BraveSirKevin wrote:There should be prominent notice or forum post somewhere to ask if anyone has the skills, or a willingness to learn them. There's almost 2000 people signed up here, and at least 5 times that many who read the forums but haven't participated, so it's quite possible that someone out there would willingly fill that role if they were aware that it needed filling.
I appreciate your optimism
Unfortunately I think it won't be so easy. While 2000 sign-ups sounds impressive, keep in mind that this is the total number of accounts registered in 10 years (AFAIK even including all the zombie accounts created by spambots). Two third of that have less than 5 postings, less than 400 have more than 10 and only ~120 more than 50 postings - during the course of a decade! I'm bad with estimations, but judging by gut feeling I'd say there are roughly a dozen people actively participating in the discussion (maybe a bit more?) with up and downs over the course of time. This would fit with the numbers I just gave.
Of course there are very probably much more people just silently following the discussions, but I'd rather estimate them to be in the hundreds instead of thousands, the vast majority being gamers who are interested in the progress of the project, not programmers with OGRE skills

And among those few who actually fill that profile there have to be some who are both willing and have the time to put the effort required to develop a 3d space combat engine into an open source project. We are talking about some serious commitment here...
That said, I don't think we shouldn't try to recruit programmers with OGRE skills, I just think it won't be easy at all. AFAIK someone tried something like that already (attracting more programmers to the project) a few years ago (I think it was MikkoM, the veterans here probably know more), but not very successfully. It will certainly require some serious and persistent effort.
The big problem with OGRE for me is that it doesn't provide any precompiled builds and compiling them requires proprietory software and IDEs that I do not have and would not spend money on since I'd not use them for anything other than compiling OGRE.
Um, what proprietory software? OGRE is open source (that's why it's called OGRE -
Opensource
Graphics
Rendering
Engine AFAIK

) and certainly doesn't require proprietory software to build, that would defeat the purpose of making an open source project, wouldn't it? And there are also precompiled builds for some platforms at least.
And if you happen to be on Win or Mac, you don't need to bother with FO's dependencies at all, as we provide SDKs for these platforms, for use with build environments you can get free of charge (Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2010 on Win and Xcode 3 or 4 on OSX). These SDKs include all dependencies and are really straightforward to use, more or less download, unpack and you're ready to go. The biggest problem is that building FO is very memory intensive, most complaints we get from people trying to build FO on their own are that the build process crashes.
So getting OGRE to work shouldn't be the thing that stops you
My strengths really lie on the graphics side of things and I'd prefer to leave the coding and compiling to others more capable.
This, on the other hand, is a far more compelling reason. You're right, it's always best to stick with one's strengths. Furthermore, it's even more difficult to find decent 3D modelers willing to contribute to open source projects like this than to find programmers. If you decide to stay long term (which really I hope you'll do, I like what I've seen so far very much!), you'd be our only 3D modeler. Programmers, OTOH, we currently have four and a half...
