Archaalen said:
Considering that at no point since the end of 2004 there have been more than three developers who can code events able to spare the free time to work on the project, it should be no surprise that ideas proposed two years ago have not made it in. The mod itself has had to have several structural changes made to deal with the differences in new versions of base Victoria - there have been three very different versions in the past two years - and there have been other event areas that have been seen to need more direct attention.
I can say myself that I've had other interests and areas that i've worked on - between rebalancing the economy in VIP twice to deal with the economic changes between 1.03C and 1.4 and then 1.4 and Revolutions, beta work for Paradox which meant no work on VIP at all for extended periods of time (almost a year) and perceiving other areas as being more crucial to work on (colonization in particular), the result is I have not had a chance to do anything with a lot of the ideas in this and the other threads.
And since there are only currently a couple others in VIP development who do scripting, and they've been busy with other things as well, both in their real life world and in what free time they have to devote to gaming projects, of which VIP is only one of many that developers of the mod are involved in, and that is why things don't get done. we'd love to include everyone's ideas, but there is just so much time to do anything when it is all based on voluntary uncompensated free time. Between work, family obligations, and other interests, the amount of time is very low, and if it is an area where there is little interest or knowledge about the subject, the ideas simply go into the "to do at some point" category. And if its an alt-history idea, it gets put even further back in the queue.
We script in our spare time, and we have to prioritize based on what we think is most important to focus on based on our interests. That means a lot of good ideas will simply remain in the "in box" of these threads until some point someone has the time and interest to work on it.
All I can say is if people just propose ideas but do not provide actual scripted events, the chances of inclusion are going to be very low - we simply do not have the manpower to take ideas and turn them into new events. I have several sets of completed events that need review first (including a set of canada events submitted in 2004) before I can even think about creating new events based on ideas alone. We do not have the manpower, and since so few actually volunteer to help out in an extensive way over the long term, that is just the way things are.
Several times over the past few years we VIP developers have asked for volunteers, pleaded for volunteers, with backgrounds in script writing to help us with the backlog, but since so few players today seem to take an interest in actually learning the basics of modding, instead expecting others to do the work and present the results for everyone's benefit, progress remains very, very slow and will remain that way until more people actually get involved and learn the basics of scripting themselves. (And the process is NOT difficult - Vickywiki has an excellent introduction to the basics of writing events, which can be mastered in about an afternoon)
And in the end, if something should happen that would take me or one of the other developers away from being able to work at all on the project, I'd hate to say it but VIP would probably die, since there are so few people who actively involve themselves in modding to keep a project as comprehensive as VIP going.
So in closing all I can say is if the community wants to see more material included in VIP at a faster rate than currently is possible, then more people will have to learn the basics of modding so that we have not just ideas, but actual events scripted and bug-free from which we can integrate directly (as we did with the Tokugawa mod created by bassadoram for VIP:R 0.1 - he did all the coding himself so that all we needed to do was a bit of tweaking to some events..though still need to rework some of the text of the events), because at this point the lead developers are at the limit of what they can do by themselves in the limited amount of free time we have at our disposal.
