But where did Stella Polaris go?

[Rasbelin]

The question asked in the topic for this thread, may soon be a question on the lips of many Civ/MoO/SMAC/RTS/TBS/whatever enthusiasts. Suddenly the project they had been checking out every now and then, appears to have disappeared or that it has died.

Today the Stella Polaris Development Team made its final decision - development of Stella Polaris will be called off. The machinery has stopped. There won't be any Stella Polaris 1.0. But there is Stella Polaris.

After today's development IRC meeting, the work on developing Stella Polaris, was suspended completely. The development team has refered to a multitude of reasons, but basically a longterm lack of developers has gradually caused that the current development team has lost interest and other issues have swamped much of their time. All this basically means that there will be no Stella Polaris released, but all the intellectual material will be collected and stored. Also the web services will continue to function and Stella Polaris Forums will be transformed into the new Stella Polaris Universe website.

We did get some attention last fall when we had our Stella Polaris forum (or area 159, as Frozzy called it) here on ACS Forums and for a few months all our Stella Polaris buzz was here. We were a part of the Apolyton community. The forum is of course left, but archived invisible. We moved most of the discussion over to the new Stella Polaris Forums and the ties to ACS were cut off, as my personal relationship with the other staff of ACS became bad, which was primarily my fault. Of course that's a part of the past now, but that's how we left ACS and I was fired from my staff position. We never returned.

The work did progress, but the reasons mentioned above for the closure, did get their roots planted as we were last winter close to a full closure of the project. However things changed and we did get some more hope. Nevertheless, we are in a dead end now and that's why the decision was made today. The official announcement has been posted on Stella Polaris Forums.

We want to thank all Apolytoners for their interest in Stella Polaris.

[Frozzy]

Quelle Surprise.

[LDiCesare]

Sad, but it doesn't surprise me either. Lack of programmers is endemic in alt-civs anyway.

[Rasbelin]

Well, not just lack of programmers actually. The real problem was finding new people that would be willing to get involved for a longer period of time and be more dedicated to the work. At the best we had around 20 developers (and developer isn't yet the same as programmer, worth to noeice). However the figure diminished quite fast and many persons left without a word. So too much work was left on the shoulders of a few. I myself got pretty tired after Blake left, as he was such a good source for ideas, but then ultimately failed to give a word when leaving. So the downfall isn't a suprise, but at least we have created something. It's not that bad after all.

[CapTVK]

Rasbelin,

So that´s how it ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Don´t feel bad, many coding projects fizzle out after the initial wave of enthusiasm is gone. Scourceforge is littered with them.


However:
Seeing that Stella had SMAC as its origin. Why not make those resources available for use with the Freeciv/ SMAC project? The developers would love the extra material.

[Rasbelin]

The FreeCiv SMAC clone project is pretty much dead (IMHO) and it has different goals than Stella Polaris. Neither was SMAC our true origin. I want to emphatise this, because we weren't a continuation for SMAC.

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
The FreeCiv SMAC clone project is pretty much dead (IMHO) and it has different goals than Stella Polaris. Neither was SMAC our true origin. I want to emphatise this, because we weren't a continuation for SMAC.

I was always under the impression that it started out as a followup for SMAC and only later evolved into something different.

FC AC Dead? You could say the same for TeamCiv and the Warclient then. It´s a rather relative concept for smaller projects that started of as a forks of the main FC project. The fork may have died but that doesn´t mean it was a complete loss. The main branch is still vibrant, important lessons were learned and new concepts introduced into FC. Sometimes with original code from the fork as a starting point.