extracting anything useful has been a challenge. We cannot just apply the entire patch because it introduces some major regressions. By the end of the fundraiser, both he and we were frustrated, and we both decided it was best for him to take the other job offer he had.

We haven't decided how to use the current funds in light of these difficulties. We don't want to end up in a similar situation as before.

We should have some news on the fundraiser perks soon. :)

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Paid development which address "Threading to use more than one CPU core" #1886 would be very, very, very nice.

That doesn't need paid development. It's just not done because it makes debugging harder (and we're in alpha after all). But a big part of our code is thread safe. So things like the pathfinder and AI could be threaded rather easy.

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