I’ve said this back in 2019 already. I tried to use armory for something small again and it failed again.
Since lubos has abandoned armory as main project in favor of armor paint and the community is all over the place. I’ll be trying to get at least some structure.
I’ve made this small plan I’d like to discuss with everyone because if nothing is done armory will continue to stagnate and still just be an engine with potential in 5 years.
Regular meetings of the community in the forum, with set date (example: every sunday of the 2nd week of the month) to discuss what direction armory needs to take, what needs to be worked on and how. Until the core/lead dev works fully on armory again.
All funding that goes into armory core development needs to be temporarily redirected into paying people to complete the docs. If lubos doesn’t agree with this he has to work on the docs.
If he then doesn’t work on the docs, armory community needs to cancel their funding to lubos and pay someone directly to finish the docs.
Making Armory compatible beyond 2.9 isn’t allowed until the docs are complete and all important blender 2.9 features work with armory.
The whole code needs to be gone through bit by bit to make sure that everything can throw an error and is clean enough for new users to be able to contribute.
Thanks for share your thoughts. Yes, you are right. The docs are something that new users need to visit and this makes the docs an important piece of the first impressions thing. Don’t forget that the most people uses YouTube as it “docs”. At least me in the past would prefer for a video than the docs (now it is the opossite, but i keep looking for videos for more “complex” stuff). Note that i say that not based in data, only in self thoughts. Unfortunately the most important factor is that people does not look interested in tools that are not in stable version, this makes Armory more underrated than it would be in opposite conditions. Also is not good to wait for money rewards because it is a very difficult thing in open source to contributors receive something that is not knowledge. I keep looking forward because ArmorPaint could attract more people to Armory when it becomes more known. I consider that Lubos is already an expert but he will be more experienced over the time working in ArmorPaint, so if he returns to be active in Armory, then we will see the gains. As many others open source software, the contributors that believe in the project or are interested in learn, will keep your contributions.
I really don’t know what exactly would be a fast development, but for what i see is that there is big improvements in the last year, like the nodes overhaul and additions, shadows atlas, Blender 2.9 stuff, a lot of bug fixes, etc. Changes that are not exposed to the community out GitHub in the montly releases. Maybe would be good at least a bot that lists the PRs names, so at least if we put a descriptive PR name/description this would attract more hopes.
If you are coming back to try another stuff, i just suggest you to open features request that you miss and report errors here.
Here is my latest experience with armory as a user:
Followed the docs and linked tutorials in the docs. Had an issue with objects falling through the ground. Checked out the docs to find a solution, it was full of placeholders. Went into the chat and got help there: scale needs to be applied and I got told the blender docs teach how to use rigid bodies. Then I got a bug without any error message nobody that can help. Project failed.
This has been my whole experience with armory since 2019. Projects I can’t continue .
Tutorials aren’t worth much if the community is too small to keep them up to date. With blender changing drastically every year its a waste of time. Most armory tuts on YT are already outdated. A leaky bowl can’t hold water. What armory needs is a stable version that can be used by casual gamedevs. Otherwise it will end as playground for blender/game engine devs and won’t be used for what it’s intended for.
Armory being made compatible with blender 2.9 before making it usable with 2.8 is absolutely horrible.
Armor Paint is only gonna attract temporary users if armory isn’t stable.
I you want to support lubos as an investment for the future that isn’t a bad thing. But that wont fix the issues armory had 2 years ago and still has today.
The docs can’t be made by users it has to be someone knowledgeable. Users can only help polishing the docs but the base for the docs is usually provided by the core developers. At some point advanced users will get fed up helping out new users with basic stuff in the forum and chat. You need new users to pick that up. Either some advanced users start working on the docs or the community needs to pay someone to do so. Without new users you risk a community collapse! If that happens armory is done for.
I understand that lubos focuses on armor paint because the money is there atm. But that is a really bad thing for armory in the long run.
Feature request and new blender versions need to be ignored until armory is stable otherwise it will never be usable. I’m not up for longterm armory testing anymore, I’ve invested half a year trying to use and improve armory already which amounted to nothing. This is the last time I’m helping out, either the armory community starts to focus on what is important or I’m out for good.
@BrahRah not all feature requests are just extra stuff. You may miss some feature that makes you to stuck in some place without alternatives, like a missing functionality regarding logic nodes.
