Godot is doing many one-time hires to specialized contributors (some external) these months using saved project funds in order to push forward some Areas, like improving build system, text and internationalzation, web stuff, fixes to X11, etc. So far they were pretty successful..
Like the contributors the project hires full time, these depend on people with proven contribution quality to be available for hiring. Currently a few of them are, but we are already low on funds for this (keep tuned for the upcoming unified funding page for more visibility)
So the question here is, would you be ok doing a crowdfunding (separate from monthly donation and sponsoring) to help finance these specific things? Should we instead ask for more donations?
To clarify, I mean something like a small kickstarter for specific features.
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Halloween does not really exist where I live, but since everyone is in the mood I will tell you an amazingly creepy story that happened to me many years ago. This is real mind you!...
March 2013. I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend (and stayed at his apartment) who moved from Argentina to the US a few years before then. To get internet for my phone and computer, I asked for his WiFi pass. Network was "Awesomatic", password was his name plus phone number..
Spent some days there, then went to GDC (in San Francisco), then returned back to my home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some days after my return, something really strange happened.
Both my phone and computer were still connected to "Awesomatic", and both had internet... 👻
[Thread] I get asked very often how can I be able to work on so many low level areas effortlessly in Godot, like rendering, physics, audio DSP, UI toolkits, scripting languages, networking, IO, pathfinding, platform porting, etc. and still do it efficiently.
The thing is, I just consider myself a generalist and I firmly believe that the "Jack of all trades master of none" label that we generalists are despectively labelled with is bullshit. Additionally, you don't need to master something in order to be very proficient with it.
There is a lot in the "knowledge surface" of things that is useless. I don't always do through research on topics before diving into them. I just look at what is available and try to see what is of use for my goals. Learning without goals is difficult and confusing for me anyway
It's easy to see @VulkanAPI as a glass half full or half empty. If you look at it from the negative side, it's a very complex API due to the very large amount of hardware supported, and many hardware "limits" can range from 4/16 to 1<<32 make it very challenging for portability.
The low level nature of it makes it difficult to deal with because it's not immediately obvious how limitations can be overcome. It appears to be an incredibly flexible API, but the more you use it the more you find there really is one "real" way to do things.
Still, so far, I think the positive aspects definitely outweigh the negative ones. Having something so low level ensures that drivers are simpler and less bug ridden (compared to how it used to be in the OpenGL era). I still found bugs, but nothing serious.
It's important that companies make their source available, but this does not mean it's considered "Open Source". As this term is not too familiar to those in the video games industry, here is a quick set of points to understand the value this software licensing model has for you:
1) Open source is about collaborative development, meaning everyone who uses and contributes to the project can benefit equally. When this is not the case, someone will benefit more from your code contributions than you will from theirs.
2) Open source is about your personal freedom as a user. When given to you, you can re license it, close it, or do whatever you want with it.
When this is not the case, you can obtain it, but you won't have the same freedoms as that who gave it to you.