Thanks to arseholery pride and douchebaggery by Foreboding Angel who saw the good of his Pride as more important than the good of the community, Shard has been discontinued.

My personal work on 0.32 will not be completed, and the work already on github will not be updated. Work already on my machine locally will not be pushed.

I ask all mirrors of Shard be taken down. I hereby remove my permission to include Shard with the nonWindows builds of spring.

Special measures will be taken where no alternative to Shard exists once a solution.

And just a reminder, you all have this douchebag to thank:

Foreboding Angel


You have 5 days to find a new AI and remove Shard from your repositories, file hosts and installers.

( Notices will be made to Desura and Dreamhost demanding Shards removal from Forebodings Servers )

How do we get Shard back?

An apology from Foreboding to me and the community, and a promise never to bother me again. I'm an open source developer, lobbying and harassment has no place here.

---------------tl;dr--------------
shard continues, read final statement here

That's not in the spirit of Open Source!

Tough. I've made my position clear, and now I'm following through. Shard has died and it's time to clean out the zombies.

If you don't like it then you should've gagged Forb sooner

Ofcourse Shard being opensource, developers could just fork it but then that would be the ultimate kick in the teeth for Foreboding proving him completely and utterly wrong. But I'd hope you respect my decision.

Ok, its your choice, but i beg you to reconsider, as this is a good ai, and if you can find some good will, pls let it be, consider it as a donation to this comunity, or at least to some of us that enjoy it.

I dont know the reasons, nor i want to know them.

Do we know the numbers of people who play with AI?

I'm unsure of numbers myself, the problem I see is not that a lot of people will be deprived, but rather that there are projects that only have Shard for an AI for which this has disastrous consequences.

I need to talk to Azaremoth, and anybody else in a similar predicament should come forth.

The only person who can undo this is Foreboding Angel.

Well, what can I do? How about cookies?



Don't punish us, punish forb!

you want Shard to be gone from public completely?
what would you see as a valid fork?
would the name have to change?

i mean.. i bet that for example the CT folks want to go on using it, and as it is GPL, they can do so, without having to do any change (eg the name).
or say... as long as someone sees fit for it, he can go on using it, and i think he should. this includes also, for example, its inclusion as a submodule in the engine repo.

i am just confused cause... well it makes no sense to try to punish forb by killing your AI, while he was the only one that did not like it.

.. am just totally confused.

It's just AF doing his princess.

---

At this moment I do not consider any forks to be valid. Put quite simply, the threat was made on the premise that foreboding was not stupid.

Alas it turns out he WAS stupid, and I do what I say I'll do. I took a gamble and I lost, and it saddens me, I put a lot of time into this, and it's my last project in this community. I'd rather not see it go.

But I can't continue development with the kind of hassle and badgering from Foreboding Angel. He makes the prospect of developing further a headache. He can't be relied on for even the most primitive of bug reports, and he'll complain endlessly that I'm incompetent and ignoring his issue, despite me making clear I need more information. I can't develop software when I have someone persistently lobbying me.

Sure if it were a larger community and I had more users I could just ignore him, but it isn't, and there aren't as many people invested as say when NTai was around. There's too much overlap.

I have other ideas and projects that I could work on that people want me to do, but I kept Shard because it was being used, to fix the AI itch, and as a favour for the community.

So how do I punish foreboding and not the community? Put simply I can't. He's trying to man handle me into a Lua AI, and when I said no he refused to listen as if I just hadn't heard him. Go look in the thread and see how many time he said I wasn't listening. I can't proceed With development in that kind of atmosphere. I'm a programmer, not a politician, and I've never had to handle this before here.

To those affected

Please make yourselves known. I want to assess just who is affected and what I can do to accommodate. I'm not in the business of leaving people in the gutter.

what happend there?

It would have been a Shard release

Legally, since Shard was released under the GPL, he owns nothing but the name and you're free to do whatever you want with his last stable release (within the bounds of the GPL). But he's asking you not to use it anymore as part of this current tantrum.

So rename and rerelease as a fork is legal.

But you'll hurt AF's feelings.

no point to punish the whole community because of someone elses attitude.

Indeed, there's nothing stopping people from ignoring my request and continuing development, and I'd be flattered if people did.

Ill make a fork, ill call it Splinter.

because of an obstacle you will simply fall apart? if you think that has no forces then give up, it was not for you, but I see many people supporting you if you decide to stop for me is just a reminder of who I would not be... thanks for all you have done until now

I've achieved what I wanted to achieve, and thanks for forb I no longer enjoy development, so I'm moving to things i do enjoy.

Someone else will do far better than I did, as others have done before

Stopping work on something you no longer enjoy is one thing but blaming a single person for ruining it is just petty. This forum, the lobbies, IM and email all have tools for dealing with exactly this kind of issue. I've had 2 particularly annoying users on my ignore/foes list for years now. In fact if I remember correctly it was YOU who first suggested that approach to me.

My productivity skyrocketed once I stopped caring about the blatant crap being spouted by a certain user (lets call him 'Mr A' - you know who I mean). Eventually 'Mr A' got sick of the sound of his own noise and left. Point is I see no reason why any dialog between you and Forb is necessary and I certainly don't see you getting an apology. Just let it go - both of you.

The lesson here is nothing good comes from caring what people say on the Internet. If they're talking crap most people will figure it out themselves and the people who can't tell truth from fiction are generally of little consequence anyway (they're going to fuck up regardless). Chances are the only people even reading this debate have been around here long enough to know what's what even if you never respond to Forb's allegations/demands and vis-versa.

Anyway. What's missing from all this is a thankyou for the work BOTH of you have put in Spring development. Shard is a good AI and Evo is a good game. This animosity is undermining all that with no benefit to anyone.