Hi Juggernaut,
thanks for your analysis, clear words are always welcome!
When I try to put myself in the position of a new developer who does not yet know the Cafu Engine, I agree that despite all it's documentation at
http://www.cafu.de/wiki/ and the other web pages, it can have a relatively steep learning curve:
Our documentation has grown significantly over the years, but there is still a lot of stuff missing.
The "root" problem is of course limited resources: I only have so much spare time, and I have to divide it across developing new features, developing usability features, writing documentation, providing support, website maintenance, doing legal work, doing public relations work, etc.
My personal preference is, like everyone else's, writing new leading-edge features with stunning effects and shiny graphics. That's ok for me as well, because I don't mind if everything else is neglected and "suffers". Such course however comes (or came) with many ugly side effects, like importing maps from editors for other engines, writing all material definitions and GUI scripts by hand and from scratch, reading source code rather than documentation, hex-edit BSP-tree data structures, implementing shaders in C++ or GPU assembly code, and did I mention that I like command-line interfaces?
Alas, most people don't like hacking like this, and if I insisted on my course, we would probably have a technically very nice 3D renderer, but I would likely also be it's only user. So I take time to implement "extras" like CaWE. The Map Editor alone is a full application of its own, and it took months to bring it to todays state. Writing documentation takes even longer (and can be very frustrating if you're supposed to document something that you'd rather rewrite than document).
For example, take a look at the new material that I created for the new Model Editor: the gallery images, the feature list update, the video and the documentation as mentioned at the bottom of
my recent News post.
This alone took over two weeks -- time that is lacking for anything else.
(And believe me, I'm
really looking forward to getting this stable release out so that I can go back to programming again!)
But things are still very well, and I cannot complain: Considering the available resources, things are progressing very well, and especially we're constantly getting better in all departments.
Finally, maybe the best that I can do is ask and encourage you (and everyone else) to help:
Whenever something is old, ugly or missing, help to add or improve it!
There are many ways to do it, too: from filing tickets over proof-reading the docs, replying to forum questions, improving the artwork, to writing C++ code -- almost everything is helpful!
(And it's really the best way to get the things done that
you think need doing!)
