I want to open up by apologizing to the community. I took on a large responsibility when I signed up to do development on FSH, and I can’t help but feeling that I have let you down. I know many of you have come to rely on the features that have been provided by those who have donated their time to help improve this game.
However as many of you have learned, the demands on my time at home and at work have shifted dramatically. I now have a 19 month old son who I love spending as much time as I can with. As you can well imagine the focus of my free time has gone away from idle time I can spend coding. On top of this, I have recently shifted jobs to a better paying, but more demanding job. At my last job (before I became a father) I could spend much of my days programming FSH in between projects at work. As we are a much smaller company I work most days, and then into the evenings after the little one is tucked into bed.
About a 6 months ago I had talked with Hoofmaster about starting a Kickstarter campaign. We have always discussed the option of HCS hiring me officially to port all the FSH code into native Fallensword Code. This option would have taken the financial burden off of HCS and allowed to community to really have a say in what they wanted ported over.
Alas, I could not start the campaign in good conscience knowing that it might be more than a year before all the work would be completed. The only time I could really dedicate to the work would be off hours when the baby is sleeping – cutting into the precious time that I have to sleep or into the time that I could be spending with my son as he explores the world around him.
It is unfortunate that the other members of the FSH team have been burnt out over the years of maintaining the series of hacks that is FSH, or simply lost interest in the game itself. I want to say that I really do enjoy programming FSH. It makes me sad to see the string of messages that I get when HCS improves their code causing a section of FSH to break (or when GreaseMonkey updates causing all of FSH to break).
The blame for who is at fault has been thrown around from time to time. Or comments to the effect of “Why don’t they just fix it” without the real knowledge of what it might take to do so. If I am to be fully honest, the fact that I get more complaints then compliments (even when FSH was updating more often) does grate on my patience and willingness to devote time to the community.
To those of you who have offered thanks and appreciation along the way – it is your kind words that make me feel that I have let down the community.
What can we do?
Well I am still around, I just lack the time to develop all the fixes needed. While I could pass the reigns onto someone else I feel that it would be breaching the trust that has been provided by the community to the FSH team in general. I know of at least a dozen different occasions where a user has programmed a “FSH” feature and provided the code to those who have asked. This code always contained malicious code that caused peoples accounts to be emptied of their possessions.
If there are member(s) of the community that feel they have what it takes to take up the mantle of FSH then by all means feel free to contact me. I can implement fixes that are provided to me to maintain the integrity of the software until such time that I feel the trust of the community is behind the new developer. This will allow me to put my eyes on each fix before it is implemented to ensure that there is no malicious code.
I have not given up on FSH, it is only a matter of free time available to devote to the code.
Yuuzhan
