I disagree somewhat. It's always a sign of a healthy project when there are multiple developers. But diversity is also a good thing. The scarcity of users, maintainers and developers is a general problem for the community, but we can't hope to solve that by overinvesting in things that have proven to be unsuccessful in the sense that players are still dwindling and only one project(ZK) is still bringing them in, barely. I for one would rather see 10 new games than 10 new developers on BA. When it comes to coding, adding more developers doesn't necessarily mean quality improvement or faster development. As hoijui said it's better to have many and see which ones emerge as the best.very_bad_soldier wrote:Sorry, but I do not agree here at all. The last couple of years proved that it does not work for us. Each vanished project is wasted effort and sad for us. We have a bunch of lobbies, mods, widgets, etc. Even multiple lobby servers. Most of them run and maintained by single persons. Sorry to say, but in my opinion some of those one-man-projects are not in a good shape. For example we dont need 20 mods, we just need 3-4 proper ones.hoijui wrote: best thing is, to have lots of lobbies, and support all of them as well as possible, and over time, some of them will vanish anyway. this is open source, it does not work like ...
I do not speak about forcing anything on anyone but maybe someone wants to ask himself if he really wants to start another one of those one-man-projects instead of joining an existing team to make it stronger.
Well, as I said, no offense, just my opinion. I dont really expect to be able to change someones opinion here, so nvm. Sorry for the derail.
Currently almost every lobby is for a different programming language than the next. Therefore cross-recruiting of developers is pretty hard since programmers are creatures of habit. For instance I moved to scala now, this basically reduced any future chances of getting contributors by 80%(just a guess, but since they say 80% of all statistics are made up on the spot, why not) because that is not a popular language around here.
Additionally, you have to take into consideration peoples personal motivation and egos. Someone who just joined a lobby project will have a hard time making structural changes, even if they are well-motivated. As this thread has shown, some people here have bigger egos than others and won't listen to anyone else because they think they are always right. Although say, x(won't name) is one of the better lobbies we have right now, even despite many years of development and multiple developers, it still cannot even sort the channel userlist properly, or sort games by players properly. Simple things like this are very large deterrents because they indicate some foundational issues which most programmers don't like and will avoid. Additionally any program that has shown to be hard for the lead developer to fix bugs in is even harder for any contributor. If there was a really good lobby, semi-professional quality, then you'd see more contibutors attracted because people want to "hop on the good boat" so to speak. But currently most of the more experienced developers are tied up in engine development, so it's no surprise this is not the case.
