It has been suggested that a PayPal Donate button linked to a pot that is used to hire freelancers to work on features should be created, allowing features to be developed and released at a faster rate. TGC is a little sheepish about implementing such as system as there is the potential for backlash from users who feel this money should come from sales of GameGuru. I can confirm that all the revenue (minus company costs) in 2017 went back into GameGuru development, which might give you an idea of the standard speed of development for the size of the team (mostly one person with LOTS of community help) that we have right now. My questions to the community are first whether such a system is wanted, and second, how would such a system operate?

Collecting the money into a separate pot, and showing the value of that pot is simple enough and can be made completely transparent. The difficulty arises when you consider that someone putting £10 into the pot might want it spent on a freelancer working on general physics improvements, or a specific bug they have reported in the issues tracker. Administrating this would be pretty tricky. An alternative strategy is a number of pots, each labeled with the name of the freelancer, and it's up to the donator to know what that freelancer is working on and supporting that specific effort. The downside here is that you could end up with 50 pots, and a few dollars in each one, not enough money for the freelancer to even switch their PC on. If it was a single pot, the cumulative purchasing power of it would allow serious development but it would be targetted at a feature chosen by the freelancer chosen by TGC, rather than the individual user. It's a tricky one. The internal team is pretty happy to implement it if it was completely transparent, fair and reflected the needs of the community, but before we make a decision, we wanted to ask the community for their feedback and get a sense of how this fits into the GameGuru universe.

Let me also point out that GameGuru development will continue as normal, investing revenues from the sales back into the development of the engine, and thanks to GitHub, the extraordinary support of community collaborators who have already made an impact on the development and improved GameGuru. We will also be using some of the future revenue to hire freelancers soon, so watch out for news about that. Lots more to come!

hi,

as i said in the other forum.

i would be more than happy to throw money in. but only firstly at what i have waited for and to see it implemented. many people may think i am selfish, but this is the western world of commerce, money talks. so i would happily donate plenty towards the features i want implemented. believe me this would be a green light from me. i have always been one to fairly chip in. but i think if people want something enough they will find a way. i will throw some money already towards preben, stab, amen due to their wonderful and generous efforts. so i am happy to throw in for their work so far. but i will from now only put in money if i know it is going directly to an area i want to see developed, like water and its attributes,

so my cash goes to them who will be doing the features i want. im good for cash so i can happily put my money where my mouth is.

so maybe the same as the voting board but with money instead of votes.

I think the best ways to do it (in my opinion) would be to have some sort of go fund me style UI for each of the contributors, they specify what they will work on , and an expected goal fund, then when that find reaches its target the money is allocated too them for payment when the work is completed. OR a compromise, instead of having one big pool or lot sof tiny pools for everything, how about set half a dozen categories, ei, physics, shaders, scripting etc. and allow people to donate to whichever one covers what they want doing, then allocate the funds from each category to the work that is being completed.

I think this is a worthy effort.

As I stated in a prev thread:
Well I'm less in favor of a donate button than I am of a bounty-board style bounty list. The way it would work would be:

Board has specific objective
(Example: Physics engine rework)
People can donate to the objective to fill a sort of pot (escrow)
(Example: over 6 month pot exceeds 500 USD)
Someone finishes the work, submits it to github, it gets approved and included as release
Funds are released to person who finished the work via paypal.
Bounty is removed and unlisted.



I don't know how that would ever be implemented aside from some sort of escrow and PHP system.

Now I am modelling this approach after: https://www.bountysource.com/ .. heck you could probably create an official channel over there JUST FOR THIS TYPE OF THING.
Just some food for thought. I like the direction this is taking.

I am also in favour of this but as already been mentioned I see difficulty in setting this up, for instance a lot of people want there own 'fixes' so I think these individuals would be putting more in the pot than say a group of 20 people wanting a certain fix 1 x £100 vs 20 x £100.

I think this is where the problem would be if a pot stands at £100 and another stands at £2000 where do you think the developer would go ?

the only way around this would be for developers to 'Sell' i.e. that they state they could do for example 'Water' for £150.00 or full physics rewrite for £500.00 so with prices fairly set by a developer people can then choose to donate to that particular cycle.

and then if someone can afford to ask for a specific feature and is willing to donate enough to fairly cover said work it could be added to the sell list for a developer to pick up.

still unsure how it would work fairly but you have my vote

I don't really like the idea of donating directly to the devs to fund the development of specific features.
I've seen projects in the past tried this, and didn't get nowhere because everyone want something else and by the end none of the features got funded and nothing being developed.
Personally, I'm not interested to donate directly to developers and for certain features being developed.

