This is so typical - it's hard to get used to such tools without obvious benefits but it's hard to explain them to people
True! So true!
Even at work, I tried to convince someone in charge of a rather large software development project of the advantages of the Bug Tracker.
He doesn't even bother listening to me, so I gave up trying.
I have his email and know his FB page, but the thing is that I think he's no longer working on SE. That's understandable - he has already spent a lot of time on it.
I'm indeed pretty sure he's not working on it now, but he did mention in the past that he wanted to continue it.
My suspicion is that all the unpleasantness in the communities has discouraged him.
This seems quite unfortunate to me, so the way I figure it, you can always ask.
Worst thing that can happen is that you will know for sure he won't work on it again.
I don't think there is hostility between these communities, but many unpleasant things are concentrated around TEHO developers.
That would make sense.
We've had contact with some people from BlackMark Studios in the past and they seemed reasonable enough at the time.
But then there were delays in delivering the English translation and some trolls lost their minds and kept throwing temper tantrums on our forum.
I can't even remember how many threads I had to lock in an attempt to stop their downward spiral.
It was quite a lot. It was weird.
To be fair, I enjoy some parts of TEHO, but I think AOP2 and COAS generally were better. I haven't played other
Apparently there is an unofficial Russian translation of our own PotC: New Horizons mod here:
Пираты Карибского Моря: Новые Горизонты - Pirates of the Caribbean: New Horizons
One of our old modders,
@Maximus, very recently considered joining them to do further work on the translation.
You could check it out and/or get in contact with him if you're interested.
DMC history lays much earlier. The thing is that there were two official Akella teams which were making COAS and DMC, but as I said, I don't remember the details.
CoAS was made by seaward.ru, which also started as a modding group.
They used to make free mods for PotC and they kindly allowed us to reuse some of their content in our own mods for that game.
As far as I know, Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean and Caribbean Tales were the only three games made by the real Akella.
Everything else started out as a mod of some kind.
This is probably the only form of progress in community projects. Competition doesn't work if there is no commerce.
I do believe you're right.