Hi All,

During 2019 we have been running the Donations System with a view to finding freelancers who will want to do some work in exchange for the various POTS on offer. In practice, however, most of our freelance work we have commissioned have come directly from TGC coffers and we have had very few offers by freelancers to work through the donations system. It is, for this reason, we are recommending the Donations System be closed down and any remaining funds be used to fund Preben's continued work on GameGuru in general. You have already seen his sterling contributions over the years and his most recent speed boost of in-game performance, and we think he will do a great job working on the next update which is planned to hit just before Christmas.

The alternative would be to keep it running, but with no freelancers willing to come forward and no significant new contributions, it might be best to end the donations system and revert to a more traditional commissioning model where freelancers can quote for work and the TGC team can approve it without administrating which pots the funds might come from.

We have opened up this thread so you can discuss the pros and cons, and we will make our decision once the suggestion is fully explored. Bear in mind we cannot magic willing freelance coders out of thin air, and most professional freelancers charge anywhere from £80-£300 per day so the current value of the pots at present would not buy us very much. Feel free to discuss...

Got my vote !!
Hell I would set up a direct debit monthly for Preben

synchro_vote+ = 1


That's true!

I'm all for whatever keeps the ball rolling

preben for president...my vote iswith you...

speedup the gg develpment.. dynsmic shadows, water and all my money are yours

Give it preben. His additions to the engine are great

Yup,Give it to Preben. Keep that ball rolling Dudes.

Preben is very well deserving of the funds. He does amazing work and continues to surprise us with the things he is able to come up with feature-wise too and for continued efforts with optimization.

By chance did my asset fixes get included in the latest build?

Yup, give it all to Preben.

+10 for Preben

I think Preben is the best candidate... Not only help he with GG, but is involved in AGK/AGKS development aswell.

Of course it did not work, it was not advertised anywhere, it was not public, it was not clear from the beginning what exactly the freelancers expected to work on and if someone would like to contribute it was not clear if the contribution would be accepted and rewarded with money and if the freelancer had a clear idea how much the contribution would cost, there was no way to let us know so we can consider to fund a specific contribution .
For example one was campaigning on the forum he could implement destructible environment, improved physics, vehicles even shared video as proof of concept and he was totally ignored. Don't know if he was in contact with TGC directly but the community had no way to show support of funding those features to be implemented because of this useless pot system.... I was against this from day 1 and here we are I proven correct.

Anyway, now we have two proposal.
1. Close it and give the money to Preben for what exactly? Exactly! we don't know. Don't get me wrong he is a great guy and he is a good programmer but it is just not what the funding was all about.
2. The other option is to keep it going as is.....which makes no sense.

How about a third one? What I was recommending from day 1.
Implement a system where people can post their work, how much it cost, proof of concept, images, videos and we can fund those specific work instead of general pots. TGC could also post works there as a freelancer and we can choose how much and what to fund exactly. Yes, not only freelancers but we could also fund work done by TGC staff.

First time I was proposing this, the answer was such system would be lot of work, and need money to implement and maintain it and told the pot system makes more sense. But now that the pot system failed, how about this:
Let us fund the development of this system and then we can use this system to fund actual projects to be worked on by TGC and freelancers?

Step 1:
Replace pots with a page where we can fund the development of this system specifically.
Step 2:
Deliver this system to us if funding was success.
Step3:
Start posting specific works to be done and transfer all money from the pots for a specific work. Which one? Just do it, the current system did not give us control where to spend the money anyway, there was only pots. So just pick one @Lee

FAQ:
How to avoid people promise but do not deliver?
Easy, if someone offer to implement visual scripting for $3000 for example and we got it funded then TGC take it over, make contact with the freelancer, sign a contract for delivering that feature for that amount of money as they would normally do I guess. TGC should be able to handle this.

What if we fund the project but the person offered to implement it no longer active by the time the funding is complete?
The system could be designed so, each project page would be live for 30 days only. After 30 days, the person posted the work, need to login and refresh it as a sign he is still here and waiting and willing to implement it.

What would happen to the money if a project is fail let say we did fund $1500 out of $3000 and after 30 days the freelancer did not refresh the page meaning he is no longer active and not interested, where the $1500 funding would go?
The best way to go about this in my opinion, is to implement a system where people could load money in to "electronic wallet" so you have an account here at TGC and you have an electronic wallet similar to many online stores then you can choose where you want to spend the money from your electronic wallet and you could use it to purchase TGC products or even to fund the development of something. Now in case you choose the fund, the money would be not taken out of you wallet, it would be only reserved and so if a project failed, you get the money back in to your wallet for example and would obviously taken out of the wallet only if TGC did sign a contract with a freelancer to implement it or if the freelancer delivered the work in a way TGC is satisfied with it....

I know, I am talking about serious development work, cost lots of hours and work so again, how about funding the development of such system first?

How about, if TGC would throw a number at us how much would it cost to develop it and maintain it and we can go from there if it makes sense to even attempt to fund it or not...

I'm a professional programmer, GG is a hobby for me, if I were to generate an invoice for the hours I've spent on Engine improvements and scripts + tutorials and other stuff, even on a generous rate, it would be around £300K. Luckily for everyone I do it for free because it is a hobby, but because it is a hobby I work on stuff that interests me and challenges me, any 'visual scripting' system will always be crap no matter who makes it. I've mentioned before how Apple created a visual programming system for MacOS, how much they spent doing so I can't even imagine, no one ever used it!

Your kidding right ..
Are you using the latest Gameguru with all Prebens latest free enhancements ?


Exactly .. We really could never afford to generate real rates freelancers could officially charge.
We are so lucky to have such talent like Preben, Amen and everyone else that generously donate their skills .

