FBS Milestone #7 Funded!

[Eric.B]

Greetings everyone!

I'm happy to announce that the community has successfully financed Milestone #7 of the Feature Bounty System.
FBS fundraising is paused until July 2027. That will be the final feature milestone for GearCity: 2nd Gear.

Voting for Milestone #7 will start Monday November 9th and should last 10 to 14 days. We have $3135.38 worth of bounties to select.

You can find the Caucusing thread here: https://www.ventdev.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=4933

I'll list new and voteable bounties sometime this weekend. They'll appear in the Caucusing thread when they're added.

Once again, I want to express my deep gratitude for your support!

[Nate700]

Eric i know your probably tired of working on gearcity but will there be a gearcity: 3rd gear if the community still funds fsb?

[Eric.B]

Eric i know your probably tired of working on gearcity but will there be a gearcity: 3rd gear if the community still funds fsb?

Actually, I love working on GearCity. The problem is, I only make $25,000 a year. Poverty level in the US is $33,000. And my current living situation in a high cost of living area requires $65,000/year. Considering I worked on GC for almost 17 years, easily 10 years of those I could have gotten a six figure job. Which means the opportunity costs is almost a $1,000,000...

Before the LLM explosion, AeroMogul at worst was expected to do as well as GearCity. Which would increased my income up to around $50,000/year. However, every year longer it takes to make means less success. Then LLMs came around. 5 of the 7 Senior level programmers I talk to regularly are now unemployed or underemployed. And I went from an expected ~5-ish single player PC airline games as competition this decade, to over 25 in just a 2-years.

So, 2nd Gear pretty much killed the chance of getting AeroMogul out in a timely manner. And then the whole industry has shifted to where AeroMogul is no longer guaranteed to be income generating and my backup career plans should AM fail are now gone.

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The plan is to have Milestone #7, #8, and 2 additional bug-fix/cleanup updates for 2nd Gear. (2.9.0.0 Alpha and 2.10.0.0 Beta) then 2nd Gear will be merged into GearCity's release. (Except on Mac, where users will have to choose via Steam/GOG menus what to install.)

Sometime after Milestone #8, I will have a non-binding poll for what contributors want to do. In all likelihood, the contribution system will remain, but the money won't go to funding bounties for GearCity. Instead, I will increase the dev logs, expand content, more videos, etc. I'll hopefully have an AeroMogul prototype by then, which I can live update like I did with GearCity Open Beta back in the day. Contributors would still collect their voting points, which you'll be able to use if a bounty system ever comes back or on a persistent multiplayer server subscription if we get that feature in AeroMogul. (It's likely, but not 100% set in stone yet.)

As for the options for GearCity: 3rd Gear. I was never expected to do all the work for 2nd Gear. Artwork was supposed to be 80-90% of the budget. Which is why a lot of stuff in the bounty system are discounted. (Doesn't help we've had 50-70% inflation since I made the prices either.) I had planned on doing about a week of work every update, instead I've done about 2 months every update. I estimate that I've made about $25,000 off the FBS and I've done about $250,000 worth of work. By the end, it'll be around $28,000 in revenues for about $325,000 worth of work.

So, the 2 options for 3rd Gear. Either bounties go up significantly in price. I'll have a formula for how it will change, but expect around 300-700% increases. Or the war in Ukraine ends, Serhey is able to come back to work full time, and he still wants to do it. Prices are likely to increase, because things cost a lot less in 2021 when I wrote up much of this stuff. But I would only expect something like a $500 price increase per art bounty, and 50-150% programming, give or take.

In no way will 3rd Gear come at current prices though. I just can't afford to do it anymore. I honestly should have shut it down once Serhey had to pull out of Milestone #2, but I try to keep my word as best as I can.