Is There A Problem?

[electrocity]

Not just on this board, but the official boards also. There just seems to be a lack of..... well... anything. Hardly anyone is posting anymore, hardly anyone is porting software anymore. There just doesn't seem to be any motivation with the Pandora.
Me... I'm waiting for the exopc

 

[andyB911]

On the lack of posts... its like satellite tv. Too many channels spreads the viewers too thinly.

With the additional forum, plus even on this one the split to general, help, emulation etc there isnt the volume of posters in any one location.

It doesn't help that production has been effectively frozen for a month. When they eventually get manufacture and distribution running again, that will bring more users and enthusiasm. And perhaps some pruning of the forum sections might help...

 

[absolofdoom]

Yeah, personally, with the split of the forums, and the insane amount of time we have to wait for what amounts to some nub testing; I've had to take a break from the boards for a while. I'm sure plenty of other people are feeling similarly. A watched pot never boils, y'know?

 

[tristan.clark]

The situation will change once/if Pandoras are flying out of the factory. That is what is needed now. Until that happens there isn't a lot to talk about, no insane hardware hacks, new homebrew, or improved emulators. We all need the Pandoras in our hands to do that.

I'm sure that batches 1 and 2 will happen. But production needs turbo charging for the project to survive beyond that and I REALLY want that to happen. Craig has been talking about doing more of the manufacturing in the UK (the cases IIRC) hope that this shift isn't too late.

I think that a credible, albeit niche, handheld product like the Pandora may influence the big boys a little. Also the future for a Pandora2 could also be bright given the developments in ARM processor technology we're now hearing about.

 

[CPUnltd]

As far as what Wookiee said... I agree whole-heartedly that a P2 is more than plausible at some point with ARM developments as of late (read about a triple-core recently where the third core was dedicated to something separate from the other two, but forget what off the top of my head)... I also agree with the need for systems to be making their way into the hands of people (or at least instructions on how to build your own and a price list of parts or something should exist somewhere... this is DEFINITELY an open-source project, but it's not yet a DIY project just yet. Honestly though, for better or worse, having reached even this point proves feasability of homebrew hardware projects and even if things indefinitely halt (or take an exceeding amount of time to kick back up) I don't see the idea/concept for the Pandora itself dying out... it has it's own distro (essentially) and packaging system... that's a real threshold to cross in and of itself... there are definitely parts along this path to reconsider in hindsight in order to make things more efficient (and I'm sure that after orders put into play on OP's part are fulfilled, they will raise anchor and make their way to part mfgs that are more efficient and easier to ship parts out. My personal belief is that since core devs are in the UK and USA (I think at least one other country too) that all/most part mfgs should be located in those two countries with part orders being split between the two locations with a building facility in both. I'd imagine most any US-based purchaser (regardless of which batch they ordered from) would be willing to drop a bit of volunteer time to speed things up. I'm sure that establishing 9-5 paid builders would be more efficient and effective in both locations as well with half of the production from each location going to Ed and Craigs orders and the other halfs going to the main ordering list, so the 50/25/25 split for system shipping wouldn't change, but it would be split between two facilities vs just one. I know... a lot more money and work... but again, I think people in the US would be pretty willing to do some volunteer work... especially with the LONG list of Linux User Groups here int he states (mostly concentrated in the MidWest... and particularly in the state of Wisconsin) that you'd have plenty of tech-savvy volunteers and enough to get a facility up and running to some degree to help speed up production. If any Pnd owners, soon-to-be owners or fanboys in the midwest area are interested, I'd be more than willing to start something up in this area to see if enough interest can spread to be worth approaching OP for working with us to set this up... especially if we can significantly limit the monetary cost of this being done for OP... which could have been a barrier for it happening up to this point. I'm sure I can contact my local LUGs and spread the word... but I won't really say anything until someone from OP chimes in on the topic.. (now that I think about it... should I create a separate thread for this?)

 

[DaveC]

The situation will change once/if Pandoras are flying out of the factory. That is what is needed now. Until that happens there isn't a lot to talk about, no insane hardware hacks, new homebrew, or improved emulators. We all need the Pandoras in our hands to do that.

That doesn't really explain why the ones who DO have Pandoras all seem to have stopped improving the things they have done, or porting other things. After the initial quick "drive by ports" happened development and optimisations of those seemed to have fallen off a cliff. It really does feel like everyone that has one has grown tired of it already and moved on.