Instead, how about that if TGC would set up a donation page where we can donate directly to TGC any amount of money. The page would display how much money has donated by the community and available to be spent on a new feature. Developers could list features on the page and set the price. Following donation, we could vote where we would like to see the money to be spent but not only the money we have donated but the whole budget and allow us to change our vote any time and also allow us to vote to "wait an other month" and do not spend the budget on any features now.
At the end of each calendar month TGC have a look what option most people voted for.
In case most people has voted on a feature that we can fund from the donations, the developer get hired by TGC to work on the feature and this way the developer is legally obligated to get the job done.
In case the option to wait an other month come out on top, no one get hired, no new feature being worked on in this month and we are going to wait an other month.
In case a feature come out on top that we don't have enough money to fund this month, the money will be spent on the next feature in the list most people voted for and we have the money to fund. I would recommend to allow us to vote on features only if the budget is enough to fund the development to avoid confusion.
After the decision has made all features and votes get erased and all developers still interested and got the time to add a feature need to list their offer again to make sure only active offers are listed and everyone need to vote again and TGC have a look at the budget and the votes at the end of each calendar month.

The important thing we need to understand, we are most likely talking about 3 or 4 digit long numbers. So the chance a feature cost £2000 got funded is pretty slim if everyone is donating on specific features. But in case we are donating to support development in general and allow TGC to use the whole budget to fund the development of anything come out on top following votes, we more likely going to see expensive features cost ££££ being funded by the community.

it's a tricky one because not every feature asked for may be possible by other coders so how would you know if it's possible before you donated?
probably best to let contributors submit possible feature additions along with their "desired" price and rough time frame for completion then people can donate to these specific tasks - so in essence it becomes like another feature voting board but you donate instead of vote.

Lee should get final say on quality before the money is given though of course, to stop people scamming the system.

we can always request stuff not on the list via the forums etc and maybe a contributor will add it.

I can see where Lee is coming from with transparency and can already see that its over complicating itself ..

I just suggested a " GitHub Donation Button " and was not really interested in when, what or who, it was spent on.
I would be happy to just leave that to Lee and the team for Game Guru ...
Pay a donation if you want whether it be pennies or pounds or not ..... But .. " Hey I want my tenner spent on X " Or " where did my 20 quid go " I don't think will work .. I think I just trust TGC to use pot as they see fit ..

Hell I don't know what's Needed next so why would I want to interfere Leave it to the experts

Well we can hem and haw about it all we want but when we have devs specifically saying they don't have the time to invest because it's not worth it for them to work on it. So they're asking us to make it worth their while. And then everyone points at TGC and acts like they're an endless pocket of money which is clearly not the case. So yeah. I mean at some point we either deal with the fact as a community that this stuff won't get done or find a way to fund the independent devs.

I urge you all to look at bountysource.com for an example and/or possible partner for this. They have a proven model that's used by fortune 500 companies around the world and it's very effective.

If we do this, I agree with synchromesh, a single donation button is fine and the money doesn't have to dictate the direction of things from the donator. TGC decides with the contributors.

You guys have no idea how expensive I am.

If I was charging my standard contractor rate my 2 libraries already donated to GG (quatlib & utillib) would have come in at a little under 10 grand based entirely on hours spent alone and not including the money I've spent on books and dev tools.

If I didn't do this for fun I probably wouldn't bother at all as I can earn far more from creating a custom ADAEXP parser for a client (basically what I did this week in my 'work' time) than I could here. Mind you I've found in my long career that it doesn't really matter what I do people will always moan that it wasn't what they really wanted.

Honestly Amen, I'm in the same boat.
Still, it's nice to see something for your time. That's why I make items for the store (Albeit at a pittance by my standards).

I guess I just feel not everyone is in the same situation. 50 dollars to me means a lot less than someone making 8 dollars an hour and living in their mom's basement as they attend programming classes in high school.

I think smallg is right, in my view the best and workable option.

A donation button is nice and since we collectively enjoy any new features which will make its way to the engine, it also should be one pot.

I just want a close to bug free game guru version. that includes the standalone builder. I refuse to donate anything until the features we have now and lua is in great working condition. I just want this engine to be stable with better performance. they can make a mess of the engine code after we get a stable version.

