Hey guys,
since I received a lot of messages lately that some of you want to help me out, I think now is the time I come back to that offer.
I pondered a little about what would be the priorities of the evolution of Sparrow in the near future. I think most of you will agree -- heck, it's you who told me so!
-- that the two features mentioned in the post title are most important now that all basic stuff is working stable and convenient.
So, while I am working on the API documentation and setting up other things that will make Sparrow more community-based ... it would be REALLY AWESOME if some of you could get started with those things. I know that some of you are already working on those topics.
The idea would be to have simple, ready-to-download projects available for both features, along with some nice tutorials on how to use them. These would be the first killer-features added to the Wiki, then.
Later, I will jump in and make these projects available as official Sparrow components.
However, at least the physics integration won't be added to Sparrow directly, but via a separate project. I'm not so sure about the particle system -- perhaps it's small enough to add it to the core instead.
A side effect of this is that the Sparrow code itself can't be touched. If there's a feature you need in Sparrow, we can add it to it, of course -- as long as it's useful for general purposes, not just to help out the external library.
To fit with the Sparrow philosophy, keep in mind that simplicity is everything. Rather skip some features than making the code and interface complicated and bloated. The less code there is, the less bugs can be in it. The key principle: "If in doubt, leave it out!"
Just so that nobody has wrong expectations: I may be nice guy on the forum, but Holger once called me a "Code-Nazi" because of my extreme egoism and fanaticism on detail concerning source code. So I will turn the code upside-down and show no mercy with it -- we can discuss it, but I'm the asshole that will decide what will go in and what not!
However, I have already seen that some of you are REALLY great developers, so I'm sure I will be the one who learns something, rather than the other way around!
Bottom line: what do you think of this? Does this sound like a plan? Who's interested?
I will propose some thoughts on both topics in a separate post.