Hello and good day NoCake.
Thank you for the message. Your concerns are understandable. Hopefully i can help address a few of these. Let me try to take a few of these things and address them best as I can.
I know Sarrene was recently brought in but it is still completely unclear of ANY other dealings with in the company or future plans. It is also unclear of what her role is. Is she project manager or community manager?
Actually, I am COO for Idea Fabrik. However, I have at this time, a few hats I wear. Alex is the CEO/Chairman of the board for the company. So I am not sure how much he would need to respond to when it comes to general issues or questions.
Our current Volunteer Lead (for when we get more to join the volunteer team) is Kelly, whom does handle much of the front end assistance in skype and on the forums. His specialty is HSL, though he is quite versed in other areas. Sadly these forums are broken and do not keep the new staff colours. They will on the new forums!
I also hound the forums and check constantly to see who was last active and I rarely see anyone from HE other than Sarrene and Herb.
We are a small team, and the company always has been. A lot of time spent by the engineers before I came on board was answering problems, issues and general questions both via PM and on the forums. This was not conductive to a good workflow for the engine itself. More time was spent before I came on board answering these posts and PM's when they could have been working on the engine as they were hired and wanted to do.
At this time I have the engineers working on issues instead of browsing the forums. It is, in my opinion, a better use of their time. We have dev and volunteer staff forums/categories that are set up that allows us to post and communicate issues and problems. Then myself, Jon or Kelly will report/respond with the answers or statuses. If it is important and requires engineers attention, we let them know. But they are aware of the forums and do still check them so they know what is going on.
I dare say this, but Trust Me! The engineers are working supper hard on the engine and new fancy updates coming soon. I am afraid though of what they say behind my back. Task Master.. or perhaps some things not quite as nice.
However, they are working hard and 110% dedicated. Their work has impressed me and still does.
We also received an extremely obscure progress report 3 months ago with no update
There has been news since then. However, it is my bad that I did not repost them on the forum. I did remember to get it on the website, twitter, facebook, etc. My apologies for not posting it up on the forums as well.
http://heroengine.com/newshttp://heroengine.com/news/updates/he-new-site (with a link to...)
http://heroengine.com/heroengine/he-roadmapTheir are very alarming bugs currently in the engine and received basically 0 attention.
Broken Particles:
https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,6177.msg34986.html#msg34986
Broken Occluders:
https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php?topic=6264.msg35308
Sarrene replied to both but neither have been resolved.
I am not sure what alarming is. I guess it is a matter of interpretation and what is most important for the project (and how soon it is needed). So let me take these one at a time...
Broken Occluders: These are in fact
not broken. Occluding culling works fine, in fact better than it had prior to the last update. The team put a lot of work into getting those updated. That last major update had a lot of hard work put into it. One of the major things of that update was the new and better occlusion culling. The only thing broken is the Blade side
visual aspect to it. Yes, the visual representation for developers is not working at the moment. But that will be back in.
The dvps panel and the stats/rendering information does work, and reflects everything from current draws, cached draws, current texture counts, cached texture counts, and so on. There is actually a lot of nice information that is available via the panels.
Broken Particle: This is broken in a way. But the particles themselves are not. It is the draw order for transparencies that are out of line. There are also different settings that now work correctly that have added shader types to them. Such as the cartoony outline that some saw. Just change the shader type if that is the issue. But visually there are issues....
To put it simply: Some of the fixes that came in for the pre-dx11 had corrected a lot of "bad math"- old outdated or bad math/scripts - This in turn exposed something that was not detected during testing, or even after release until I was working on some particles and noticed. Shortly after that the post came up. So I knew it was not on my end only. This IS being worked on (and I think done) and will be in the next update, along with everything else that is in that package.
It really blows my mind that the main form of communication is Skype.
I create a discord channel which is an application that is blowing away the gaming market atm and only 3 people join yet all my other communities people are literally flocking to it.
As many things, people do not always embrace change as quickly as others. And as explained before, everyone that has a windows pc has skype now. It is quick, fast and easy for most. I did state that I will be looking into the possibility of Discord as an official channel, however I have too much to do at this time and I would rather keep my focus on Idea Fabrik as a company, HeroEngine at this time, along with the other hats I am wearing. But I will look into this in time as an option. However, anyone is free to start a group anywhere. I cannot however promise nor force anyone to join any one elses group. Just like I cannot force anyone to join the Skype groups.
It may help to instead of posting in the Skype channel post, to create a nice friendly inviting post for Discord itself, along with the information needed for those that might never have used Discord before. I think that may draw more attention and get more to join.
I am halting my project until we receive some clarity.
I am sorry to hear that. I hope that in time, you will feel more comfortable and can begin development again. It is always nice to see developers work and their ideas grow and flourish. I hope to see more of yours soon.
- Sarrene'
