Hydrax/SkyX
First of all, I really want to thank you all. Really, it’s been a terrific 2 year journey since I’ve started the Hydrax / SkyX. Back then, when I was starting to think about how cool it would be to have a realistic ocean system created into Ogre – or a Sky system too for that matter –, I could not foresee what a wonderful time I had been having, watching my children growing and being accepted, and more important, being useful to so many people. From small to big projects, it is a joy every time I open a screenshot or video of someone else’s project and find my work helping others to achieve higher grounds on their visions.
This is, for sure, the most important evidence that I’ve been making right decisions about how to lead the project thus far. From the amount of – free – time I committed to it to the license model that I had in mind; one that would be the most appropriate to something that I wish can always grows to help others in their tasks.
Although the past and present are good so far, the time has come to make new decisions for the future.
The truth is that I must come up to my financial needs, and this cannot be postponed any longer. Servers, developer licenses, hardware, personal obligations; it’s all in the mix that builds up my monthly costs. I do have a wide range of options on how to deal with the situation, but my wish is to keep doing what is making me happy for the last couple of years: developing the tools that I believe are, and will be, valuable to others.
Most of you know that I’m working on an ambitious and wonderful project: the Paradise Engine; a well-designed and highly optimized Game Engine focused in outdoor scenes that comes with a all-in-one Editor, the Paradise Editor Sandbox. That is what I’m investing my time now and what I do hope will get me the financial support that I need. The problem is that it is a long term project and will not be ready to a “selling product” point any time soon.
That leaves me with the option to charge for HydraX/SkyX new versions – with the pros and cons that this will bring to me –, or to think in some other solution.
Well, I thought about another solution. 
In order to keep both free and open, I will experiment with some sort of crowd-funding / donation system to further develop SkyX.
How does it work? Well, each version of SkyX will be split in donation slots of 200€, and as soon as donations reaches the desired amount for a feature, I’ll start to work on that. Once it reaches the total amount for that slot, I’ll work onto a release build of everything that far, polishing the code and testing for release.
How is this good for you? Maybe some of you have a higher interest in further development of SkyX than the future of Paradise Engine, so I’m giving the opportunity for those of you to “buy” my coding time to make a better and bigger SkyX right now, with no further ado.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN I WILL NOT BE WORKING ON SKYX IF I DID NOT GET PAID. This does mean that I can make things faster for those of you that need things faster. Otherwise I will invest my time in what I forecast will have a better financial result for me in the future. SkyX is part of that for sure, but it is not a priority right now, and in the future it will be more important for me to ensure it work nicely inside the Paradise Engine framework than to develop a stand alone version, though there might be mutual benefits.
All that for a almost bargain price: you donate how much you think my time is worth for you, and how badly you want what I am proposing below in the timetable.
How is this good for me? I get the financial support that I need right now selling the time I would be investing in something for the future, for a “discounted” price. Really simple.
“But there’re no news of SkyX since two years ago”, you may say! Well, there are! Just watch:
*Videos from the Paradise Editor Sandbox, realtime.
So, if you think that these videos are really cool – like we think they are! – and are excited for the future of SkyX highlighted in the steps below – as we are! –, consider donating and support the project futhermore. I think it is a fair way to get both of us what we want. For you to understand what I’m asking and what you will get for, take a look in the time/cost table below:
Note: prices shown in tables are not per-feature, it’s just the total amount of donations that will make me starting to work on that feature. So each feature “price” is typically not higher than 25€.
* All versions are going to be released under the LGPL terms.
v0.2 - Advanced Volumetric Clouds RELEASED
| Under-horizon rendering | done |
| Native GLSL(+HLSL) shaders | done |
| New clouds light shading | 75€ – done |
| Multi-camera support | 100€ – done |
| Controller-based astronomical model abstraction | 110€ - done |
| Moon phase support | 115€ - done |
| Volumetric cloud system improvements | 125€ - done |
| Update sample projects | 150€ – done |
| Add multi-camera sample | 175€ – done |
| SkyX 0.2 release | 200€ – done |
v0.3 - Thunderstorm support FUNDED
| Minor skydome/vclouds mesh generators changes | 210€ – done |
| Basic lightning manager | 225€ - WIP (90%) |
| Avanced lightning manager | 275€ - WIP (85%) |
| Integration with SkyX | 325€ - WIP (50%) |
| Add sample project | 375€ |
| SkyX 0.3 release | 400€ |
v0.4 - All-viewpoint rendering support
| Some code refactoring | 450€ |
| In-cloud rendering | 500€ |
| Over-cloud rendering | 550€ |
| SkyX 0.4 release | 600€ |
Current donation amount: 521€ (18/02/2012)
Mail me or add your real name as comment of the donation if you want to be mentioned on this site. If you provide a link it’ll be also linked to the name.
Hydrax-SkyX demo – version 0.1
- Precompiled demo - 16Mb
While running the demo press ‘M’ to switch water presets! - Sources - 13.5Mb
(Code::Blocks and VC++ 2005 project files included)
Hydrax – version 0.5.1
- Precompiled demo - 16.2Mb
While running the demo press ‘M’ to switch water presets! - Hydrax/Demo sources and media files - 15.2Mb
(Code::Blocks and VC++ 2005 project files included) - Hydrax editor (with sources) - 17.0Mb
Hydrax config files are saved in bin/release/saved