There are way too many secret TI projects

[DJ Omnimaga]

I'm sure most of you who visit other TI forums has noticed the drastic decrease in activity in the TI community lately.

Well, some people will say it is probably because people are losing interest in calc stuff or everything has been done. Well, this is not the problem this year. There is effectively lot of activity going on in the TI community at the moment. However we cannot see it anymore, because almost everything in the works is secret now. Since 2007 started there seemed to be a drastic increase in secret calculator projects, especially games, so much that everyone joined the bandwagoon and now I can cound on an hand how many public game projects are still active on each major TI forums (UTI, MC, Omnimaga, TI-Freakware, Revsoft, Cemetech, Calcgames and Detacheds Solution), and this doesn't just include the staff of each forums. On some of those forums they're currently nonexistant.

I don't mean to bash anyone making a secret project, because I understand that some people doesn't want to give false hope to people if they don't finish it, I myself do this with almost all my games until I have something major done. I am just saying that currently there is way too many secret TI projects compared to public ones, so members barely have anymore reason to post on forums. Even MaxCoderz, Revsoft and Cemetech have decreased in activity (altough Cemetech's may be partially due to the recent downtime), Omnimaga forums survives because of the few public projects that are still active and UTI is mostly calc help and support now, same for calcgames and detacheds. And this sucks because the TI community is actually very active atm, even more than last year. Every 2 or 3 days I get greeted via PM on IRC with a new secret project sprite set or screenshot.

I think the 2008 resolution for the TI community should be to have at least 70% of public projects, or at least when the entire engine is coded make the secret project partially public. Just posting updates once per month would alerady help. The other 30% should be surprises. Right now at least 60% of the calc projects I found are secret. If more were public this would give those lurking guests more reason to join, so at least something else than spambots would register now. It would also make a bit more discussion.

Imagine: a monthly update on 10 people projects, and each updates triggering 10-30 pages of discussion and questions/suggestions, that make 100-300 more posts on the forums about calculator programming talk, and considering some people would probably updates their projects more regulary that would make even more discussion, thus, the community would look more active.

Anyway it is just my opinion, I do not force people to abide by my suggestions, and people can keep their stuff secret if they want to, I just mean that in the future we should consider posting a bit more publicly.

[Harrierfalcon]

That, or progress is being made really slowly . After all, I see a lot of very large projects that will take a while going on. (Implicit, Metroid Pi ², Pokemon Purple, etc.)

On a more personal note, having 3-4 simultaneous personal projects doesn't help them get done any faster.

[Weregoose]

I also have a couple secret projects running. These, I am definitely going to finish and release, but I simply choose not to whet people's appetites beforehand – my reasons being that I wouldn't want to open it up to much criticism before then, and the fact that it does make that first release more gratifying. Especially, for this, it's important that I don't leave a mess of betas scattered across the Internet.

[DarkerLine]

My programming style prevents me having a public/secret project most of the time. This is because I write 90-95% of the code over the course of a few days just after I get excited about some new idea, and then spend an arbitrary amount of time making small improvements.

And there's definitely stuff going on at UTI other than help and support. Even though that's a big part of this site and will continue to be.

[thornahawk]

I had meant my blog to be a repository of the various programs I had written over the years to aid me in numerical work, as well as a discussion of the methods/algorithms used. However, I have not been able to write much lately because one, I for some reason keep finding better methods in the literature than what I have used in my programs, and thus take (much!) time in modifying the programs to use the better algorithm; and two, I lost most of my written notes in a particularly nasty flood (I stay in a small house near a overflow-prone river). Reconstituting those notes from memory is not going to be very easy. Apart from that, being a one-man show also presents its unique set of complications. :(

Hence, although I have ~300 or so potentially very useful programs stored both on my calculator and my notebook, they may have to remain secret for a while, at least until I'm confident enough to release them for public consumption, bugs and all.

thornahawk

[bananaman]

My reason for a secret project was so that I could never be responsible for keeping people updated. In the process, I never finished the rpg that I really wanted to make. Now my time is taken up with school and computer programming and I no longer have time to code games for the calculator. I think secret projects make the programmer less accountable and we are getting less good projects finished. Then again, I must agree with weregoose to an extent that a million public betas spoil the game. It is better to be like spencer with zelda and just throw a few screenshots and make everyone drool.