As do we all,but don’t forget Lee is working on the core all the time so everything that is added is a bonus

Dave

Easy as that ... You don't have to donate and as long as no one makes a song and dance about those that want to there shouldn't be a problem,

Its a win, win for everyone from what I can see ?

I'm all for it!

To add on to granada's comment... the github as far as i know is a way to add additional contribution to GG's development. In no way replaces it or stalls it. GG will still be developed as is and anything that contributors want to add or fix on top of that is nothing but complimentary.

Actually your spot on teabone !!

GitHub or Paypal would have no effect on the normal Development of GameGuru .
They are and would be additions to the progress of the engine ..
Some Donate their time and skills as stated and others who cant do that but also want to contribute could use Paypal to help with the development funding via GitHub

This really shouldn't be an issue at all even for those who don't want to donate ...
Its not like there losing out and will benefit from it anyway

I think the first feature should be Preben's draw call optimizer.

I think that would be harder to achieve in GG as it actually merges meshes together so they can use the same draw calls to speed things up. That may cause issues with scripting and such as most scripts are attached to objects and so having them merge into several other objects would cause issues. Of course it could probably be done, but it would be a lot bigger job than many would think. If it could be implemented of course it would give GG a boost in fps.

Back on the threads subject. I have no issues with this, anyone spending their time to help deserve some remuneration

It would work well if it were restricted to static objects, not sure how it would effect collisions though, if for example you merged a bunch of trees into a single mesh would they still be treated as separate objects in the collision code and would that lead to the situation where there is a disconnect between the visual edge and the physical edge?

This is a good Idea but as people are saying, difficult to implement.

Maybe you could have all the money going into one pot but have things that people can vote on similar to what we have now, with the exception of the votes. You could have it so that for every dollar they have one vote.

For instance, someone could donate $100 dollars giving them 100 votes
Next someone else could donate $20 dollars and get 20 votes and so on.

When you have finished collecting, which would be set by you, all the votes counted up and the money put to the winning vote and if there is any money left put that to the second and so on. That way if people really want a particular thing done they would just put more money in or get a lot of people to vote the same way. Also if plenty of money is collected a few things can get done in order of popularity.

The votes could also be rolled over to the next collection so that people who voted for something that didn't get in the first time would get a chance the next time.

@Tazman
Lets not forget that this type of system would require administration and someone to do this .. More cost and time ..
If I put a donate button on my site to help with hosting and domain etc Donaters don't say " This £5 must be used for adding new buttons or specific models " ... and I never spsecify when I donate to projects ..

Its a Donation to help support the project ... As long as its used for GameGuru it shouldn't matter.
If users are iffy and not keen on that then don't donate ..

Basically all Lee needs is a " All Donations will be contributed to the Development of GameGuru "
That's it .. over complicating just means more cost ..

Lee could of course say this months donations raised £200 and I will be using that towards " Said Contract "
But when it comes to donations you don't even have to do that ..

A 'Generic' Donation pot would be the way to go for ease of administration I agree with synchromesh

Of course if you do want to pay £500 to have something "Specific " done ( not out of the question )
then you could contact Lee direct ..

@Lee This very model has been applied before (and successfully for a couple of years in my opinion) in another game engine: 3DRad.
This is the link to home page of the engine:
--> https://web.archive.org/web/20120103153208/http://3drad.com/how-to-make-a-3d-game.htm

The model was adopted because sales weren't doing so well, so 3dRad changed over to a donation system, where features required a certain donation level to be reached before being added to the engine.
Once released, all donators were given access to the new version with the new features, 3 months later the new version was released free to everybody.

So:
- the game engine went free
- the development was handled (at least financially) only from the main developer/owner of the engine
- users sent money (real money) to a paypal link
- when the money goal (set by the developer) for a collectively desired feature was reached, the developer started to develop it
- as soon as the feature was realised, it was given to the users who paid for it
- three months later the feature became part of the free engine
- three months later the feature became official and in the free engine

Pretty neat ...

My two cents

Riccardo

No no .... Nothing so drastic


This is all it is ... Some of us requested a Paypal button to help contribute to Freelancing ..
No one has mentioned Bad Sales , TGC not having the funds or anything like that ...
Just a little diddy button

@Syncromesh I was not saying that
Just describing a development model that I think has been successful for a few years. Maybe I have to sync better my mind with my english

What i was saying is that maybe that kind of donating (strictly related to the feature to develop) is the best way to do it.

