On Ares, Probabilities, the Future and the State of the Community

[Renegade]

Let me begin this post by saying that everything that follows is my own, personal opinion. I didn't coordinate it with the other coders, it's not an official Ares news release, or anything of the like. It's just my personal point of view, and I thought I'd get it out there to maybe get a discussion going and get some clarity on a few things.

To put the main issue out there from the start: Working on Ares has been frustrating in recent weeks. Not because of the code, but because of the community.
As far as I know, we're the last patch standing, so to speak. The last exe-enhancement project left for YR, or at least the last one actually delivering anything useful.
Basically, you've got the choice between stock YR, increasingly ancient, unsupported patches, and Ares.
One would think that gives Ares some kind of importance to the modding community.

And yet, if you look around...you don't exactly get the impression anyone gives a shit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not whoring for the fame or the attention. I've been in this community longer than the vast, vast majority of people I meet these days, I've met my fair share of people, I've pissed enough people off - rest assured, I got enough attention.
This is not about fame. This is about support and meaning.

To put it bluntly, if no one cares, we, as developers, don't have to waste our time on this project.
I don't know if you realize this, but wading through Westwood's crappy code, with no comments, no variable names, and lots of the original code obscured by compiler optimizations, isn't exactly fun or easy. Even those of us who don't do the hard work end up having to work with an API that's less than ideal, riddled with variables of unknown type or purpose, and with no direct access to the surrounding code to change anything on the fly.

Now don't get me wrong - we appreciate the geeky challenge, and we like doing this for the community.
But that last part is where I, personally, increasingly see the problem.
I simply don't see that the community cares anymore.

Take our testers, for example:
Anyone who's been here for a while knows it has become a sad tradition for us to have to either replace the testers or pressure them into working to get any kind of response out of most them.
The truth is, just yesterday, we were discussing how quickly we could release 0.2 - and the unknown factor wasn't how long we'd take for the code, it was whether we had any chance of actually getting the code tested, so we could release it.

We haven't had a single comment on the tracker for four days, and overall, we only had 4 comments in the entire past week - irrelevant comments, giving us no helpful information for development.

No bug reports. No implementation feedback. No resolution confirmations.

Now, I'll readily admit I didn't check any code in recently, either - but I'm one guy, working on one feature.
We're talking about two dozen testers, 38 bugs marked as "to verify", and an unknown army of bugs hidden in the code.
The probability it'd be that quiet if people actually cared is...small, to say the least.

And it's not just the testers. It's the general community as well. Look around you - how many random Ares modders did you see post in the past week?

We have actively tried involving the community numerous times - see the NIPPLES AREOLA thread, the DFDs, ICS, the offer to take an active role in vetting features on the tracker.

But what difference did it make? Deadness abounds. The only times people come around are when they want something from us.

It has been said the community is dead for years on end. I don't believe it's dead. But I'm beginning to believe the critical mass to achieve anything in it is gone.
There simply don't seem to be enough modders left to generate significant interest in a new development.

(And this not even getting into the fact that 70% of active modders today seem to be mentally under-equipped to use Ares anyway, that another 15% seem to be content with the Russian Bug Patch 1.53 SE Turbo HD Remix Edition, and that, of the rest, a bunch of people simply aren't switching because Ares doesn't have features they need - which is fine, but how is Ares ever going to get those features, if none of those modders uses their weight and support to help?)

I'm sorry if that all sounds very emo-blog-ish, but I have an IDE full of source code open in another window, a bunch of very annoying bugs to fix in Chrono Prisons, and I honestly can't tell who I'm fixing them for. Source code doesn't magically appear out of nowhere. Fixing all the currently known bugs will take several hours of my time overall, several tests from god knows whom (since the testers are gone), and compiling effort from either Alex or D.
And I just don't know that anyone even cares.

I am sitting here, looking at the prospect of wasting several evenings on this, and I honestly don't see a reason to do so - as far as I can tell, no one cares anyway.

I will be very clear at this point; I hate that it'll sound like a threat, or like a whiny child going home, but it needs to be said: I have recently started a new job, so my spare time is severely limited. And as it is right now, I honestly have no motivation to waste that little spare time on Ares.
I'll help release 0.2, no doubt about it, and I'll probably do 0.3, too, since I invested way too much organizational effort into 0.3's release already to let it slip, but after that...no guarantees.

I'd be happy to see that the community cares, to see an outpouring of support and the community uniting to help improve YR's engine for the benefit of all of us, and I'd gladly help with a project that actually matters to people.

But right now, I'd be surprised if more than five people even read this post, let alone do more than promise they will actually start testing for a change.

And before this turns into a post-fest of "I like Ares": I'm not talking about lip service. 50 posts by random people about how much they love Ares and want it continued are nice, but they mean jack shit for development. RandomDude45's love for Ares doesn't help me fix my bugs or test my features.
I'm talking about actual, active support.
I'm talking about feedback, both on the forums and on the tracker.
I'm talking about useful bug reports.
I'm talking about active feature vetting, including trying to kick out the useless ones.
I'm talking about helping to proof-read, update and improve the documentation.
I'm talking about tutorials.
I'm talking about screenshots.
I'm talking about a reference implementation.
I'm talking about goddamn coding help, if you're capable.

Love is nice.
But love doesn't change the fact that, right now, 95% of the work is done by 3-4 people, and there's no sign it actually matters.

And even if it did matter - it's also a simple question of sustainability: pd already left. VK already left. I just said I might focus on something else. If the community truly wants Ares to continue, it's in its own interest to get some more coders involved - 'cause the ones currently active aren't gonna be around forever.
Especially not if their workload increases because they lack a third/fourth coder and they have to test everything themselves.


So yeah. This is how I feel. Looking at the forum statistics, I can't even be sure anyone will read this post. But at least no one can say there was no warning.
If the community truly does care, it should get off its ass and show it. If not...well, then nobody will care if I focus on something else.

(For those who forgot, this was my opinion and my opinion alone, not coordinated with the other coders, and not as an official statement by the Ares developers.)

P.S.: In anticipation of select people complaining about me not being "cooperative" of "receptive" - I'm talking about helpful contributions. Not useless shit that wastes even more of my time. You will find that, if you actually make a helpful contribution, I can be very friendly and thankful.