Re: [Adonthell-devel] Re: Kudos (was Update on collision work)

[Alexandre Courbot]

That is indeed, very positive things to read (to the point of raising
the dead, like me! ;))

I think Ingo clearly summarized the success of Waste's Edge: having
been able to get artists and programmers to effectively work together
in order to produce an open-source game that feels as polished on the
artistic side that on the programming side.

He also clearly summarized the current problem: we need another
release, but the development pace is very slow (indeed, since only Kai
is active on it). I'm in Japan with obviously too much things to do,
Joel now has a carrier to manage, and so on... I'm desesperate to free
some time to work on Adonthell again, because Waste's Edge has been
great memories, but I always failed so far. :'(

I think the project is going to stay more or less idle as long as
there is no active team. Kai has been the initiator and enlightened
leader since the beginning, and as long as he's around the project
cannot be considered dead or stopped. But my feeling is that he has to
rise new contributing forces again, since the old ones are kind of...
out of service.

Compared to a couple of years ago, it seems obvious to me that there
are more potential contributors wandering on the internet, the only
thing we need is to get them to see the project. That is, give the
project more visibility. We have a complete demo of our past work,
Waste's Edge, and some experimental bits of the new version. The
source code is clean. Docs are written, more than we never had. It
should be easier for newcomers to join the project, but compared to
the 2001-2003 years where Adonthell was under the spots, it has
completely lost focus today.

Life (and... end of university, mainly ;)) has gotten us more or less
out of the project. Kai, don't you think it's time to invite some
students in their late 10th/early 20th who have talent and are dying
to contribute to something that will be visible? How many thousand
downloads for Waste's Edge? How many distributions include it? This is
enough to convince people with talent to join us, and you did not even
have that when you started the project, but still managed to get a
solid team around the project for Waste's Edge. So, today it should be
easier to get contributors - we just have to call them!

I think this should be discussed, maybe on the general mailing-list,
but we should not release that subject until some action is actually
performed in that direction. What are your thoughts, old pals? ;)

Alex.