Bye!

Riccardo

I quite like the idea of features being sponsored directly rather than going into a pot of money for TGC to distribute based on the voting board or something like that. Its better for people to put their own money on things they really need.

If there is enough demand for it and people can contribute what they like, it could be started development much quicker. If there isn't enough demand for a feature to be developed in this way we just have to accept it or do something about it ourselves.

Also to make it fair there would need to be some kind of classification given to a feature in terms of cost and developers would need to agree on rates otherwise you get someone saying their time is worth more etc.

Finally, the developer would need to demonstrate the feature has been completed before getting paid (or have milestones for large features) otherwise its going to be the wild west in GG land.

I know but the next person to read your post without looking at the rest of the thread would think " Hell is TGC in trouble "
I was just clarifying for the next reader

Just keeping close tabs on this one so it doesn't cause a Panic or misunderstanding ..

I'm happy to donate to development in general. There are a lot of things I want or would like to see in no particular order. I just like improvements. Anything that makes it all better in the big picture is good with me, and sooner is always better, if the work is completed and properly functioning.

I don't know how I feel about donating to particular efforts, but I'll go that way if it's the only option.

Taking off my TGC hat for a moment to give my opinion on what I would like to see if I was to use a system like this, while taking other people comments in this thread into account.

I think the best solution would be a system providing a donation amount box where you can choose how much to donate. After choosing the amount to donate the next step before sending the money would ask you to select from a list of predefined options (features requested or currently available to be developed) where that money should go and what percentage to each. With another option that you don't mind, placing your funds in a misc pot which can be assigned as developers see fit.

So I could donate £200 for example with 20% to AI updates, 50% to new shaders and 30% to whatever the developer wants.

I think this has a nice balance between TGC making all the decisions and relying on developers to list what they want to do and users having too much choice.

Then when TGC have the funds in one of the pots or the funds in the misc pot can complete the amount required for one of the other pots. Development would begin and be paid to the dev for features as per the agreement with TGC. I don't think the community should be involved directly in the details of the developers contracted work or how much exactly they get paid, that should be left to TGC as they can negotiate deals as they see fit.

It is important that we keep the system accessible for users and not scare them with something too complicated or in-depth that it puts them off.

Good idea @ The Next,should keep everybody happy .

Dave

@TheNext

I like your idea but it does have one problem, what happens if a pot only ever gets small percentages of the donations or small donations, this would take forever to fulfill.

@TazMan

In this case after TGC have seen a pot taking a long time to fill up they could assign some of the money from the misc (unassigned) pot to finish the slow pot off and get it to the required amount to complete. That way nothing will remain unfinished forever as there is the possibly of assigning the misc money to it.

Also by curating the list of options carefully all of them should be things the community are interested in so the payments into each pot should get fairly equal shares, or that is the idea.

Okay, thanks everyone for the feedback on this one. Looks like we are going for the 'Goldilocks choice', not too hot (many pots) or too cold (one pot). I've had a quick chat to make sure it can be done, and this is the proposal for getting some extra funds to freelancers who want to work on GameGuru on behalf of the community:

DONATION BUTTON - Any Amount (PayPal/Credit/Debit Card)

POTS AVAILABLE (Assign a percentage of donation to one or more pots) (default is 100% in Misc):
* Physics Improvements
* A.I Improvements
* Performance Optimization
* Enhancements from Issues Tracker
* Bugs from Issues Tracker
* Miscellaneous

This would allow you to put your donation in the general area you are most interested in, or to support work of a freelancer who is working on one of these specific areas, but also allow you to put the donation into 'Miscellaneous' which means you give TGC the authority to use this pot to top-up any of the other pots to get a project greenlit so work can commence immediately.

This is the present suggestion that we can implement and get running, possibly as soon as March, but I welcome continued feedback on the concept and whether anyone sees any downsides to this approach over the others that have been put forward.

Pretty much how i imagined it would work, thanks Lee, hopefully this will get things really moving and take some stress off your shoulders.

Yep I like it ... If that's easy to implement then that's awesome ..
I like the Default as just Misc ... I can just chuck in sporadically

It sounds good, but who is going to decide which features are going to be funded first?
Let say we have two developers would like to improve the AI. One would like to add the feature, AI is jumping and climbing through obstacles with certain height and an other dev would like to add the feature the AI kick/open doors, climb ladders to get to their destination. Who is getting the fund in case we have enough money in the pot to fund only one of them at the time? Even if we can not put our money directly on certain features I think it would be nice to be able to vote. Someone suggested earlier to get certain number of votes for each donation say 1 vote £5 or something, in case I donate £50 I have 10 votes... The more I donate, the more I can influence which feature get funded first. It would also means, in case the more expensive feature got more votes, we keep the money in the pot until we can fund the more expensive one and don't spend it on the less expensive feature....
How about that?

