I'm really sorry if I sounded too negative and patronizing or whatever. :oops:
I think that Spenoza pretty-much summed up the actual point that I was wanting to get across.
Some kind of community GitHub like system COULD work, if there's a person directing the show and deciding what to keep/trash.
The "Who gets to be God?" question will always tear those things apart, IMHO.
And while music and art are kinda piecemeal things, where people can leave and be replaced, you'll find that programming a game, particularly if you're using assembly-language for performance, isn't that way.
It's not just a matter of documenting things properly, as much as it is the sheer amount of things that a programmer is considering and juggling in their head when they're bringing together a whole bunch of different systems into the cohesive-whole of a game.
I saw a number of fully-commercial very-expensive projects go "boom" and collapse BITD because the programmer bailed-out or just couldn't take the pressure.
Another programmer can't just come in an pick-up-the-pieces, there's just too much in the way of implicit design-choices and design-implementation that aren't obvious.
The amount of time that it would take for another programmer to become comfortable with the existing code is often longer than it would take to just start everything from scratch again.
Trust me... any future projects I might start, I will make it a point to NOT ask for help from ANYBODY here for ANYTHING. Why? Because, from my experience, no... you CAN'T rely on help from others. Not in this scene, anyway.
I'm sorry that you're so frustrated at this point, and truly, nope you can't rely on someone to come-along and just slot into your plans and have the same passion for your project as you do.
Learning to program yourself so that you can work on it, is definitely an option. It'll take you a long time to gain the necessary proficiency, but it
can be done ... with enough
determination passion.
But let me tell you ... having a partner, that you can rely on, and who will give you feedback as you push each-other to improve things, would actually be more "fun", and be less-likely to just fizzle-out and fade-away.
Finding the
right teammate is a terribly difficult thing, especially if you don't know each-other and see each-other in real-life.
And when you do, eventually, find that teammate, at some point in the process, you'll have to loosen your control on the whole thing and let it become "our" project instead of just "your" project, or you'll end up losing them.
Yea, well, i've stuck by Xymati up to now. I don't see any reason to abandon it at this point.
Of course you should stick by Xymati, you've put too much good-work into it to abandon it, and I don't see anything in it (from what little I have seen), that shouldn't be achievable on the PCE.
But it does look like it'll take a reasonable amount of programming-talent to make it work properly.
I was thinking that xymati was on the frozen utopia 's hands
OldRover said this, back in January ...
I was working with Fragmare on Xymati but it was requiring a level of competence above and beyond what I was capable of at the time. I just didn't have the skills to program all the stuff it required. That's not an issue nowadays, now it's just time. Maybe it's something that can be picked up again in the future.
That's a wonderfully-honest and humble admission that he mistakenly (but with the best will and
determination in the world) took on something that was over his head at the time, and had to put it on the back-shelf while he improved his skills.
So now it's a matter of timing, and he's snowed-under with other commitments.
I understand how that's terribly frustrating to Fragmare ... but it's kind-of-life, and it seems one heck of a lot better than EsperKnight's coming along here, starting half-a-dozen different projects at once, getting folks over-excited, and then just letting them fade-away in silence when they became too much for him.
I mean, i know you had kind of openly offered to maybe code Xymati when you have the time. And believe me, you're more than welcome to. Knock yourself out, dude. But, quite frankly, I've heard it all before and I don't really know you all that well yet, so I just kind of file it under the "Yea ok, we'll see..." folder. No offense.
Absolutely no offense taken!
I think that if you look back at my PMs, I said that I was registering an interest, and that we should talk seriously when I'm free of my current commitments.
I hate to see all of the work that you've done just sitting there unused ... but that's far from a promise.
If/when I promise, I'll see it through to the end.
But I would have to be sure that I can share your
passion determination whatever in seeing it get done.
That's pretty much the same as I said to NightWolve recently when I found out that he'd suggested my name to Chris for the Battle Princess Madelyn project.
It looks somewhat interesting ... but unless I can actually feel that personal passion for the end-product, then I'm not going to get involved and mess around with people's hopes-and-dreams.
As I've mentioned to you ... I don't want to work on anything that doesn't try to be an almost-professional project that at-least-attempts to raise the bar in some way over what's out there.
Otherwise, I feel that my time is better spent working on tools to help out others, and on translations that make some of the best of the old professional Japanese games fully-accessible to an English-speaking audience.
P.S. Like touko, my
passion when it comes to creating something new, is far more oriented towards the SGX rather than the PCE.