charlieg wrote:and then simply not releasing the code citing 'it's not useful to anybody' is just a crock of s***.
You cannot say something like that without seeing the code, I _do_ have access to what we've coded and as a well experienced coder (that doesn't imply experience in project work) I say the code is not usefull. You can either respect my thoughts, or go into discussion, of which the latter won't help you very much.
Also, I didn't give the 'not usefullness' as the only reason for not releasing the code, but some ppl tend to keep things out the picture when they aren't in line with their own arguments...
then produced nothing short of a few screenshots showing very little of somebody elses graphics.
You have NO idea of what we've produced just because we haven't released it. I agree, to an end user it adds up to the same result: nothing. But only viewing it from that perspective doesn't mean we didn't produce anything...
Your attention span is the amount of time you spent coding TTU which, on any viewable evidence, is not very much unless you were using the project as an exercise to learn how to program. In which case, you really shouldn't have been seeking attention, but instead working diligently and presenting the results, not the aspirations, to the public.
If we hadn't presented our progress and plans in the first place TTU wouldn't have come as far as it would be today. We began this project in a vacation, with all the time of the world, and enough motivation. In short periods we were able to create many more than anyone has yet shown (at that time). The public 'pressure' we created by making everything public generated motivation to continue. At first it worked out pretty well, but our studies began generating quite much work, so we had to give in on TTU progress, a process that lasted until last weeks, where we realised that continueing at this stage was quite useless.
We never intended to not do so many things, we hadn't anticipated heavy study workloads. So don't say: 'we claimed to be doing something then not do it', as this was NEVER our intention, NOR will be, you bring it as we just deliberately generated a 'hype', which is absolutely NOT the case. Conditions caused the project to end up something like that, but don't say it like we intended to.
The main issue of the project was not 'learning how to program', believe me, we've done lots of useless programming before. In the progress of the project however we realised object orientation is much more suitable for game programming, and we switched to C++, a learning step which proofed to be quite useful, seeing the capabilities of such.
Dreams are cheap. Respect is earned.
Not to mention that all our 'dreams' were technically possible and just required a certain amounth of time (which turned out we just didn't have) to implement it.
I hope you kids learn from this experience.
First of all, F*** OFF with your 'kids' stuff, as you don't know anything about us.
And yes, we did learn from the experience. But not in the way you would like the see it I guess. We learned useful lessons in design and programming, all being applicated in programs we currently make.
I stand with my point that sometimes public attention is futile for ensuring motivation, that in this case, for the public, TTU turned out to be not much than publicity is a pity, life doesn't always go the way as you would like to see it, it's a situation we couldn't have possibly anticipated for (don't even argue with this unless you do/did an academic study...), and thus I believe you cannot put the full blame on us or our 'inexperience'. In the future we'll be more carefull announcing something, but we certainly do not rule out any publicity before we made something presentable.
Summing all your points up I come to only one conclusion, and that is that you have an entirely wrong view of the situation (you only look through the end-user perspective, though there's more to see)...