I am interested in participating, but I'd prefer to do that on my own terms if that's possible, without feeling as if I'm very responsible for the progress of the potential development.'
I figure I should comment publicly to close the book on my involvement here since my name came up a few times in this thread. Unfortunately this is a complicated topic for me in a few ways but most of it stems from the quoted comment above.
Over the past 5 or so years I've been a part of this community, there has been this recurring point from Simon regarding game updates being contingent on a "new website". This arrangement was communicated to me and other community members in various email chains in various contexts - from inquiries into purchasing the cultris 2 IP, to simply advancing the popularity of the game itself. Perhaps initially and at various points I agreed with Simon's idea that a website would be a logical next step for the game's future, but now I have a much more pessemistic and jaded view of this initiative.
Frankly, while my and many other community efforts have kept this community vibrant and stable, I've come to the point where I feel that the rewards - tangible and not - for commiting time to Cultris 2 are largely non-existent/not worthwhile. There simply is no longer any gratification for me that warrants further effort, especially on a new website. In the end, a game update or sign of reciprocation for this quid pro quo verbal agreement Simon has put forth a few times would have probably been enough to keep me interested personally, but my belief that it is anything more than an empty promise is gone.
Regarding cultris.net: I would have loved to have formalized this "test website project" into something fully functional and directly integrated with the game database that is now on azure. Unfortunately, for a few reasons, I did not really get anywhere beyond deploying the front end, hosting my own database that is painfully webscraped from gewaltig.net and in game using OCR scripts (yikes), and creating a publicly available API (which others have used for their own projects to my delight!). I will share these reasons so as to inform anyone who chooses to do further work on this project:
- really poor communication overall, especially response intervals. being dependent on simon/rick for basic things like azure access, database access, information about auth/api/tech stack was completely unrealistic when the responses happen q1-2 weeks (at best)
- forcing a tech stack/unwillingness to use cultris.net which is already hosted on a vps and only really needs db access to continue to develop. to this day despite collaboration and constant I still have no database access provisioned to my account on azure. not sure why since it was always the first thing i asked for.
- lack of independence/autonomy: the decision to use azure was unilateral. the decision to not host via a vps was also unilateral despite my request. i was asked to write serverless db functions in c#, a language i dont even know and for which there was never really good justification. i was also asked to implement microsoft authentication library (MSAL) (which was the last thing I did, for reasons that are not clear to me). i was told to let rick write the db queries/create an api via azure functions which did not ever materialize far enough to get the basic data needed for cultris.net. it would have been nicer (+ easier + more efficient) to just write my own queries, deploy my own api, and immediately have working results on cultris.net while staying within the stack i already created and deployed.
TLDR: sad's quote above.
In the coming weeks I will likely stop updating the database that currently serves cultris.net as well as take down the cultris 2 discord bot as maintainig either of these out of pocket does not seem worthwhile based on the feedback and usage (or lack there of) from players.
I hope anyone who is interested in working on this project finds more success than I did, and hopefully things can be different next time around. I am happy to talk with anyone further on discord kb1900#0178 and I fully support anyone who chooses to put their efforts towards this.