What is polycode for?

[Samuel Batista]

So I just found out about Polycode, I had seen it elsewhere before, but the IDE really caught my attention this time. It's starting to feel a lot more like an Open Source alternative to Unity with this functionality, and I'm definitely intrigued. However, I'm a little confused, and concerned about the future of such am ambitious open source project.

This engine boasts some incredibly ambitious feature sets and it seems that now there's a big focus on Android and iOS publishing, which would certainly put this engine in the limelight. But through my experience as a Flash developer, and now a Haxe developer, it seems that ambitious projects without some kind of monetary backing don't evolve quickly, and it's easy to become obsolete within a few years. In addition, even with significant community involvement, it can become difficult to maintain stability and cohesiveness as more people submit features and take ownership of the engine's source. Or the original developer can become the bottleneck for new additions, as he shifts his or her focus from this project to the next.

So here are some questions:

1. What are your overall goals with Polycode and what makes it different from other comparable free alternatives such as Open Frameworks, MOAI, or Haxe? 
2. Why aren't you charging anything for this ridiculous feature set? It will be difficult to maintain the project as it grows, since it would require more time commitment.
   
3. Who's maintaining the repo and do you have any plan to handle external requests / feature additions?
4. How would you handle an influx of pull requests from users that have their own agenda? Do you plan on having entrusted collaborators?
5. Finally, does the IDE have a Lua debugger? That's something almost no Lua engine provides, and it's a shame.

I understand these are the early days of Polycode's public life, and the project shows a lot of promise. I'm not trying to kill your momentum and excitement, just trying to get you to think of some of the problems that plague other open source projects. Keep in mind, some are willing to pay a reasonably small amount of $ to help fund development of software they enjoy using and being a part of (I donate fairly regularly). As long as it's not thousands of dollars a year like most other successful games engines.

Good luck, and thanks for all the great work.

[Ivan Safrin]

Hello!

Thank you for your interest in Polycode! Answers below, but to clear up something you mentioned: there is currently no development happening on mobile ports of Polycode, though it WILL be a major focus in the coming months.

1 and 2.

Polycode has been my main personal project for nearly 6 years now and I use it for almost all commercial and personal projects that I work on. I made it open to the public because I think it can be a great resource for other developers and their input will in turn benefit (and has already benefited) the project itself. I work on it almost fulltime at times, but I do not want it to become my job, which is part of the reason why I released it under a liberal open source license and have been ambivalent about accepting any kind of money (even donated money binds you with a responsibility that I am currently not looking for). I want to be able to walk away from Polycode development for any length of time that I need for other projects and not be restricted by financial or other obligations. That said, I am planning on continuing working on Polycode indefinitely and it will most likely stay my main project. I've already put 6 years into and it will remain my own framework of choice, so I have no intention from walking away from it.

I won't go into how Polycode is different from X or Y framework. If you look at the feature set and the code tutorials, you can get a pretty good idea on your own. 

3 and 4.

I am currently the single maintainer of the repo and I accept pull requests almost on a daily basis and there is usually an active discussion happening between the people who are most closely involved with contributing to Polycode on Github, the forum and IRC. Most of the feature enhancement pull requests that result from these conversations are accepted after a quick code review on my end and of course all and any bugfixes contributed by the community. Feature enhancement pull requests that are sent in without prior conversation and don't immediately make sense I tend to ignore, since every pull request involves my looking through the diffs, pull it in and testing it and right now there are still a lot of bugs that I want to focus on. 

There are about 3 people right now that are actively contributing to Polycode's development. Ultimately, I am the final gatekeeper of what features go into the project and I want to keep it that way, at least for now. I am, however, always open to suggestions and always welcome a discussion about the merit of doing things this or that way. So far it has worked out well. Polycode's license allows you to always go off and do your own thing with it (and others have; one of the main contributors to Polycode maintains her own branch that's tailored to her own needs and syncs it with Polycode's main code base once in awhile).

5. Yes, the IDE has a networked debugger that the player connects to and will give you a backtrace in case of a crash, though currently there is no support for breakpoints (also planned in the future). It also allows you to execute code in the running player from the IDE console.

I hope I answered your questions!

- Ivan