Building Godot Engine GDC Talk

[edmundito]

I'm watching a video about how Godot operates as an open-source project:

Sharing to see what we can learn from them for AGS development. They've been running a highly successful open-source project, which continually improves. What can we borrow from them? What doesn't work for us and why? Etc.

[Crimson Wizard]

Godot is a highly successful project (as well as other successful projects) because it's been led and organized by highly dedicated people, who have a well defined vision about what they want to make, and continuously pursue their goals.

AGS, as an open source project, had not been led by dedicated people, never had well defined goals, nor concept, and much of its inner problems had not been solved for many years. Plus it's still have a pretty bad code base, which is difficult to work with.

That's a comparison in a nutshell.

I don't know if anything can be borrowed in this case. The AGS, as a project, is in a very bad state overall. It cannot be improved by a small fix, it has to be redefined, but in order to do so, it first of all needs dedicated people, or a person, who would lead this project properly.

[edmundito]

@Crimson Wizard, it's undoubtedly a very successful Open Source gaming project, and I wanted to know how they achieved this. I don't expect AGS to match for many of the reasons you mentioned, but at the same time, give yourself credit for keeping the releases going and managing improvements. There are also several significant projects being made in AGS even today, despite the current limitations.

I posted this before I completed watching the whole thing, and there are a couple of takeaways I got

First, who is maintaining the project, and we have a similar structure:
- Core maintainers (you, Drake, Erico, etc.)
- Volunteers (I'd consider myself in this)
- Companies? (Not so much, although Wadjet Eye coordinated the effort for Mac/iOS in the past, and I'm now willing to include myself in this.)

What does the AGS core group need to work on the most at this time? Time and/or funding?

For funding, I am confident I can gather several individuals or companies to make significant monthly or yearly donations to the project, including myself—maybe not Godot money (37k euros per month?!) but at least something to get started.

However, I'm unsure about the core maintainer situation, specifically whether one or multiple devs can use the money to dedicate time to it every week without having to make ends meet.