FIFE SOS

[Brother None]

The FIFE monthly update:<blockquote>Welcome to yet another FIFE news update, this time it's a rather important one. You've prolly already noticed that there was not much SVN activity after the last official release last month. Phoku is busy with his exams and jobs and won't have time for FIFE in the next couple of months. As everyone who's still left on the team seems to be incredibly busy too I want to send an SOS to all FIFE fans out there.

There were no major code additions to our Subversion repository since about one month. So if no wonder happens this phase of slowdown will probably last for several months. We know that nobody is eagerly awaiting to join a team that is in a massive slowdown but our aim was to be always honest about the status of the project. If you know any developer who could help out and would be interested to work on FIFE: don't hesitate to send us a message to our mailing list: fife-public@lists.sourceforge.net

We're in the desperate need of experienced C++ coders who are interested in working on the engine or the editor. If we won't be able to attract new contributors we'll make no big steps forward in the development for the next several months. There is a list with tasks to address for interested developers:
https://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/engine/report/1

Furthermore you should read our getting started guide for developers to find out about the basics of FIFE:
http://wiki.fifengine.de/index.php?title=Getting_started

Last but not least there are also some small signs of hope for the FIFE team. We got two new interested developers on team: labrat and shales. Labrat currently works on a general solver interface and wants to integrate the Micropather pathfinding library into FIFE:
http://www.grinninglizard.com/MicroPather/

Shales works on color-keying for the SDL renderer to speed up the transparency effects with software rendering. But both new developers are rather busy with their real life so their enlistment alone won't help to boost our progress significantly. We hope that someone hears this call for help

Last but not least we're planning to restructure our wiki. mvBarracuda already started to overwork the wiki frontpage and planned more important changes for the next weeks. We would like to get some feedback from the community how they like the new wiki structure and what could be improved:
http://wiki.fifengine.de

See you at the next development update and I hope we can bring you better news next time.</blockquote>

 

[Tails]

like always there is the same problem in all project on FO scene... problem with people. Well good luck guys, don't let FIFE die. It will be a shame for community...

 

[Davaris]

like always there is the same problem in all project on FO scene... problem with people. Well good luck guys, don't let FIFE die. It will be a shame for community...

This is not just a Fallout community thing, every volunteer team faces this same problem. The only way to get through it is for the main guy to keep plugging away for years on end.

The other solution is to get funding, but then you'd have to make what the man wants and 99% of the time it will be garbage.

 

[McArrowni]

I hate it when I see good projects like these needing people, and I know I'm not good enough yet. Nor do I have the time to help out yet (stupid classes).

Good luck to FIFE though, I hope you find the right people.

 

[radnan]

What most of these projects almost always lack is a dedicated programmer... especially in this type of endeavour you need just one guy to handle the programming since its not a team that meets face to face every day... one truly dedicated guy can pull it through ... hope you find him ... since a lot of the artwork is allready there people would surely start making missions were the engine complete.

Good luck and dont give up. Try to find support from the russian front ..

 

[mvBarracuda]

The other solution is to get funding, but then you'd have to make what the man wants and 99% of the time it will be garbage.

Receiving funding is no option for us. This project is meant to be a free solution for indy devs so we don't intend to charge for it either.

What most of these projects almost always lack is a dedicated programmer... especially in this type of endeavour you need just one guy to handle the programming since its not a team that meets face to face every day... one truly dedicated guy can pull it through ... hope you find him ... since a lot of the artwork is allready there people would surely start making missions were the engine complete.

As I said about 10 times already: it's not about finishing the engine because open source is _never_ finished. Our aim is to reach a state where you could start making your first mods. However this won't happen before the completion of the 2007.1 milestone.

It's foolish to just rely on one coder who does the majority of the work. Because you can never guarantee that nothing unfortunate happens and he leaves the team. That's why we were searching for new member for quite some time now. In the end we've done a lot to advertize the project and tried to attract new members. This gives us the good feeling that we've tried everything that was possible

Good luck and dont give up. Try to find support from the russian front ..

AFAIK one of the TeamX guys already posted at their site about FIFE. We had Russian members on the team but the language barrier was an issue :-/

 

[Sander]

What most of these projects almost always lack is a dedicated programmer... especially in this type of endeavour you need just one guy to handle the programming since its not a team that meets face to face every day

...
No, what you *need* is coding and documentation standards everybody adheres to, as well as a clear software architecture.

 

[mvBarracuda]

No, what you *need* is coding and documentation standards everybody adheres to, as well as a clear software architecture.

I guess that's at least one good aspect of FIFE: we did receive very positive feedback about the quality of our code as well as about the general design of the engine.

Now we just need some talented developers who're willing to support us on our journey