Hi all,

I know that you expect a new release of Sandy, and I promise it will come with the expected improvments (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

But for instance I would like to discuss about the future of Sandy.
As you might know I am the creator of Sandy, but also the main developper, for almost a year!
But my professional situation has changed, and I'm now a full time developper in an aerospace company, and as a consequence, my free time has decreased a lot.

Sandy is growing slowly but nicely in my opinion. The AS2 version is stable, and capable to do whatever people want (with few hacks sometimes). And that's a very important point!

But for a week I'm preparing the future of Sandy. Sandy is an open source project, but it is still quite hard for people to contribute to. In nearly 2 weeks, I'll have finish to set up a system that allow to everybody to modify, add classes, to sandy project. You might be thinking that it is going to be hard to manage, and indeed it is going to be hard.
That's why I would like to proceed with a request/agreement system. People interessted in developping Sandy will have to do a request to me, and depending on his experience and motivation, I'll give him the rights to become a Sandy developper. Not what I would like only experts, but for the benefit of the project, only some motivated and experienced users or developpers will have this oportunity.

The project needs different kind of contributions (not only for the developement!!) :
- website managment : as the website is a wiki, it is quite easy to manage it. Create/update tutorials, update/complete the FAQ, completing demos page and improve it(!), translate some information in other languages (the website is ready for that!!)
- Demos creation. A good project is a project that has some nice demos! Currently the demos are correct, but do not show all the power of Sandy. Creating some nice demos can be a good start point before being able to be a developper.
- Forum moderators : There are already a nice community of users here. But in the future it would be nice that members with experience become moderators.
- 3D modelisation artists. As Sandy can manage files exported from 3D modelisation softwares, it would be nice to have some people with experience in that field. They woul be able to do some report concerning the portability of our parsers, and do some request for a better evolution of the engine.
- Documentation : Sometimes developpers don't have time to do the best documentation ever! It is currently a problem I have. So people who want to learn the API and to contribute in the mean time can help on the documentation, complete it, etc.
- Mailing-list : I'll set up a mailing list in the near future. The mailing list is in my opinion better for discussions. The forum will remain the technical help support maily because it has upload, search, and more features.
- Developpers!! : I'll stop the AS2 development once the 1.2 release become official. After that I'll focus on AS3. I4ll need some help to create some file parsers, AS3 port, AS2 update with AS3 version evolutions, 3D algorithms implementation/optimization! A lot of things can be done here, but it requires a bit of experience and time.

I think I've done an overview of what should be done to make sandy a better project, with a nice future.
Now if you are interessted to contribute, please leave me your comment here! If you have some remarks, questions, etc. do not hesitate to participate to the discussion.

Thans to all the community!!
All the best,
Thomas PFEIFFER

Hi damo and sorry for having forgot to mention your name on the people who helped the project. Your debug work has been really usefull, as your requests/ideas (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I'm pleased to count you among the developpers!

The project needed a good basis and to be mature enought to be sure to survive to the community development (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
I'm sure that with the next release, the project will have enought maths/robust code, to continue to evolve as a real open source project!

Hi Saumya,
What I'm proposing is to discuss about your availabilities and your experience by mail if you will (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Just use the link from the forum for that (damn spam robots...)
Thanks a lot for your interesst !