WIP: Advanced Vehicles

Nah, afaik this is an older one. He had attempted on a bunch of different SDKs. An IntelliJ IDEA based plugin, a JavaFX one then a Lemur one and his latest attempt was based on Swing ( jme-swing-devkit).

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thanks for info.

so the JavaFX i assume was: jme-jfx-devkit
didnt knew about swing one.

do you have fork of lemur one? whats difference between them and why so many of them?

Not sure.

By the way, I think we have gone offtopic :slightly_smiling_face:

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Iā€™ve created my own fork of Advanced Vehicles and have plans continue developmentā€”after 3 November. If anyone wants to collaborate, please get in touch.

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Please also raise these concerns. We can improve the documentation etc. Current SDK plugin system requires Swing knowledge. The biggest gripe I have is that the SDK is sometimes a bit tricky to build. But other than that, I at least donā€™t really know what makes it difficult to build a plugin for that.

I left because of lack of confidence as a whole. Iā€™m under constant scrutiny from Ricardo with virtually every decision I make, and oxplay in support of virtually anything he said, which is fine, but it felt like there was no support for me, despite the fact that I worked tirelessly every hour of the day in every aspect of the engine and its supporting areas. For me it was the nail in the coffin. I work. I have 3 children. I have a mortgage, a wife, a life outside of jMonkey, and when I took on the task of bringing in financial support I knew full well it would be tough, but I did not anticipate that it would be such a lonely endevour with virtually nobody supporting me. It felt like posts supporting my actions or intentions were far and few between, if at all. The team as a whole didnā€™t really want to get involved either. Iā€™m sure they had their reasons, and I can only respect that. In every other aspect they have been stellar. But there comes a point when as a husband and father I have to consider whether I can continue this difficult daily battle of convincing people, writing software, managing servers, finances and all the other things I took on - and whether it was worth doing so at the expense of my mental state and family life. I donā€™t even get paid for it. And I knew this already, but when nobody really cares that youā€™re putting in everything you have into it, I have to ask myself why Iā€™m doing it. Itā€™s mentally exhausting with no reward.

I donā€™t really know what else I can say. This certainly isnā€™t a post I wanted to make. It isnā€™t how I wanted things to go. My vision has been repetetively clear, but you win some, you lose some. Iā€™m sad that all of the effort, mentally and physically, amounted to this, but it appears to me that I am not the person you guys want; that can do what needs to be done. I canā€™t do it alone. Thereā€™s no support. No appreciation. No thanks. Nothing. I donā€™t even get paid. I am a human. I have a family. I cannot continue to put myself through this when I could just the same walk away.

But for all of those that did sponsor me I thank you dearly. Genuinely. Nobody in the team endorsed
me, nobody in the community encouraged you to do so. Virtually every post youā€™ll read is based on
scrutiny and doubt, yet you chose to put your hard earned money into sponsoring my work. Every time
I recieved an email of a new sponsor it brought untold encouragement to me. I genuinely and excitedly told my wife every time, no matter how small it was, and she in turn would push me to keep going, that I could do this. To keep working, and that encouragement got me through a lot of difficult times. And to those that contributed to repositories I made, your interest and PRs - as anybody that has published open source software will know - is always encouraging to see, and I thank you for your precious time.

But moving on, I hope some person or some people are able to do what I could not, and that maybe they will
get the encouragement they need to see it through. Maybe that person will be Ricardo, maybe somebody else, but I do genuinely hope that JME continues to remain alive and prosper. Iā€™ve learned a great deal from
this community and still believe that itā€™s one of the best engines out there. Not because of itā€™s rich feature-set, but because of the community itself.

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Itā€™s unfortunate that you chose to take down all of your repos on the way out. Weird kind of open source, I guess. No warning or anything.

So kind of a giant FU to the community because of a couple people.

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Actually the majority of repositories were forked by oxplay and ali_rs. If anybody else wants a copy of a repository that wasnā€™t forked Iā€™ll zip it up and send it to them.

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You werenā€™t under scrutiny from Riccardo. You wanted to do things your way, i voiced my opinions regarding that, proposed alternatives and ways to reduce server maintenance (that i would have implemented myself) and help with some of your tasks so that you could have more time for things that are not jme related.

You refused everything, and now youā€™ve left because you cannot handle different opinions.
Iā€™ve been often criticized on discord for my code and proposals, Iā€™ve just implemented solutions to make everyone happy, or at least considered the criticism. You canā€™t do that somehow.

You didnā€™t want my help and now you are complaining you didnā€™t have the help of anyone.
I also asked if you could please keep the things on until they were migrated, you didnā€™t do that either.

I know other people had opinions but they didnā€™t want to voice them to not upset you. The difference is that I donā€™t care about your feelings.

By the way if you could please add an opensource license to the store code, it would be awesome, since we could continue development as a community, to which i think you are still welcome, because, and i think everyone agrees with this, despite the disagreements, your contriubtions were still objectively valuable.

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i do remove my emotional based post, i will just say ā€œdont lieā€.
anyway everything is in post hisotry to read if someone need.

I didnā€™t write the post above to continue any argument, simply to explain to the sponsors as to why I am no longer continuing what I started. I felt they deserved an explanation. Nothing more.

