As I recall, a few software developers still follow along here or may stumble here in the course of exploring my tools. As such, I felt I would be remiss not to mention my new patreon account.
Given the state of my life, I've had little or no free time lately and it really wears against the things I actually do choose to spend time on. I have many projects that I juggle and some days it's hard to get motivated to even look at them. One constant in my life is that I routinely help others on the jMonkeyEngine forums but I find even that often wears at my soul from day-to-day. Mostly this manifests as a total lack of patience for anyone accidentally or intentionally or ignorantly wasting my time in avoidable ways. At any rate, the negativity this generates only exacerbates the issue.
I've found that I'm always much more patience and much more generous with when helping with the things I've created directly. For one, not as many 'stupid questions' have been asked yet but for another, I view those folks more directly as my "customers" and it's not like I've provided them a pile of documentation or anything.
I started to find that every little 'thumbs up' I get on those forum posts tends to buy a little more patience for the next guy so I've been trying to figure out ways I can generate more positive energy than gets sucked away. Certainly, roasting everyone who gets it wrong wasn't going to do it.
As an experiment, I've created a Patreon account for those folks who use my open source tools and feel like contributing back in some positive way. Every cent is like a vote of confidence that I should keep doing what I do for the community. Too often I find that I have users that have been using my libraries without issue and just trucking along... unfortunately, that also makes them invisible to me. The hope is that seeing a few pledges here and there helps a bit with my sunny disposition.
If you are a Mythruna player and have read this far out of some sense of curiosity then hopefully this doesn't feel like a money grab. My Mythruna donators have already gone above and beyond with support and generosity and I really can't ask for more (except for maybe from future-new players when updates start again). That's a different kettle of fish as the idea was always to be on the path to 'self sustaining'. This is just about my open source developer tools.
I realized somewhat grudgingly that if things didn't change for the tool situation that I was on a path to burn-out and the tools on a path to self-destruction (presuming life doesn't choose to let up anytime soon on the distractions). I derive a lot of tangible Mythruna-related benefits to having these tools out there in users' hands.
If you are a software developer that hasn't seen my open source tools yet you can see here:
http://www.simsilica.com/?page_id=34If you are a software developer that is using my tools successfully then you might consider throwing a little support my way:
http://patreon.com/pspeed42Thanks for reading.