While the community is losing patience with the developers every day, the team has finally started to speak up and admit to exactly what I had told them over a year ago.
Does that mean ‘Beta 3′ is vaporware?
Straight from the source…
Splinter:
the current dev. process is plagued with some reasonably spotty attendance and lack of interested people applying to fill janitorial work, coders in particular, unfortunately. mostly theorycrafting a game we don’t play. general interest is declining.
Jaboo:
We are currently lacking coding development… We are in pretty rough shape code wise.
What Jaboo didn’t say is how he personally drove away one of the most active coders last year due to him taking some initiative and actually updating the source code.
Spielmann:
When you say “most of the dev team is gone” yes, you are right. In fact, most of the dev team is working now for professional studios… Yes, we lack sometimes the coding power we would need, or the time, or the energy. Good recruits for things like coding and level design do exist, but they are also scarce.
Bluestrike:
As for ‘beta 3′ I think we should never have anounced that one, the truth is that we don’t have a coder at this time and probably have to restart the port to the OB engine from 0.
Blue hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what I said over a year ago. The developers should stop kidding themselves with Beta 3. There is a perfectly good version of Insurgency on Source that NEEDS updating. Currently they do not have the resources to do that, beyond updating maps.
Speaking of maps… Where is Karam? Unfortunately the developers drove Majoris (maker of Buhriz and Iraq War veteran) out of the mod and he has moved on to Resistance and Liberation (a fine example of how a mod team should be operating).
Six months ago, I made a post on how to improve the mod.
Many points easily could have been worked on, but none were.
Developers should be prolonging the length of time that players are engaged in the game, not prolong the time that it takes to develop the mod.
I even suggested to the team over a year ago that I could head up development of the Source version while they concentrated on developing on Orange Box (since they are adament to do so). I even suggested I would find my own team to work on Source. They declined saying that the team would not be divided. That could have saved the mod for the fans and developers.