Here for the Velocity 3.0.1 release announcement? It's over here.
This year has been a wild ride for me. In February, I got a job with Branch. To say that the pressure has never been higher than ever is quite the understatement. To put it bluntly, this is not for the faint of heart. With the increase in workload at work, it has left me with ever less time to focus on Minecraft.
In addition, most of my projects have been one-man shows, with me being the principal driving force. Velocity alone as of this writing has 25,441 lines of code, with much of it written by me. But with increasing time pressure on me, along with not being adequately compensated for the free time I am able to put into Velocity, I have been forced to re-evaluate my priorities.
I've always wanted Velocity to be a community project. I could still play an important role in the project but at this point I need to start considering ways to keep the project alive without having to rely extensively on support from me. Lots of servers depend on Velocity now, from Minehut to people using Velocity like a reverse proxy to their home-hosted servers. There is a very delicate balance that has to be maintained, but I am simply not in a position to maintain it. While I've gotten some support, both financially and in-kind (thanks to my GitHub Sponsors for helping pay for my time and Voldex for being generous enough to pay our server bills), sadly it is not fully enough to pay for me to focus on my Minecraft work.
As such, I'm considering alternatives to keep the project alive. Given that my workload is likely to increase, I see the days of maintaining the project myself to be numbered. Currently I only see the following possibilities to keep the project a going concern for me:
- Being hired as a contractor to work on Velocity and nothing else. I doubt this will happen (and I do otherwise generally like my job), but if you are crazy enough and are willing to fund it, I'm all ears!
- Relinquish control to another entity. I have had preliminary discussions with the Paper team and they are receptive to onboarding Velocity as an official sister project. This would reduce a lot of my workload since I would no longer have to pay for (and maintain) servers and moderate the Discord server.
I do intend to continue providing support for Velocity 1.1.x until the end of this year as previously announced - the cherry-picking I commited today (September 1st, 2021) shows my commitment. However, I am not likely to extend this deadline without a significant financial contribution.
Polymer will continue to be developed, but at a slower pace and with more of a focus on what can be integrated into a stable Velocity release without too many compromises. There is much that I want to do, but there just isn't the time for it.
As of now, nothing will change with them. I expect to be able to maintain LazyDFU indefinitely due to its simplicity and strong backwards compatibility story; Krypton will require more attention but it is doable.
❤