Mote gone dark?

[Dave Griffin]

Greetings,

We're just coming back to Mote after a long Call of Cthulhu campaign that's not used maps, and it seems that this project has gone dark?

The websites are not working, and there's been on activity on any of the usual social media, so has Idle-Ideas gone away? Is Mote now dead?

Hoping someone is still out there and the project can still live on...

Cheers

Dave

[James Murrell]

Seems essentially dead. Unfortunate, but I had a feeling it might happen. Ultimately, the MapTool open source base was simply too much of a Java kludge to improve substantially. They made some great improvements but it still wasn't going to be marketable. When the Idle guys made their move toward working on Sift instead, that seemed a better course. Perhaps they've grown weary of the whole virtual tabletop project, but perhaps they've just been working on Sift slowly and quietly, now knowing that it will take a very long time to bring to fruition. I also think I remember something about one of the project founders dying suddenly, which understandably soured the project.

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

He didn't die. He had a back injury with a long road to rehab and that totally changed his outlook on working on a project that required him staying put in front of a computer when the recovery demands need him to up and about getting his mobility back.

With regard to the projects, nothing is dead. A series of bad scenarios just happened right when no one has any time to spare to rectify the situation:

• The staging server that does all the native compilation, containerization and uploading to the cloud, got killed during a thunderstorm / power failure / UPS failure, scenario. We only had one, as we have never been able to get enough support to expand the good stuff LOL
• Google Cloud pushed out several new policies while we were away that messed up our configuration. We'll have to correct things, in order to re-acquire administration of our service instances on their cloud.
• 3 months of commits to our development branch got corrupted along the way, and without time to sort through the salvageable code and cherry pick what's compatible with the stable root, we can't push out any new updates yet
• We decided to let go of the .biz domain, in favor of our preferred .net domain, which only recently became available. This migration, of course, carries its own share of heavy workload to reconfigure everything, so yeah, it's on the pile of TODOs
• Everyone's on full-time jobs right now. I've been on the enterprise side of things for a year now and I just got promoted even further up the ladder, managing a bigger team of junior devs. I  barely have the time to sleep, much less time to correspond on what's become a side-project.
• G+ was laid to rest.
• The community's been quiet. No one has reached out over the months, other than the posts made by Dave and James here, and the ones made on Facebook this week.

We're just around, and we'll be back to pushing out and hosting new updates, once we get the time. While yeah, this has never been a profitable venture from the start, the existence of these projects is much more important than making a buck. I know it's our job to do this, but do tell people that we're not dead yet ;)

[Dave Griffin]

Really glad to hear that nobody (and nothing!) is dead ;-)

Real shame that all of this has happened at the same time.

With the loss of the .biz domain, there's no way to download the current version at all currently? If just that was resurrected (or http://idle-ideas.weebly.com/ was updated to point to an appropriate message or place), then at least we could still access the latest version and keep things running (I've rebuilt my games PC since we last used Mote, and I'm not sure we have the software available!).

Be a great shame to lose any users just for the sake of a domain name...

Cheers

Dave

[James Murrell]

I'll gladly accept the clear fact that my brain misinterpreted what I remember of a forum post.

[Dave Griffin]

So, at the moment, I cannot even re-install Mote as the servers are not there...

Is there any chance of at least putting the latest installers (windows & linux?) up somewhere so we can access them ?

[Idle Ideas Inc.]

Hi Dave,

Check your e-mail please :)

[Dave Griffin]

Many thanks! :-)

[Longshot Md]

For what its worth, I've been singing praises to my fellow gamers about Mote and what it can do.

And though it has taken a lot of time, and I myself am busy working in a startup (unrelated field), I am close to finishing my 5e framework for my group.

Also for what its worth, I'd make it available if anyone wants it when I'm done. I don't know how many frameworks are already made for Mote other than John Waite's that haven't been shared. Seems a shame if there are more out there.

[Dick Justice]

I would be interested in 5e and especially GURPS frameworks for this. I would do GURPS one myself, but I know waaay to little about all the tech stuff. 

[Woodrow Mace]

https://front.idleideas.biz Doesn't seem to be working and I can't update from within Mote.
Is there a new website?  Is there some other place to download the latest version?

[Longshot Md]

I don't think anyone is working on it. But who knows, maybe they will pick back up on it. I still code in it, and I love it. I only just now discovered this group was still here and "active".