As Time Goes By

[Renegade]

Blablabla inactive testers blabla delayed release blablabla...

There's really no point in posting the same text yet another time, so I'll skip the obvious part and go straight to the message: Five months ago, I talked about the inevitable fatigue of eternally walking the soon-to-be-released-treadmill. I have made clear that we need a break from working on Ares "full-time", and I even went as far as planning to have that break be over by July.

Obviously, that didn't happen. Development keeps dragging on and on, and Ares- and inactive-tester-fatigue keeps building up. We have tried our best. We have cut down on features, we have stabilized what we could, we made clear what kind of tests and what information we need to push forward with Ares 0.2.

And yet, here we are again.

In the exact same spot, stalled by the exact same people, reliving the exact same scenario.
We're tired of it.

Therefore, we have come to a decision: If we don't have very clear indicators that the crew of testers is active and will stay active enough to facilitate a release within the foreseeable future by August 31st, 2011, we will begin a three month development break on September 1st.

In other words: You can either get off your ass and help us release Ares by fall, or you can wait until winter.
We have tried often enough, and we're simply done being trapped in 0.2 development because every time we're trying to go for a release, the testers walk away.

If we don't get reasonable, sustainable testing activity by August 31st, Ares development will be on hold until December 1st.

[assasing123]

awww i m just starting ;-; so far i only has 1 crash found... T-T! but i m active

[AlexB]

As you may have noticed, no new features have been committed for several weeks now. This is frustrating for me, too.

I have a bunch of new features lying around on my hard disk, but I won't commit them until 0.2 is out. Because this stack of features has piled up (and some new features depend on other new features that haven't been committed yet), my hard disk is jammed by now, as well as my mind. Thus, I stopped coding new stuff weeks ago, too.

Coding is my hobby and I like to accept challenges there. But with Ares and YR, implementing most of the feature requests is just dull work. Narrow-minded feature request and bug reports (like "We have side specific parachutes, but without unit specific falling speeds this feature is crap", "You implemented 'feature A' but you didn't do 'unrelated feature B'. Then I'll call this a bug. It is all your fault!" or "[something about the Chronosphere]") didn't help to make it an entertaining challenge again.

The point is: If the dull work doesn't help anybody (and nobody is interested in it), there's no reason for me to do it. There's other interesting things to code. The features on my hard drive have a very little chance of being committed, because the longer nothing interesting happens and the longer there is no progress, the less interesting Ares as a project becomes for me.

Having said that, I respect the fact that only new features keep a tester happy because it's a new toy to play with, but I did my homework. Now it's time for the people who wanted the results to prove them right or wrong. Until then I consider my coding job done.

(This is no basis for discussion. Please don't ask what the new features are or whether I can commit them anyhow. If you still want to ask, you missed the point of my post.)

[Graion Dilach]

And not just you wield that shoe. Speeder can confirm that I have stuff uncommitted to the SVN because I am waiting to get past 0.2. I am just bloody annoyed by the fact that how this is going, where this is going... and happening when I might could learn useful programming, not just useless course examples.

[eva-251]

I got YR and everything back. I've let myself be distracted by other games and temptations, but uh, I'll be on IRC tomorrow. Just tell me what I need to do.

[Steel Mirage]

I've noticed a significant increase in reporting on testing here and there. I realize that that is just my point of view, but consider this:
In the roughly thirty day period before this ultimatum was issued, the BugTracker had 22 topics updated, while Graion Dilachs "The Issue of Feedback" thread had three independent reports.
Since this thread was created, in the BugTracker, 50 topics have been updated, and 7 independent reports have come out of TIOF.

To be clear, thats a 250% increase in reporting. And its only been twelve days since this thread was started.

I understand that these numbers don't tell the whole story. A full analysis would take a bit longer, and would take a more objective eye, but on the surface, this is a remarkable improvement in tester involvement. At this pace, in the thirty day period after August 16th, we will have a five hundred percent increase in participation.

Using some creative extrapolation: If the original estimate was that, at last months rate of testing 0.2 would be released in 6 to eight months, at this rate, all other things being equal, 0.2 could be released in a month to a month and a half!

This is news filtered through rose colored glasses. Renegade has ultimate authority over approval for release, but I figured this might be a little pick me up for the troops.

Don't let this be an excuse to slack off! Now that many of us are back to school/work/bordello, we all have better things to do. Which frees up a great deal of procrastinatory time to be wasted here. So hop to it!

EDIT: After further review of the play (IE the dead bones of Report #2), the six to eight month prediction was based on average testing. Since average testing is ill defined, I still believe that the testing level we have achieved is a marked improvement over earlier levels. On the basis of that, I would like to make a motion that the aforementioned deadline be moved to the sixteenth of September to see if the current burst of testing will be sustained or if its just an initial sprint in reaction to fear over a development hiatus.

[DCoder]

Those updated bug statistics are skewed because yesterday I updated a lot of stale reports to request feedback or close them for good.

Over the month of August, 1726 direct downloads of ares 0.1 P1.zip were performed, that's not counting Launch Base. Directly underneath the download, there's a copy of this post asking for help.
Off the top of my head, people who have contributed to the bugtracker over this period: Graion, SM, Speeder, Drogan, Mig Eater, eva-251, YR Modder, mevitar, assasing123, FS-21. I'm sure I missed someone (sorry!), but that's still ~10 people. Most of them were around before that post was made, too. It's almost like a rounding error.