 

[wardred]

DaveC,
I think even the devs who have their devices and are making ports/games/emus/menus/whatever want a larger audience to share with. Many of them are still working on their projects, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have slowed their temp or stalled it until more people have Pandoras. I'm pretty sure there are also devs out there that don't have their products yet. I'm guessing that if a port is good enough...if for instance QIII runs at a good frame rate without actually porting it to GLES, then said dev may consider the project mostly done. (Actually, Pickle's probably a bad example to choose as a dev who's stalled. I've seen more ports from him in sporadic bouts of truly impressive productivity than just about anybody else.) Other enhancements, like a slicker system for launching the game, may be left up to other people to do, or may be way down in the priority list of things to do. Just a guess.

I don't know what the critical mass is to keep enthusiasm up for a niche product, but I have to believe it's > 900-1000 units. Combine the latest delays in nub testing, board manufacturing, case delivery, and whatever else may be holding up the next 3100 devices from going out the door with the split in the forums, and I think you have a perfect recipe for a lot of projects being in a holding loop until more people have the devices to play with and provide enthusiasm for the devs. The forum split really did seem to decrease the number of posts dramatically, both positive and negative.

I also think that you'll have some devs who drop off as they pick up other things or their life gets busy, and new devs who step up to the plate with their own projects...with enough units out in the wild. Without enough units in the wild if a dev puts a project on hold, that's simply one less thing being done without the chance of anybody else pitching in with something else.

Just a theory. I think if all of batch1 really is shipped by November, and a good chunk of batch2 ships by New Years, or even January or February given the delays around the holidays, a lot of the enthusiasm from most will return.

 

[skeezix]

Theres really not a lot of devs with Pandoras yet. And for myself, I've got at least a dozen projects so not many can advance quickly While people love to see releases every week -- when that happens, those are easy ports; if someone goes away and codes for 3 months, thats not them losign interest, thats them doing real value, probably more useful than the drive-by ports. But the drive-by ports are the metric people go by. ITs backwards really -- if things are quiet, is the scene dead, or stalled until units ship, or people quitely working on things? (And recall, working on the _system_ doesn't go front page or get any glory .. its just quietly rolled into hotfixes etc.) For sure, some few people are laying low until iunits ship (and in a way thats quite fair.. why bust your nuts when theres not many people to enjoy it yet?) But I don't think thats the norm.. I think the norm is _theres not many devs, and we're all spread thin_

ie: A few fixes for libpnd and such here or there, and pretty significant work for minimenu, that ties up most of my pandora time. Thats all non-frontpage unglorious but has to be done stuff. Same with ED, who does an amazing amount of scripting etc. After a few months, all kinds of people will have put in various changes and a hotfix comes out.. that doesn't mean everyone is idle, it means they're working. (Lets not forget that no submitted change can just willy nilly go in, it has to be tested; testing and tracking tickets and such is a huge amoutn of work, and counts as absolute zero to those watching the frontpage news.) The config UI for minimenu was actually quite a lot of work .. but its boring tedium stuff, no one likes to hear, and its just part of a hotfix; but that tied up my pandora time for quite awhile; with a wife and kid and work++ theres only so much time per week now I'm looking at the 'manual category' stuff talked about in the other thread .. a fair amount of work to add in options to minimenu and again, small bullet points on a hotfix, nothing for the frontpage; so of my time, few months can go by just doing system support. (And at the onset due to having the little one around, I said I was keeping my nose out of the kernel on this one; one has to draw a line.. I've bene 'too involved' in too many projects over the years, can't afford to wreck myself now .. and kernel is much more involved than non-kernel, so look at notaz, and djwillis who built the firmware kicking and screaming into what it is. They've earned a break, but for every little point you see by notaz, theres quite a lot of work and testing there.. but little bullet points, not glorious front page stuff people notice.)

Anyway, so my summary is .. theres few devs, and many of them are tied up in 'invisible' stuff. Pickle and a few do the drive-by ports and the mega-ports (the real work ports, that take serious coding to get done); the real work ones take awhile to do. The drive-bys, maybe most of the easy ones are done. IS it productive for someone to convert an ipk or recompile some app every other day? Maybe, but thats just 'making the scene look busy' but not really accomplishing much imho. Its the real work that takes time, but it doesn't show up on anyones radar.

Example..

