Re: [Adonthell-devel] Sign of life

[Chris Frey]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 08:40:41PM +0200, Kai Sterker wrote:
> But first, the state were we have Waste's Edge again needs to be
> reached, at least in my opinion.

I think like that too... "if I just get here, a release will be suitable"
but I'm not sure that is correct anymore.  More like, "what's the minimum
I can polish to make a release?"  Because each new feature or bugfix is,
in theory, useful to somebody, but not very many people will know about
it if it is just a git commit or a mailing list notice.  It's the release
that makes that feature widespread and useful.

Ideally, it would be good if end users were driving the feature requests
to some degree, because that's when you've transitioned from scratching
your own itch to solving problems that other people have.  And when
people's problems are solved, users increase, and when users increase,
contributors increase.



> Something in style of the previous three 0.4 alpha releases
> (worldtest) could be done anytime. And with an official engine release
> it would also be possible to have an official tools release (as the
> tools require the shared libraries from the engine.

That sounds promising!


> During the website move, I had thrown out the 0.4 alpha releases, as
> they had been quite dated by that time. So offering another one might
> be something useful. But will it help to spark interest in
> contributing?

I think that might be the wrong question.  What we want is to spark users,
or in this case, experimenters.  The contributions come afterward, in
my experience.

Maybe a series of demo releases, instead of game releases, is better.
Each release would have some demo (maybe with docs) of a small feature
of the engine that is newly complete, showing how it works, and how to
use it, from a game designer's perspective.  With each release, that
feature gets widespread publicity, and as each small feature is demoed,
people's creative juices get tickled as they play with the demo.  Plus,
each release is an excuse to announce your project again on places like
Freshmeat/Freecode, which can increase potential users, and therefore
contributors.

Again, just my $0.02. :-)

- Chris