You can scale objects (including rigid bodies). You only shouldn’t scale some objects depending on the behavior you want. For example if you scale a cube, then when you pass some coordinate to its local space/orientation, these coordinates will be influenced by its scale, what wouldn’t be something desirable.
Just make sure to clear the project cache, then all the scaled rigid bodies shapes will be “updated”. Many “bugs” can be solved simple by cleaning the cache.
Do you still have your project to test? Also would be good if you could tell which kind of docs you are missing. I mean if it is about logic nodes, etc. My English is very poor and i don’t have any technical information, but anyone can polish it later. I am busy because it is the last year in university, but i would do that in the free time.
The part I’ve noticed missing is physics. If it’s the same as in the blender docs just copy and paste it from the blender docs or put a link to the blender docs. I’ve cleared the project catch for half a year I still remember that part very well. That is not the problem.
I’ve already gone through this with the guys in the discord channel. I hope it helps a bit but this is not what this thread is about. It’s not enough to fix up the docs now and then. Either someone works on it regularly or the community as a whole needs to do more there. This can be accomplished with stickies everywhere (chat, forum, git etc. ) with some guidelines. The guidelines need to be worked out which is what I was trying to accomplish with this thread. Otherwise nothing is gonna change. Stuff like: If you help out someone post a link to the docs, if the info you provide is not in the docs add it. Efforts need to be directed into getting more users for armory and not just temporarily. This is the last time I’m addressing this I’m repeating myself like a broken record. I’m really fed up with this, most of what I’m writing I’ve written in 2019 already.
I’ve been told that most contributions were bug fixes. How many of them where blender 2.9 related? I get the impression that the focus is mainly staying with the newest blender versions. Not in making armory more stable/usable. If this is really the case then there needs to be a full stop on these kind of contributions with 2.93 lts and amory needs to stay with 2.93 till everything is worked out. The only thing that counts is users being able to make games. The difference between 2.8 and 2.9 is negligible. Putting efforts on keeping up with blender is pointless with a small community.
I’m pretty novice when it comes to Haxe / Python, but have junior-level experience in things like PHP & AfterEffects Action Script (give or take).
I have watched several hours of Haxe tutorials and read through the manual (RTFM - lol). However, there are gaps in my setup and comprehension that keep me from being a regular contributor.
If there was a pathway to becoming a code contributor / bug fixer that was well marked out, that might help people like me who are willing to donate a lot of personal time to support some of the more tedious work. As it is, I don’t try to contribute to solutions because I assume it would be more work for someone to fix any code errors that I might have rather than to simple do it themselves.
If there is such a path that already exists, point me to it… Otherwise, I’m happy to document what I learn if someone wants to fill in some gaps and answer questions. Maybe we can open a forum topic for aspiring contributors to get help from those who are knowledgeable in the process so that the same question doesn’t have to be answered over and over again? I’m thinking about exponential growth of contributors. Just brainstorming a bit…
From the perspective of someone entering the game creation world as a beginner, I personally think that Armory3D is worth the long-term investment – the Blender integration makes work-flow fluid compared to other solutions (when Armory3D works) and the open source nature really democratizes game creation. I know Godot and others are working solutions, but the potential for the quality visual output of Armory3D is a big plus in my opinion.
I was trying to help to change this…I made some tutorials of Armory on youtube (in portuguese) and I was translating them to english. But it has so few views that I gave up of translating them.
I come from blender and have my little projects on my own. From now and then the idea of using modeling to modestly try make it into a game emerge in my head. I have looked for unreal and unity and was really frustrated by the lack of fluidity in the workflow to go from blender build to game engines.
When I heard about armory I was really amazed. imagine, on top of being a modeling, 3d animation, 2d animation, vfx software, it could be a game engine!
