Page 1 of 2

Hajo retires from Simutrans development

Posted: 03 Jan 2005 14:37
by orudge

Posted: 03 Jan 2005 15:02
by Hajo
I was about to post a message here, but I see you've been a bit faster! So there's little left to say. I'll stay a member of this forum and maybe I can answer the one or other question if there should be any.

Posted: 03 Jan 2005 20:00
by SHADOW-XIII
sad news
you created such nice game :cry:
but well ... feel free Hajo

Posted: 04 Jan 2005 00:53
by charlieg
As I stated on the Simutrans forums...

1. I hope you consider releasing the Simutrans code/gfx under a FSF approved license like the GPL for reasons widely discussed many moons ago.

2. I hope you are proud of your acheivements with Simutrans. Few people can claim to have written a game played all over the world, even fewer can claim to have done so without having been paid to do it.

Posted: 04 Jan 2005 01:29
by spaceman-spiff
It's better to stop if it's become a bore, good luck on your new projects

Posted: 04 Jan 2005 16:38
by Hajo
Thanks. It was time for a change.

But don't get it wrong. This isn't the end of Simutrans. The team continues, and they have big plans. Even one of the former team members came back after a long break, it's Volker Meyer who set the base for many of the new features.

Posted: 04 Jan 2005 17:17
by eis_os
Hmm, really bad, but I think know the feeling why you did these steps... :(

Posted: 04 Jan 2005 19:46
by DanMacK
Hajo,

7 years IS a long time. I've enjoyed Simutrans for years and will continue to do so.

Thanks and good luck in your future endevours. May they all be as succcessful as ST ;)

Posted: 05 Jan 2005 07:52
by charlieg
And in brighter news, Hajo says (on the Simugraph Simutrans forums) that he will open source Simutrans if the team who are taking over desire it to be open sourced. Then Simutrans will live forever!

Posted: 14 Jan 2005 23:45
by Zuu
I'm glad that you was able to take that decision. Its not easy. And I'm thanksfull for what you've made.

You're development of Simutrans have meand something for me, not only that I have played it ~30 hours, but it have been a good inspiration source for my own development. Thanks, and I wich you good luck with your other projects.

Zuu

Thank you

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 12:01
by Yuffie
Thank you for developing the game. It really extends the original idea of TTDX, much more than Locomotion.

Posted: 18 Jan 2005 09:00
by Hajo
Thank you for the feedback :)

A while I felt very unsure if it was worth all the time that I've invested. Overall I'm happy to see that the new team pushes the project forward at a great speed.

I'm not sure if anyone of the new team reads this forum, though.

Posted: 18 Jan 2005 09:23
by eis_os
Hmm, ok, then send them emails they should visit it :wink:

How will the future development work? I tried to get an idea about it in the forums, but didn't find something usefull on the english forum, there where rumors of open source I read somewhere, hmm. Let's see what the german forums have...

Posted: 19 Jan 2005 09:04
by Hajo
eis_os wrote: How will the future development work?
It's a self-organizing team. Roles can change. ATM it seems to be like this:

Prissi turned out to be the most active coder. ATM he sets the pace, and builds new versions. I have no doubt the other team members will accept his role of a leader and send their changes to Prissi to see them integrated.

Hendrik is doing some infrastrukture things, like setting up a bugzilla system for error tracking. I guess he also will do bugfixing like he did in the past.

Volker Meyer is back and will improve the MakeObj/PAK system.

Dario will continue to work on the trams, and maybe subways after finishing the trams.

Tomas Kubes waits for Volker to make the code compile with MSVC once again, and then will continue to work on the indusrty distribution code. Tomas Kubes also coordinates the workd on the 128 pixel object set. A smaller group of graphics artists continues the 64 pixel object set, but with a twist - the base scenario will turn into a japanese scenario with multibyte/unicode font support, and an german scenario is created in parallel.


Overall it seems everyone took a piece of the cake, and Prissi turned into the bakersman with Tomas assisting him to get the decorations right.


Open source? Well, all current and former contributors have to agree to this step, but currently there is no interest in such a change. Even a former open source promoter now favours the closed style. This decision can still be changed, but currently everyone is happy with the chosen path.

Posted: 19 Jan 2005 15:00
by eis_os
Thanks for your informations...

Posted: 20 Jan 2005 03:59
by charlieg
Hajo wrote:Open source? Well, all current and former contributors have to agree to this step, but currently there is no interest in such a change. Even a former open source promoter now favours the closed style. This decision can still be changed, but currently everyone is happy with the chosen path.
I think it's a decision that should be deferred until the infrastructure like bugzilla is in place.

The largest benefit that going open source would have would be to make it not dependent on directly interracting with a core member before you can get involved. A player might decide to download the source, be able to fix a bug that's on bugzilla or even implement a new feature, and then post patches all without much fuss. Currently, he'd have to contact the right people, get access, and generally have to make a decent amount of effort to get involved.

Basically, with the closed source model, people with a casual interest will never get involved - even though what starts as a casual interest could turn into a much deeper interest in improving the game.

A good example would be the problem compiling is MSVC. If a player with MSVC knowledge could just download the latest source from CVS, they might check it out to see what the trouble is and post a fix. But because they have to get formally involved, it's far more unlikely that anybody other than established developers will look into this.

That, in my view, is how it would benefit Simutrans.

Posted: 20 Jan 2005 09:43
by KaCzach
I think it's a decision that should be deferred until the infrastructure like bugzilla is in place.
Doesn't sourceforge.net offer everything you need to go opensource?

Posted: 23 Jan 2005 13:30
by Tyrell
..

Posted: 24 Jan 2005 10:43
by prissi
I'm not sure if anyone of the new team reads this forum, though.
Well I am reading here, but only sparsingly. (Mostly I watched the japanese trainset grow ... )

Posted: 03 Mar 2005 20:25
by Torahteen
May I ask what language the game is coded in?