I'm working on a couple new games; I've written a game server for a turn based game mentioned months ago, just working on a client now.. but its a _huge_ amount of work (months), so while a tonne of effort, you're not going to see much for awhile; if I went away for months and you didnt' see anything.. Someone would assume I've abandoned things, but really, it'd be real work being applied The server does stats crunching and all sorts of balancing, plus universe generation and player diplomacy and all sorts of awesome stuff, its a tonne of work.. but it has no UI, so its 'easy' in a way (for me; thats the stuff I"m good at, writing daemons and protocols and infrastructure.) Writing a client barebones is piece of cake, but if I want to make this look at all good anf fancy, its many months of work, especially given my other obligations and projects .. so if I vanish for a few months, its not for lack of effort, its for _effort_, thats invisible

Hell, if I had a graphics artist, I'd be working on BattleJewels multiplayer too, that needs a few months of work, but I'm having trouble syncing up with my mighty artist; he's a busy lad with kids too

I've also thought of a couple smaller action games that could be done, but not sure I really shoudl bite them off right now.

Not to mention an ovr editor and general tweaks to the system and minimenu and so on. Stuff like libpnd and system tweaks etc don't go on the front page, they're just small bits of many changes in the hotfixes; so folks tend to think a lot of people are doing nothing, but in fact, theres lots of system work, its just unglorious work

And lately, aside of all this, I thought I'd might chill out a bit; I think with all the work I've done, and still doing, I can take a week here or there and play Civilization V or Starcraft 2 It doesn't mean momentum is lost .. (and I hear that in various msgs quite a bit) -- it means hey, we're human, relax For ED and Craig this might make a few bucks. But despite comments like Craigs where the assembly guys are making some honest pay, theres no pennies in this for us; we do it for _fun_ cause we're sick idiots (Someday, some long day away, maybe Open Pandora will be hugely successful, and it woudl be awesome if they hire us over the seas folks; but thats a long shot, right? So permit us some relaxation while things are 'quiet', and most of us aren't relaxing anyway. Some people come home from work and _play_ games; for us who come home from work and _Write_ them, you gotta remember how much more effort that is, and how much longer it takes.

jeff

quick edit: "real momentum" coudl be defined as number of _Real_ jobs that get done in some amount of time; ignore quickie ports etc, since they don't really count .. I could port 10 little things a day, but thats nothign of real value; stuff like moving the whole system to a newer kernel and getting hardware video decoding going, thats real work, months of work. Stuff like that can only happen one in awhile due to how few devs we have; but if we had a pile of devs, you could see real big ones like that happening all the time. For stuff like that, you need thousands of units out, so you have hundreds or thousands of devs. Otherwise, it _must_ be that you get lots of quickie easy things (not real progress) or occasional real heavy ones (real progress). Or perhaps things are isling down, but it would look the same, and a lot of evidence sure points to what I'm talking about -- can you count the number of devs who've posted something on more than 2 hands?

 

[-Tj-]

I think even the devs who have their devices and are making ports/games/emus/menus/whatever want a larger audience to share with.
...
I don't know what the critical mass is to keep enthusiasm up for a niche product, but I have to believe it's > 900-1000 units.

This. ^

To be honest, I have a lot of things I'd like to do with my Pandora, but seeing as I don't have it yet there's not much I can do. I have some hardware mods in mind that can't go forward till I have a case in-hand that I can measure, along with some software that I'd like to try making, and so on. My programmer friend also wants to do things, but he's said two things that reflect what most other Pandora users/developers are faced with: no Pandora, and too small an audience at the moment. Considering the fact that the first batch is effectively sold out and only a percentage of Pandora buyers are actually actively using the forums, I'd think that even getting any response now would be rather minimal.

In addition, in my year of forum-going here, it seems like weekends drop off to very few posts, perhaps as people have more things to do and aren't bored at work. :lol: I'm sure things will pick up as more users get their units. I, for one, am preparing.

 

[skeezix]

As to 'small audience', I always ignore that -- code for multiple platforms If you're doing opengl, limiting yourself to 1.1 might by you additional platforms; or consider than the Nokia N900 is nearly same specs as a Pandora, minus the controls .. or consider also targeting the gp2x, the wiz, the caanoo; or the PSP, the iphone, the Android army. Or god forbid, if you're using SDL, that its trivial to also run on windows, linux, OSX, and random platforms .. even WebOS.

