Situation/Progress

In October 2011 we released Crossfire 1.9, in December 2011 the work on CF2.0 started.
With other words almost 2 years passed by.

At this point I can clearly tell you that I am disappointed.
In those 2 years +30 people told us that they will help with the mod development.
Thats great actually... not so great is the fact the mod so far was build by just 5 people (mostly).

Gearhead who did hundreds of tests and gathered valueable information
Huor who created the server software and did many visual changes
Vishnu who create many 3d models
Utrack who create the new launcher (and hopefully is still working on the new version)
and me who did all the other work.

Well, it would be unfair if i wouldnt mention that Hi-ban created a ship that found its way into the mod and that some others are working on infocards.
(such work is also noticed and appreciated)

I am absolutely not sure why some people tried to join our dev team.
We currently have 18 members, 5 actives, 4 members that are part of the team because they worked on previous mod versions and the rest people which apparently dont see the need of doing something.
(I previously removed members from the team already)

The CF dev team is actually very organized.
Every idea, every concept, practically everything we wanted to do for CF2.0 has its own thread on the dev boards.
And in these threads the team was putting together what to do, how to do it and presented the results of the done work.
When the work on a topic was done then the thread was closed any moved to a different area. So every member always knew what needs to be done, who was working on it and even how to do it.

From more than 150 major topics for the CF2.0 development we currently have 54 Threads left open.
Most of them are just open because we need to do some final tests or because that are topics which have to be done at the very end of the mod development.

However, there are a few topics which really bother me.
Topics that easily could have done by the other dev team members, even topics that they wanted to do but in the end never even touched.
The active team did rely on people which in the end just wasted our time.
Now we are facing the decision to somehow put more workload on our shoulders to get these topics done... or to simply drop these ideas and features.

I said that CF2.0 will be released in 2013 and i clearly intend to stick to these words.
I am already doing night shifts in order to catch up time and i know for sure that Huor is also spending every free minute working on the mod.
In 5-6 weeks the annual mod awards will start and for sure I will not tell the CF players at moddb that they will have to wait till 2014 or even longer for a release.

I dont know how to do all the work, really... i dont know. But ill get it done somehow.
What i also dont know is why we got so little support from the community in the past 2 years.

It hardly can be because we didnt ask for help:
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=29932
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=34439
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=32196
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=34187
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=31622
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=24358
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22886
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22864
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22882
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22880
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22885
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22884
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22883
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=22887
index.php?page=Thread&threadID=25404
(there are many more threads where help was requested)

I see many people with alot of free time which have nothing better to do than to spam the forum or express how bored they are... but writing stuff for the mod... nope
I see many people with fantastic graphics in their signatures... but nobody ever reacted on my (and Huors) request for graphic artists.
Some with programmers/scripters/modelers/texturers.

If we wouldnt constantly being asked "when is the mod done" I could think that the members of the community dont want us to finish it.
Well, support looks different.
And people which volunteer to help should probably decide to actually do something.

I dont want to let this post end in such a negative way... and like to thank Martind Forlon for the incredible work on the wiki and the EMs and GRs for their dedication despite the sometimes rough conditions.
Of course also thank you to the 4 other Dev team members that really want to create something great.