I appreciate the kind words. I was just a bit frustrated. That drives this more than donations. (Although my daughter is asking for more Minecraft lego!) Realistically, at the rate my company bills for my time SMEdit is well into the five digits, so monetary renumeration is never going to come close and isn\'t an objective.
But you did hit the nail on the head: getting Schema\'s attention is the real objective. I could blather on about my skill, experience, and stuff like that. But Schema\'s got a hundred people shouting at him saying the same thing and no way to tell the serious from the self inflated. I figured showing my skill through doing something that adds value is more likely to establish credibility than any resume, no matter how long.
And, in the end, what I really want to do is write planet generating plugins for StarMade. But there is no plugin system for StarMade. That\'s fine, if necessary I\'d write a plugin system for StarMade so I can do my plugins. (The SMEdit plugin system is designed so that, when the day comes, it can be migrated to a StarMade plugin system.) But Schema obfusticates the code. So to do that, I need to pursuade Schema that this is a short sighted mistake and does not serve the long term good of StarMade as a product, property or investment.
But Schema just got burned by someone he thought was a well meaning contributer. I don\'t think he is necessarily in a position to easily trust the next person who comes along volunteering to be a well meaning contributer. That makes it more difficult, especially when a lot of the decisions are based on his business plans and intentions for the software.
The problem is that this one-man-show is going to kill both Schema and the product. If he has to do everything, from the code to the architecture to the defect triage to the promotion to the building and release maintenance... he doesn\'t have time left for future planning or business development. And, to be fair, I\'m not saying that making shitloads of money is Schema\'s primary goal, but unless a product is commercially viable, its future is limited to the time when Schema wakes up and decides he\'s done with spening ten hours days on it.
So, on the balance of things, there could be several reasons why Schema has not hooked up with me. I hope at some point he does. I do think this game is ready to transition from indie-programmer mode into actual product dvelopment. Additional structure of the right sort will turbo-charge its progress rather than retard it. I\'ve got a day-job otherwise I\'d be angling to sign on to the team. But it is something I\'d like to see happen and if I can help make it happen, I\'d like to.
In the shorter term, my new code can read/write a 1500m long ship with the Gettysburg Address written down the side. It renders correctly in StarMade. I left it running over lunch and it was able to import and save the Galactica. I haven\'t been able to do a flyby as my Mac at work take a long time to load. But I\'ve pushed it up to the server.
This is a big change. Please test. But please back up any critical files first. I am hoping that it fixes the extraneous chunk problem and the big-ship-gap problem.