What I meant, the whole point of the idea the community fund the development was that we can choose what to develop, if we give all the funds to Preben it is going against the whole idea. I don't mean Preben and his contribution doesn't worth any money, of course he does I am talking about funding we collected so far and actually it is a perfect example why my proposal could work because TGC and Preben could post specifically hey I work on this for this amount, please fund it and we can choose to do it....

I honestly don't understand why do I need to explain myselft 2-3-4-5-6 times every single time I post something on this forum. I know my english is not perfect, but I experience this only here at the GameGuru forum. This community seriously doing me headache every single time I post something. I guess better if I go back to my little corner and just leave this here for Lee to chew....

But yeah, if Lee choose not to bother with my proposal, yes I do agree to give all the money to Preben and close all the funding down. Yes

+1 to give money to Preben.
Better?

Apologies if I jumped on that comment then as it probably came across the wrong way.
Understandable if your trying to translate

I like the idea Zigi mentioned, because you know if anyone and who is working on a specific task.
This way is about getting people into the boat.
Giving all the donations to one person has the taste of "let him do the work alone in the future and that's the end of the road for other freelancers".
Of course I know Preben is surely not the only one working on GG and I don't even doubt he is derserving it.
I just like the idea of getting more man power to the work that has to be done. The question is, like Lee mentioned, where to get the freelancers.
And of I course I know I'm not in the position to form an opinion on this like you guys who have been active for years.

GG + preben = awesome....

Give him the money

OldFlak....

Yep preben should get some love for his work, also amenmoses, his script additions have added so much potential to the engine even if it isn't as simple to use as the rest of the updates (just the nature of the beast, not saying he should make it easier).

As said many times, professional freelancers will cost way more than the small community here would ever generate... Don't forget GG itself (or whatever you want to call it back then) pretty much failed to make any money itself... So the idea of having people come and make "offers" for their features they could add seems unlikely to really work either but if the current system is to be closed then I guess we will need some new form of road map or feature request system as we already know how stale GG can get without any obvious progress being shown.

You don't have to explain multiple times, we all understand you. People aren't disagreeing with you because they don't understand with you, they are disagreeing with you because they disagree with you and don't think X idea will work. Not everyone will agree with you and there will be back and forth refining ideas, that's what happens when people join a discussion, if you aren't happy with someone disagreeing with your idea then you're never going to be happy in a discussion.

And i'm not saying that because i disagree with you, in this case i agree with some of what you say, it should be people who are doing the work posting their ideas of what they want to implement and we choose to fund it or not, not pots for vaguely generic areas, where we don't know what they're going to specifically until someone claims it.

This sounds to me like governments meet again and again to discuss climate change, but they never reach an agreement or simply deny that it exists, just as the American cowboy does.
It seems incredible to me when they commission a study that costs millions of dollars to verify something that is an obvious truth, I could verify this for free, without charging a penny.

I keep voting for a single person who is responsible for continuing the development of the engine.
And I can't think of anyone better than Preben. imho.

quote..+10

btw only one people could not be enough since preben is great and manypf the GG improvments are related to him.. and i think it should be here to lead a small group of developers to work togheter and to accomplish features in a lesser time since GG development is really too slow..we need about 5/6 preben here

Should Preben get the remainder of donated funds... Yes! No reason not to.
While I really think that GG roadmap should continue to be discussed openly by
the forum and perhaps some system for specific features advertised/ voted on
in the future... whenever or however.

Really what it boils down to is that people want to stay excited and informed.
They like to be involved and hear about what great things could be upcoming
to appear in the future GG! They wonder if they actually put something on
github if it has been noticed. Isn't that really about it?
Inquiring minds want to know.

Please don’t bring back the voting system, it caused nothing but arguments

Dave

Your right Dave. Probably just like Lee mentioned,
"revert to a more traditional commissioning model where freelancers can quote for work and the TGC team can approve it without administrating which pots the funds might come from."
...that... kind of "vote"- if you will.

Either way I think we know the donations are probably ending.
This is simply a case of " What happens to the money left in the pot "

On this particular point it should only concern those that have a financial interest to decide what happens as its their funds in the pot.
For me there isn't a lot we can do with it except at minimum show our appreciation to Preben for his voluntary and continued efforts. Its a no brainer for me

@Granada … Agreed .. I really hope we don't get the voting system back
Course we could vote on it
J/K

I just wanted to post that we have officially ended the donations system as per our conversations in this thread. The amount that remained in the pots has been lumped into one amount which comes to £487.56, which will be used to fund Preben to continue his sterling work fixing bugs present on the GitHub issues board.

I wanted to thank everyone who contributed to the system, and am happy that we managed to get some cool things done during the time it operated. Moving forward, we will be looking to hire freelancers internally to augment development. Until the next update, happy game making!

Perfect !!

Cool. If I had an income right now, I would contribute. There's no need to shut
down voluntary contributions to a general fund?

Anyhow, what I wanted to mention besides -- Great Work! is whether there is
a (or a few) Standalone issues thread on Github. Notice that it is pretty prevalent
concern in the forums... if that was axed, this engine would be uber more stellar.
What can we do to wrap our heads around that?

Perhaps this is a good opportunity to use Github Sponsorship?

Though this software is not open source and is commercial. I'm not 100% on the restrictions. or perhaps that just opens up the same topic again about micro funding a commerical project's task list. Either way its something to look at:

https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-new-way-to-contribute-to-open-source/

That looks cool but the only problem I see there is the one we had before.
People getting the wrong end of the stick and moaning why should they pay for development of a commercial product ..

All we really need is one of these buttons and were in business
Well I think I nailed it anyway.