With blender 2.8 getting its first release candidate coming soon, do you think we will see an update to the engine? I know armorpaint has been getting a lot of updates but it doesn’t directly use blender like armory does. I figured we haven’t seen a release because blender was changing quite a bit over the last few months.
I’m not the developer, but expect slow to very slow progress for this engine.
I’m not the developer (I help a little though), but expect fast to very fast progress for this engine.
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Hey @RobDangerous,
I’m curious why you say that? I mean, I really hope you’re right. I just don’t see anything supporting that view. I mean, @lubos isn’t encouraging people to try and contribute to the engine. Merge requests are rarely accepted. He hasn’t even mentioned the last couple of releases exist anywhere on social, or the website, and 99% of @lubos’ energy seems to go into ArmorPaint rather than Armory. Where is the development likely to come from? I don’t ask this to put Armory down. I’d desperately love it to succeed. I’d love to help it succeed. I still love Armory. I just see very little hope for development recently, so if there is any I’d love to know where it exists, beyond benefiting indirectly from the odd bit of ArmorPaint development…
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On GitHub I can see nearly daily commits in the Armory repository (which is crazy for a one-man team, Lubos should really take some time off now and then), also lots of commits in iron and zui and almost all pull-requests are merged with only very few not yet taken care of. I do not understand how you come to your conclusions, where do you get your numbers from?
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Hi @Armored_Blob,
Could you expand on “Merge request are rarely accepted”?
I made a few pull request (7 to be exact and I plan to do more) and they were all accepted within a day or less, 1 was not accepted because @lubos asked if I could move the code to another repo, and after I moved it he accepted it. So I don’t understand where “Merge request are rarely accepted”.
If you refer to those open PR that have been sitting there for a while, well I’m not @lubos so I can’t answer for him, but I think it’s probably because they are not finished, or the author didn’t present them as finished, so work it’s still required before being accepted.
Although, I agree that maybe there is a “discouragement” for contributions by not knowing the “short-term” plans of @lubos for Armory/iron/etc, and that probably do not redirect work more efficiently towards where Armory might needed it the most.
Otherwise we might run into the situation where someone can possibly make some work on something that Lubos maybe was planning to get rid for a better solution and the information was not communicated until the PR was created, in that case I agree there is some miscommunication.
Lubos is not the talkative guy. Never was. But here is how you can all help with that: https://armory3d.org/fund.html - because the only thing that’s actually disappointing about Armory is how funding went down after Lubos made it open source.
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Well the reason behind my concern about “miscommunication” is because I want to help to make reaching “1.0” a little bit faster, with code, the only thing I have at hand right now.
If Armory gets more and more stable, I think more people will use it and thus bringing more funding.
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Sadly that didn’t work out so far.
I’m glad to see some differing opinions. It does sound like development is still continuing (slowly). I am glad that armorpaint is getting updates. It sounds like armory needs more funding to keep development going. Maybe when it gets funded he can hire more devs to help him.
Please ignore all the opinions, hop over to GitHub and have a look at the progress yourself, then tell us where we can find evidence for that supposed slowness.
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To be fair, I think in terms of innovation and speed at which things are being updated and shown and made production ready, Armory Paint is way ahead of Armory Engine. And we all know that’s because Armory Paint is well-funded whereas the engine is not.
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You point out that there are near daily commits, which is crazy for a one man team.
That’s pretty much my point.
It’s being pretty much locked into a near one man team with many merge requests often taking months to get replies. You say that Lubos was never talkative, but every release before 0.6 he posted about on social, while the 0.6 releases and later there’s been nothing. Meanwhile the Armory Twitter account posts roughly 7 tweets about Armorpaint for every tweet about Armory. Yes, the funding has gone down since open sourcing, precisely because no one is being told what funders have been getting for their donations, or even if there’s a future for the project. We still don’t know (despite my best efforts) what features were actually in the 0.6 release many months ago. There have been requests by myself and others to be allowed to help by letting us add to the docs. Thus far Lubos hasn’t allowed anyone else to even approve commits there.
If he’s not a particularly social guy then fine, I understand that. Just please, please allow someone else to help, otherwise there will only ever be commits from one guy who gets less and less interested as the funding drops because the project is invisible with a dwindling community because no one knows if anything has gotten better.
Meanwhile more community minded projects like Godot go from strength to strength hiring more full time contributors, sharing a whole communities achievements and garnering greater and greater attention and features.
We don’t need a project that’s amazing “considering it’s one guy” as his secondary project with dwindling funding and no communication with the outside world. We need a project that is an amazing synergy of talents from a community of passionate people working together, sharing our accomplishments and generating ever more funds to help from the excitement created by the results we achieve together.
Take a look at the number of commits and dollars raised over at Godot’s website. Take a look at their news feed. That’s the kind of results I’d love to see our community, including myself, create for Armory. I’m just tired of us being locked out so it’s extraordinarily difficult to impossible to help and watching the results gap widen evermore regardless of the metric viewed (commits, $ of funding, news shared, number of contributors etc).
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What you say about pull requests is simply not true as everyone can easily see on GitHub so please stop that nonsense.
I agree with your sentiment but if you take Godot as a role to follow take into consideration that they have a feature on their Patreon where you can vote for features; so the project might be “community-driven” as the community might suggest features, but the ones who have a final say are the patrons who put the money and can vote AFAIK.
I’d prefer something like the approach of the Blender Foundation: “hey here is a list of features you people asked for, if the fund reaches X amount we can work on those features”…
I think that moving from Patreon to a different platform affected this project, he should go back to Patreon with the new updates for promotion, he was doing well in that platform, that’s why the project got open sourced.
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The monthly payments dropped below the project’s stated threshold while it was still on Patreon so I doubt it would help a lot.
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Also Patreon might close the page again on a whim like it happened before. I think “paid incentives” like I mention before + some showcases of Armory current strengths might attract some “investors”, or contributors who want to future-proof Armory development.