Wedge

Well, depends on whom[1]  the drama was coming from... It was very obvious that the drama on our side was from frustration, and their drama came from fear of moving (too much) forward.

Anyway :P

1.	Trying to get the hang of 'proper' English by the book... This is 'whom' here not 'who', right? :^^;:

Yeah, least we can say is that it's been slow at SMF since 2009 or 2010... When I left SMF, they were at around rev 10069. Right now they're around rev 10600 or 10700 and 90% of these revs were for minor bug fixes. We made close to a thousand commits in the same time, with a good half being solid commits. It's just as you say -- SMF needs 'dedicated' developers, and they're not dedicated.

At first I thought it was because of the 'feature-frozen' rule. But now... Well, it's been over 2 months since SMF was released, and absolutely no new features were added to the SVN. I'm actually way more surprised by this, than by the RC-time lack of activity. It's like they're expecting the forks to do their work, and then they'll take the best BSD fork and make it their new codebase... :^^;: (Please make it Nightwish's, pretty please! ::) Although his code needs to be cleaned up, he can obviously work steadily and actually implement new things that matter.)

Anyway -- I was thinking that maybe Wedge was what SMF was in the beginning: a group of dedicated talented people with a vision and goals in mind, sharing similar ideas about the whole project in a way that it doesn't systematically create tension. What we need to be careful about, is that one of us (either Pete or I) stay onboard as long as possible (ideally the both of us) to oversee development, even if we don't participate in the actual coding any more. I think what killed SMF was that the entire original team had left at some point.

rev 967
(8 files, 13kb)

* More credit page fine-tuning. Still upset that the extra white space in the English version. Added a couple of special thanks. Added link to our online license. Removed unused text strings. Replaced we:titles with we:blocks. Also added Ante's real name in the credits. It's credited in plain view at http://www.lewisonline.ca/?p=426 after all... (Credits.php, Who.english.php)

* Removed third-party tool credits from AeMe and moved them to the main credit page. (Credits.php, ManageMedia.php, ManageMedia.language.php, Who.language.php, ManageMedia.template.php, Who.template.php)

Depends on the width of your browser, actually, since they're floated names... Thankfully for me, his name is far away from mine in 1280x1024 :^^;:

@Jeff> Would you say it's been this way since the original dev team (you, Unknown, etc.) left the ship? :P

rev 966
(7 files, 18kb)

* Another Credit page overhaul. It's a work in progress, so it'll be finished later.

+ Added a 'website credits' section to list Administrators and Global Moderators, so that the page can actually live up to its 'Website credits' status. (Credits.php, Who.language.php, Who.template.php)

- Removed a few things, such as unused credit areas and the 'general' thank you message to beta testers and translators... Okay, if they're doing a priceless job, then they need to be thanked by name, don't they? Plus, translators get to credit themselves anyway... (Credits.php, Who.language.php, Who.template.php)

+ Added credits for FamFamFam Silk icons and Diagona, and removed them from the AeMe area. Other AeMe items will come later. (Credits.php, ManageMedia.php)

! Added special authorization for img tags to hold action=media items. Unsure whether I should specify the sub-actions that actually perform the downloading or showing of an item... (Subs-BBC.php)

* Tweaked credit page visuals. (sections.css, Who.template.php)

@ Pete, I made a dirty query to get the website team list, but maybe it's stored somewhere in a special variable or something...? Or maybe there's a faster way of retrieving these?

I know... I can be evil when I want. :niark:

A year ago, on August 25, 2010, the first commit to the Wedge SVN server was made. I was hoping to get to rev 1000 before the first anniversary, but I tend to commit small bug fixes in a large batch so we 'only' reached the 965 commit milestone.

Well, a year later, what can be said of the project...? It already had a name back then, it still has the same. It had goals and a vision, it still does. Some adjustments were made to our schedule (personally, I decided to give up on a lot of the Noisen.com improvements I was planning to integrate, and will rewrite them later), and other things were pushed into the codebase as we went -- the product of being mainly fueled by passion, instead of money. I know, I know, it's a classic, but it's just the plain truth -- you can't work full time on an unpaid project for a year without some kind of solid passion and commitment. Back when we started the project, I wasn't 100% sure Pete would remain interested in the project in the long run. I was totally wrong, so I'd like to take the opportunity to give a big thumb up to him for being one of the driving forces (the other being me, but I may not say :P) behind the Wedge project, a shining beacon of courage and determination, a herdsman for the nerds, a vanquisher of spaghetti code and... What, I fully expect him to give me the same treatment in return! :niark:

(Oh, and in other news, apparently I'm back in the 'Friends' group at SM.org. Can anyone tell me when this kind of thing happens? :P)

What better way to celebrate the first anniversary than to release a public alpha version! Yes!

Okay, I'm playing with your nerves... There is nothing (yet), but it won't be too long now. As the commit process is now a public one, you've all seen we're still as busy as ever to fix bugs and add new features. I can't honestly see myself release Wedge without having first integrated Aeva into the avatar and attachment system, and I can't work on that before I can fully focus on it. And this month has been doing a very good work at distracting me: Nightwish's fork (interesting ideas, it's definitely going to be the worthiest competitor to Wedge if Nightwish can keep up for another year :D), playing a little gem of a game played Xenoblade (okay, so I passed on other RPGs and JRPGs these last few months because they're time eaters, but the guy made one of my all-time top 3 games so I have to play his titles, even if unrelated to Xenogears), and more generally a personal burnout and declining health (I'm not one to complain, though. These things happen in cycles.)

In short: I don't remember my original schedule, but right now my personal target is for a demo in early September, and an alpha in late September or October. I'm still kind of wary about releasing my code to a general audience. It's our baby you know... We want Harvard for it. Hopefully it'll spawn into Facebook. Or something else.

J'en suis flabbergasté. (long live frenglish.)