The mod's development has slowed down over the past few months, ultimately becoming stagnant. Factors outside of this project caused the pause/slowdown. Whether it's this project or another mod on the workshop, every project made for the community is a labor of love. Anything made for the community comes at a cost. The most expensive resource associated with this project is working hours. Yesterday I learned an essential lesson on implementing something seemingly simple that can take 12 hours of googling, following documentation that is not UpToDate, and still not successfully set up my idea. Working/going to school time full time and still attempting to put 20-30 hours into this project and (others) per week is challenging to achieve even with the best time management skills.
I want to address some rumors. First, the H-60 development has not stopped, is not on the chopping block, and will continue progress. But we will require help from outside collaborators to help with a load of work with the project. As a development team, we are creating new workflow solutions to reduce staff-hours wasted on building the project and bug tracking. And more accessibility to pushing updates to the steam workshop.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
As the dev team (one developer is horrible at this), we will get sucked into a feature devoting everything the dev has into developing the feature, skip sleep, food, etc., until it works'. I am sure most of you have been in the "zone" and understand. The problem is after the feature is implemented, the actual work begins. We still need to beta test the feature, document its capability and limitations, create bug reports for the errors, and give tech support to end-users. This is a lot of work required to complete, even for the smallest feature on this project. I think we can all understand that developers will get burnt out when there are only a few people working on all of this, and workflow will slow and negatively affect our developers' mental well-being. I know that I could not sit at my desktop for a few months due to a stress reaction from working 18 hour days. I'm Just now able to open blender on my desktop after six months and not feel sick.
The solution is to ask the community for help. And give specific roles to qualified community members. I'm adding a public repository for a community-run wiki/ pages, skins, MP missions, and SP missions that will get included in the mod. When the time is right, there will be two releases of the H-60, a stable version, and a beta version that Q&A team members will have access to. Another thing that will be a great addition is using the GitHub issues tracking feature and workflow, and it will keep us more track than using discord to track bugs. As I look around, the discord, I can't help notice a large amount of great community content creators: from Youtube video creators to Q&A. If you would like to help out and take some of the weight off our