Future of armory?

[Kevin_DaGraca]

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.

[RobDangerous]

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.

[boogabelly]

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.

[Armored_Blob]

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).

[RobDangerous]

What you say about pull requests is simply not true as everyone can easily see on GitHub so please stop that nonsense.

[M_Ent8h]

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.

[M_Ent8h]

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”…

[Aryoksini]

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.

[RobDangerous]

The monthly payments dropped below the project’s stated threshold while it was still on Patreon so I doubt it would help a lot.

[M_Ent8h]

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.

[Shik]

Yeah, you are right. I think funding will increase when Armory reaches a stable state. When people realize that there is an open source and free alternative to Unity and Unreal right inside blender, they would gladly contribute instead of paying for subscriptions or royalty.

[MadMinstrel]

I let my subscription lapse due to how little communication there is. It really wouldn’t kill lubos to spend 10 minutes once a week to write up a short report. Not being talkative is not a valid excuse.

[RobDangerous]

Oh boy, the comments in here indeed are a valid excuse for avoiding communication though.

[M_Ent8h]

How so?
The only thing I see here is people concerned about the future of the engine…

[RobDangerous]

Well, maybe you’ll need to get your own open source project running to understand that. For me this forum is becoming an energy drain, not sure I can continue being around here either.

[tkp]

@RobDangerous, please stay around if you dare, your insights are very interesting !

I am still amazed by Lubos’ constant work day after day, and his vision still seems very relevant.

From my POV :

• pull requests are coming (30 contributors)
• and rovacado contributed a nice new website, so the constructive community exists
• AmoryPaint could seem to “drain dev power” from Armory, but dogfooding seems a nice practice to improve and stress-test the engine - the great performance gains for ArmoryPaint benefit to all Amory projects - and It also bring attention to the engine to different profiles and bring funding to Lubos.

On the practical side, using Armory was a very nice experience : installation was straightforward, the documentation and examples were very helpful for such a young project. For humble projects, the engine’s Present is already great, no Future

I’m glad that Armory is based on Blender, Haxe, and Kha, very powerfull and pragmatic technologies. Rust seems like a powerful tool. In my uninformed POV, biaised as a Haxe user, eventual performance issues should be solved for Haxe, as evolutions, contributions, or Rust target if needed.

Seriously, if your project is not working like you want, maybe try to re-evaluate what tools you choose to use, their maturity level, or try to work on it as much as Lubos on Armory. I don’t think the blame can be put on his shoulders. I find some attitudes pretty rude to be honest.

Free software needs contributions from all sides. Make a screen capture for documentation, polish an example, submit or reproduce a bug report with a minimal example… everything takes time.

My main criticism regarding Armory management would be the lack of soundtrack on latest videos

[MikeRobinson]

Are people expecting Armory to be a commercial venture? It’s not. At every level – Armory, Iron, Kha, even Haxe itself – a small number of developers are working very hard. But they didn’t sign a support contract with you.

[M_Ent8h]

I don’t think Blender is a commercial venture either, but that didn’t stop them from amassing 42k in funds, which helps a lot to speed up development, just saying…

[MadMinstrel]

The Blender Institute does publish weekly reports though. This shows the world that stuff is getting done, and that’s very important.

Currently I don’t consider Armory mature or stable or battle-tested enough to base anything of my own on it, so I also don’t keep track of the commit logs. From that perspective it looks like the project is dead, with no activity since 0.5. I know this isn’t true, but it looks that way.

So color me unsurprised when you see people leaving.

[LeeMo]

Armory is my favourite thing at the minute. I’d be happy to pay towards a Patreon if it was set up again.