I doubt Iā€™ll ever log on again. I wish you guys all the best. Iā€™m sure with the right person at the helm JME can succeed. Time for me to move on. Please feel free to revoke my admin rights on the forum. I canā€™t revoke it myself.

@Jayfella I assume we all have responsibilities outside the project: school, job, family, mortgage, or something. I tell myself that the time I spend on JMonkeyEngine is rewarding in itself; I donā€™t need thank-yous for it. Even so, I pay attention to stars and likes. Weā€™d all benefit from more encouragement, and I will try to keep that in mind going forward. Thank you for reminding us of the importance of encouragement.

I concur with Paul that the sudden takedowns felt like a giant FU. If I ever decide to leave the project, Iā€™ll remember that feeling and try not to replicate it.

If you were under extra scrutiny, probably that was because you were raising and spending money in the projectā€™s name. Many people (myself included) have irrational attitudes around money. We canā€™t fix human irrationality, but techniques for coping with it exist. Going forward, I hope project funding will be handled in a more transparent fashion.

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I reply out of respect for Stephen.

Again - my repositories were forked by at least 2 people. The only inconvenience is someone else has it now, not me. In addition, if there are any that are not forked, I will happily zip and send them as I mentioned.

In regard to transparency: it may escape peopleā€™s mind that when I started this funding project that the server bills were left outstanding and as a result was turned off. Nobody did anything. It was left to die. It was down to my effort that it got paid and continued in that vein to this day. I also continually and endlessly vented that ā€œpaying a billā€ was not my style. It was and will always be to improve. Costs increased in line with traffic and consumption. Do we all remember not being able to even change avatars because there literally was zero mb available on the server? Now you can upload images without regard. Services increased. A new store. Future services were also being readied to be deployed. Thereā€™s only so much you can do with a shared cpu, 80gb of space and 2gb ram.

My experience of managing servers shows that cpu utilisation along with memory are the bottlenecks, not disk drive utilization, hence I picked a server costing less than our current setup with the resources required not only for current expansion, but for the future services I have outlined all along. Combined with the drop in sponsorship, it was not a request for more sponsorship, it was a plea to stop dwindling income and a reminder that we must keep improving, and that sponsorship not only paid for current and future services, but also acted as a contingency for bad months, unexpected bills and any other situation that may arise requiring monetary resolve. I had been very clear on all of this. It is also important to note that legal advice is expensive yet detrimental to acquiring the ability to sell software. As are accountants. These were the improvements that again had been vehemently and clearly outlined from the start. It must also be said that I provided without fail everything promised - and beyond. Over 50 repositories of game demos and tech demos, and additional starter templates for newcomers to name a few.

5 years ago there were at least 10 developers that were critical to the future of JME. Today there are 3. This is what happens when nothing improves. Some very talented individuals have gone for various reasons - most of which can be deduced to the fact that movement was all but gone. I canā€™t speak for those people in reality but I can tell you that at the very least, had JME improved at a steady pace, those people may have at least have been replaced by new talent. But the engine doesnā€™t attract that kind of talent because it needs to up its game! And that was exactly what I was doing.

I understand completely that endorsement also means blame. I didnā€™t expect the team to lay their wrists on the line. But when met with resistance itā€™s impossible to keep relentlessly pushing forward. Eventually Iā€™m going to get exhausted. And I did.

Again - I hope JME can continue to live on. I hope it gets the leader it needs to do that. I wish nothing but success to the engine, but I say this with experience - you must keep improving. In an ultra competitive market such as this, simply paying a bill and reducing services is as good as laying down and waiting to die. I cannot do that. Itā€™s not me. And so, I must walk away.

Is it possible for you to open source the store code or are you taking that with you?

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And note: if you donā€™t want to do the work to add a license then we would just need you to give us written permission to add one.

Sure. You have my consent to license the SoftwareStore private repository under the BSD 3-Clause license.

Before open the repo to the public you need to check whether there are any static passwords that need to be moved to a configuration.

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Thanks, Jay.

For posterity, here is a screen cap just in case posts get deleted/edited or whatever in the future and lose the intent of the discussion. Though I guess these could be faked, tooā€¦ at least you have the opportunity to object if I faked it. :slight_smile:

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I have no intention of disputing it. Itā€™s just a shame it took something so drastic as someone leaving to bring you guys together. I hope you can do something positive with it.

If thereā€™s any other repository that I didnā€™t add a license to, let me know, and Iā€™ll happily consent to those being BSD-3, too.

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Note: I wasnā€™t suggesting that you would dispute it but some folks rightfully get spun up about the pedigree of licenses and whether or not they were applied arbitrarily without the authorā€™s intent. (See big questions we had about some of the blender loader code.)

Given that you intend to be a less active participant in the community, there is some consideration that at some future time someone may choose to purge stale accounts or some other nonsense. A screen cap is just a little extra insulation.

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James:

Thanks for your contributions to the JMonkeyEngine Project.

I expect youā€™ll be welcomed back after you apologize for the disruption you recently caused.

Good luck with your future endeavors,

ā€“Stephen

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