Well I tried it yesterday for approx 2 hours and let me tell you that Holly crap I was in! Followed a couple of tutorials and as I had the blender node logic in mind, it was quite easy to understand
Im just a beginner but I definitely intend to study profundly armory, as I think it is really worth it
My point being that as a community, we could be able to get more attention to armory 3d by YouTube tutorial, reddit posts, sharing project ects
I don’t know if there is a lot, but sharing finished or wip could really help to hook new persons into it
As for me, if I begin to get a hang of it, I intend to try make it more popular, maybe by streaming, spreading my projects ect
Edit : maybe would it be useful to create a discord?
edit2: neverming it already exist
Welcome to the community, as you know, Armory 3D has a lot of potential but as you might know, It is missing an active community. The discord community is great but we are still fairly inactive… So like you said, I want to teach beginners with tutorials on youtube and I decided to host a game jam for all armory user, advanced and beginners… I hope you will stick around because although armory isn’t perfect, it has a lot of potential and work is being done to make it even better for Blender 2.9LTS.
It’s not a community that we need, we need the original developer to either continue his original promise and actually work on Armory (Accepting merge requests is not “working on Armory”), or to admit that Armory is dead and let us the users stop wasting our time with an abandoned prototype…
EDIT: you can have a ton of tuts and docs, but a static, not updated and incomplete game engine is surly dead…
That’s fair enough and really true, and that’s what’s holding me back a little: if the engine is a dead end, why do I bother to learn and use it?
Yet, I assume that if the users community grows, it would bring back the light on it and make it ever more worth for the original developer to work on?
And maybe a way to that would be a greater visibility by the help of youtube tutorials, etc.
that being said, i know it’s a bit utopist, idealist and all.
I know it’s just words thrown in the wind coming from a naïve, underexperimented person. But i still am very thrilled by all the possibilities.
I’ll do my best to stick ! I try to practice on blender regularly, in order to not lose it and forget about it ect. The fact that armory comes in blender make me confident that i will certainly look more and more into it.
oh look at that, a deadline ! i’ll definitly look at it, and if time’s with me, maybe propose something ? who knows ?
I understand where your coming from but the developer is doing update… Although armory doesn’t have as big a community as his other armory paint project that is a commercial project that got the Epic mega grant so of course he is prioritizing armory paint development because it is his livelihood… So screaming at the developer for not working on his FREE open source project and blaming him for not working on it is just unfair and unrespectful… Maybe if you donated to him, I would understand but I bet most people just take his free project and complain about it being slow in development.
And no Armory 3D isn’t DEAD, it is very much alive with many thousand downloads a month and a caring community that I intend to grew as much as I can.
If you don’t want to be part of that community then nobody is stopping you from leaving but please don’t try to infect anyone else with your negativity…
Thank you for joining in on the fun, like you might know, the jam has an undefined theme so you can do way you want but members of the community and myself are working on making assets to bust the developers who joined the jam… These assets can be used but don’t have to be. Also the assets available will contain things like sounds and textures as well as pre made models.
Hope you find time to submit something but if not then you can just check other submissions out and vote…
Also when the jam is open, you will have 2 weeks to made your game and submit it. Then the is a 2 day voting period, so no rush.
It can be seen that the latest commentators still “have not lived billions of millions of lives, on trillions of planets like this” and they have not yet learned the world of room-sofa game development.
The developers give you a generous opportunity to do nothing and go about your business, and “you” are dissatisfied.
Godot Engine, successful in that it generates thoughts - " why would I study and develop something, if a new version will be released soon and everything will be taught anew. Then some Russian donnatit on some functionality and now the release, again postponed to a later date."
With Blender 3D, also, " why start with a big project in Blender x. xx, if a new version of Blender x.x(x+1) is coming soon, they will add such an important function, without which there is no sense to start doing something now»
excuse me if i gave you the idea of being a dissatisfied users, as it was surely not what i intended. I am aware of the tons of work programmers spent to gives the ability to play so easily with those tools and could not thank enough the person behind them.
And i’m sorry you think I was this kind of person. You surely refer to my sentence
" if the engine is a dead end, why do I bother to learn and use it?"
. That was not at all meant as a diss, but a proper reflexion one can have before hoping into something, whatever it is.
And of course, i know who i am, a newcomer, with far less knowledge and experience than you, don’t get me wrong.
So please sorry if you took my comment the wrong way, as it was not at all intended.
Otherwise, I’m happy to document what I learn if someone wants to fill in some gaps and answer questions. Maybe we can open a forum topic for aspiring contributors to get help from those who are knowledgeable in the process so that the same question doesn’t have to be answered over and over again? I’m thinking about exponential growth of contributors. Just brainstorming a bit…