Another update about the project progress. Or perhaps that should read ‘lack of progress’.
The past months have shown a serious slowdown in the progress as you will no doubt have noticed. The team has gradually shrunk to no more than a couple of people for each ‘discipline’. The team at this moment is as follows:
[b]Project organisation:
[/b]-Pier[b]
Concept art:[/b]
-Mehmet
-Pawel
Modeling:
-David
-Pier
-Simon
Realtime engine development:
-Flavien
Texturing:
none
Website:
-Emiel
-Tim
At the same time the people involved have become increasingly busy. Most people (including me) hardly have time to work on the project at all.
So apart from the concept part, the team is lacking manpower in all sections.
The result of this is that [i][b]the progress on the project has stalled almost completely.
[/b][/i]Over the past months I've been thinking a lot about how to proceed. I've tried to make the project more interesting and get people more enthusiastic by letting the project move beyond being 'just a lotr city in a realtime engine'. On the project forum we had a thread running to discuss how we should do this, but unfortunately it resulted in nothing substantial or realistic.
Looking at the rather downward motion we're in now, we could decide to do a couple of things. Even though most of them aren't at all satisfactory, we can either:
[ul]
[li]Pull the plug and stop the project. This will be quite clear for everyone involved or interested.[/li][li]Put the project ‘on hold’ until any new substantial amount of (participating) interest in it arrives.[/li][li]Continue the way we do, which means doing something now and again, but in the end not getting to finish a lot. That way it’d be rather unclear for everyone, and the project could easily last for years upon years before even coming close to completion.[/li][li]Cutting on all goals, in terms of scale, quality etc and trying to finish it as soon as possible. This would probably mean making the team fixed to just a couple of people, and aiming for no more than a year. In other terms: stop it being a large collaborative project.[/li][/ul]Any other ideas would be appreciated.
For me personally, in the oncoming 6-11 months I’ll only be able to do the project organisation, no extra work like texturing or modeling. (Apart from when we’ll just continue this way, then there won’t be much organisation to do).
There is however a small bright spot in this dark post. (Let's just hope it's not the train coming towards us). I've completed fixing the material bugs for v12 today and sent the updates to Flavien. This will allow him to continue the development for the release.
