Voting for features and bugfixes for patch 3.6

[bvanevery]

I actually just read his last posts according to his profile, to figure out "what happened", since I didn't quite remember.  Yep, looks like straightforward "gotta find a job and survive in the real world of money".

This has happened to pretty much every open source developer I've ever run into, unless they managed to transition immediately from their unpaid work into a job doing exactly that same work.  That can happen, but for it to happen, you have to be plugged into the commercial open source ecology to begin with.  Fiddling with SMAC binaries ain't that!

Some people do eventually come back to some project for a second try, a second round at it.  But it usually takes a few years of getting money, possibly paying off debts, acquiring enough career skill to have some savings and mobility in the marketplace, and not enough of another big thing to obstruct your life.  Like a SO, wife / husband, pregnancy, or even just a startup that completely sucks all free time out of you.  In my case I had a dot.com bust, that was "fun".  I still have not managed to go at my own SMAC-like project since then.

Least I got a mod done though.  Now if I can only protect that work by getting a large enough audience who cares for it.  This is of course bottlenecked by the number of SMAC players.  I'm just pointing all this out, as reasons why Yitzi would be fully justified to never come back to his patching work again.

Doing .exe patches as a generational project has got to be one of the harder things I can think of doing, in "open source" development.  No disciplinarian infrastructure = no long term progress.  The problems exceed the career windows of individuals willing to take such things on.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't regard him a necessarily gone for good, at any rate - though a good deal of his motivation for .exe patching was as a resume builder, and that's probably worked, or not, now...

[bvanevery]

An anecdote for me is back in 2010, some young guy did some truly brilliant work on a Wesnoth campaign.  I contributed 4 person months to the cause of polishing his campaign up the best it could possibly be.  He had great art direction but not really the game balance finesse, and I tweaked a line of dialogue here and there.  Halfway through that he wasn't really working on it much, I was.  We had a couple other people contributing.  We crossed the finish line, I was thanked, then they jettisoned me from the project.  They felt threatened, like I was taking over maybe.  Big age difference between us too.

So for many years, I'd occasionally watch to see if this guy would ever do anything again.  For the longest time, silence, nothing.  Recently I looked again and saw that maybe in 2016 or 2017, he finally did something?  6-ish years later.  And yes, a substantial effort now.  I don't even know if any of my contributions are still in there.  I don't find myself interested in finding out, as I've done enough Wesnoth for, like, forever.  So yes people can come back to things, but it can be pretty much an epoch in someone's career before they do so.

My falling out with the Wesnoth community was over the issue of visibility, for content producers like myself.  There was no path to personal glory.  You can't really sustain the level of effort I was putting out, when you have the sinking feeling that your work is getting a pittance of recognition, compared to what similar commercial effort would bring you.  Vast quantities of user made content existed in the Wesnoth ecology.  The Wesnoth core devs basically didn't care about all this content, they only focused on showcasing their "mainline" campaigns.  We had words, I got banned.

Yitzis usually need audiences, or they find better things to do.