Also, what if no one plan to develop any AI feature but I put my money in to the AI pot? Funding "general improvement" would be not very exciting so even though we have general pots only, it would be nice to know before donate what features are on the horizon just in case...

@Zigi

The idea is that if there are two distinct developers that can offer different features right now but need funding they would each have their own pot in this system covering the bits they will change. There is no need for points to vote with, as you assign your a percentage of your funds to each pot. Lee will have control over what the pots are on the list and can add new ones at any time, so they are likely to change dependent on what is currently available to be done.

There will likely be some additional information on each pot giving an idea of what features may be included for that selection.

@The Next
I guess I misunderstood again what Lee is about to do. I thought he means, instead of having tons of pots or a single pot we are going to have this few general pots only and fund features from them as they come...
But in case Lee going to add pots as required for each and all features individually that sounds good then

There won't be a pot per feature, it will be as general as possible to keep things from becoming over complicated.

However in some cases where two or more devs are working on the same general area, it may be split in to sub sections. For example two devs working on AI could produce two pots called "AI - Pathfinding" and "AI - Interaction" to allow users a bit more choice when there is a situation such as this so TGC can see where you want the funds to go.

Splitting the pots up will be up to TGC (Lee) so they can change however often they need to suit the current state of development.

The thought is this system of giving general groups will give enough freedom while avoiding a massive list of features.

I don't know, having general pots but then add sub-pots as/if/when required while trying to avoid too many pots sounds too much trouble to me. It up to Lee. But I'm worry about that if lot of people would like to make an offer to add bits and pieces it is going to be overwhelming to sort them all and decide one by one if something worth to have it own pot or it ok to be funded directly from the general pot....

And again, how do I know if it worth donating in to a general pot? it would be not nice if my money just sit there and wait for someone to make an offer that Lee put in to the general pot. But maybe it is also something we have different opinion about. Maybe Lee expect people donate the money first and devs seeing the money going to make the offer while I think it would be better to see the offers first before I decide about donation.

Personally, I would be ok with only the general pots if I can vote on the features I want to see developed first (and able to see them before donation).
Developers could list their offer, add a small description, link to images, videos if they got something already, set the price and let me vote for my money. In case a general pot got enough money to fund the top voted feature from the list, only then Lee need to take a look, contact the dev and get it sort it. It would be more simple on the long run as it would not require the time of Lee until something got funded....

However it going to be, I be happy as long I can see long waited features and improvements finally being developed.

That's exactly as it should be ...Or ... To many Chef's !!
Let those who know what there doing do it I say

But what if there's nobody willing to work on that feature that was voted on, or the next, or the next?

What is done via GitHub is done entirely at the discretion of the people willing to do the work, it's not a mater of TGC saying "we want this done can you do it?", (well there will be cases of this but whether anyone's willing is another matter) it's a matter of volunteers saying "i can do this, will you pay me to do it?", there's nothing to vote on.

TGC got absolutely nothing to do with it apart from setting up a page with some text input field and hook it up to a database.
Developers (not TGC) submit their offers what they can and want to work on using an automated system (may going through moderation just to avoid spam and trash) and we are donating (to TGC) and vote. In case we got enough money in the pot to fund a feature offered by someone, TGC contact the dev who submitted the offer and in case he or she is available and seem reliable, get the paper work, contract and payment done and start the work.

Alternatively, maybe every dev need to go through a process first where they need to provide evidence they have the skill and experience to develop GG and only after, they can start submitting offers freely using an automated system. But the money would go through TGC only and not directly to devs.

That's exactly what i said.

No. You quoted me and questioned what if there is no one to work on a feature... The feature should be not listed in the first place if there is no one to work on it because the devs them self would list the features they can work on and not TGC just to be clear. The idea is, TGC would setup the platform only, where developers can submit features and improvements they can work on, set the price tag and we can donate and may even vote on what feature we want to fund in the first place. Once we got enough money in the pot, TGC take it over from there and contact the dev who made the offer and let it know we got the money, ready to go...

Again, that's exactly what i just said.