Coding only for the Pandora is a gambit right now due to limited population, but ... anything targeting Pandora can _also_ target something else; build up front for that, or add it later

If you don't have a pandora now (drag, I know), you could build an SDL app or Open GL app on a desktop; port the code to yor pandora or whatever later. Most of game writing (for example) is done on a desktop; sure is nice to test on the real thing of course, but you don't have to. Or get a beagleboard in a pinch :/ But if you're writing a 2d game with SDL (say), you coudl code the _entire_ thing without ever touching a pandora, and with a days work, get it rnning on pandora when it arrives. (Consider Hatari, Atari ST emu; compiles and runs out of the box on the Pandora, and I did a couple hours of tweaks to make it run a little better for us due to controls.) Your real risk is performance issues since without a pandora you don't know how much is pushign too far .. but there are a few peopel out there who can proxy for you!

jeff

 

[WizardStan]

That doesn't really explain why the ones who DO have Pandoras all seem to have stopped improving the things they have done, or porting other things.

I can't speak for all, but I've been playing it more than coding for it :blush:
I occasionally get flashes of inspiration but have difficulty seeing it through, and then I'm all "hey, a round of Pandora Panic will help me focus..."
it's all downhill from there.

 

[Hitnrun]

Yes the quick and easy ports have already been done. On these we took 30 minutes to 3 hours to make.

Now the hard ports don't happen as fast. They need more time and concentration, things that sometimes Real Life doesn't allow.

Now let me get back to fighting this Skull Dungeon boss from Zelda... err, I mean, testing PocketSNES!

 

[JurnD]

Now I feel all bad for not working on GemRB last night. I wanted to, i just needed to play one more turn of Civ5. Damn you Sid Meier!

 

[torpor]

I tried to mention this once before, during some long-winded soap opera thread where people were cussing each other out and generally being very insulting, when I mentioned that it would be nice if "we all just coded more than we complained on the boards about things", but I got shot down for "not being relevant -or important- to this community" .. that seriously demotivated me, personally, and I've only been using my Pandora for the odd Mame game every now and then. Whats the point working on a release in those conditions, eh?

Frankly I think there is a crony'ism problem here, where the 'main core' are hyper critical of anything that will reduce their own influence on 'the scene', and thats a big distraction from what I had hoped would be a fun target group for interesting things. There need to be more end-users participating in the developer/user dialog, and fewer 'gp32x guru versus potentially de-motivated developer' discussions.

For my part, I hope to pick things up again at some point, but the majority of my effort right now is going into the Caanoo .. at least with that platform there is a chance to have some interesting feedback from users, and not just other devs, and the existence of the GPH store, even though its totally not working right now, is a tasty subject.

Could be that the situation with the Pandora is that the end-users aren't there, mostly its just other 'expert developers', and we all know thats not fun to deal with sometimes ..

 

[Bosbeetle]

Hmm sad to hear that topor.

I try to give 'end-user' feedback however most if the time it just happens to be "x doesnt work" then the dev saying do you have any Idea why and then I have to reply no to that question.

Thats not really constructive, I think dev to dev talk here on the forums is much more constructive.

(on a more personal note I am still learning a lot about Pd, thanx for showing it to me)

 

[metalhammer]

... I'm sorry to hear your words Torpor but I can see your point

Unfortunately there're not so many of 'us' users having their Pandora yet so there're no good chances to comment your nice work or give you guys a useful feedback. Obviously we're always on your side since we heavily rely on your skills and efforts to make our dreams and fun come true

What I can say, for the moment, it's thanks a lot and keep up please with your hard work: I'm sure everyone here greatly appreciates it

We could be beyond the scene while waiting but I guarantee we're monitoring the situation closely !

Cheers,
Wizboy

 

[EdCa22]

Yeah, I feel like I'm not really helping make the boards be a more optimistic and happy place, but I think everyone is a bit disillusioned right now - I'm sure it will be much better when hardware meets hands.

In the mean time, I'm trying not to think about the Pandora too much... we've had over 2 years so most of the possibilities of what will/can be done with the device have been discussed to death. What we're seeing now is almost a pure waiting game.

 

[Bosbeetle]

Its really weird being on the other side of the waiting game. I see all the reactions of people still waiting and remember how it was and that for you guys its still like that. Rest assured the feeling will vanish immediately after you receive your pandoras

 

[chame]

seriously, the waiting is killing the pandora

a new generation of hanheld devices is right on the corner.
pandora needs to become cheaper and massively available

 

[torpor]

I have to say that I really empathize with the guys who don't have their Pandora's yet, and it feels a bit disingenuous for me to be disaffected with it, as a machine, already .. so I want to point out I'm still very much a Pandora fan, just that I've decided not to check into this 'scene' so often and get all gnarled up with shitty flame-fests with other members of the 'dev with Pandora' group.

I'd sure like to start a few threads where we're working together on things, a little .. maybe I'll focus on that some time this week. Would be good to get the 'gridwars'-clone project fired up again ..