We only have one programmer, and he's on vacation. You've got the reason behind this inactivity right there.

OSS development is very much about waiting around for interested (and talented) people to show up. As soon as we reach critical mass, I and Charlie can do admin-type work. And you brijones need to be our leader and atrain guru. You seem to have a very clear idea of what makes a good atrain-like game - back to basics and tight gameplay goals.

Right now I'm busy with Freeciv but I'll check by here every now and then.

I just wrote a long-winded response to have Vista kill my browser session.... why did I waste such time on a response to dignify my actions to a little pleb who can't handle reality? I don't know...

Anyway, the state of play is that I'd love to get this project going, but as the sole-programmer (a role of which I did not request) it's taxing to be working by oneself on something so huge. I'm also on holidays and can hardly get infront of a capable computer. Please don't call this arrogance, nor selfishness, nor expect free things to always land in your plate.

I wish you all the best in your future endeavours and I hope you are a lot more leanient on your next partnership. Especially in the OSS world, not everyone is nice and you don't always get things when you want them.

Seriously, if you want someone to work at your pace pay for it instead of whining. Use a service like http://cofundos.org/ or start a non-profit organization and collect donations.

Please don't let this ruin your well-deserved vacation Steve! I think someone is just jealous of you sipping drinks at the beach.

You know what, I don't know anything about programming, hell, I've tried many times to learn. The problem is, it's the drive, I just can't get happy over trying to program "Hello World!".

What I do, is I problem solve. I might not know what code to write, but I can invision the program and slowly create ways to solve it.

I recently had a problem handed to me, I was asked to create 12 records in Access, and have them imported into Excel, and have a couple of charts. However, the perfectionist in me wanted more. So, in went future proofing. I placed a "populate" button in, which ran a fairly complex script updating a set of formula's and the two charts.

Now, I have minor VB experience, and we all know that excel uses a very weird implementation of VB, so, the way I got around it, was creating a macro to discover what code to use. I trialled and errored the entire script until it was perfect. But I took it one better, and I did something similar to my accounting spreadsheet.

I may not know how to do it today, and hell, tomorrow, I am betting I won't know either, but one day I will, and by taking small steps each day, I can be on the path to a direction. I love this project, and I will start trying to learn what each part of the code does. Perhaps, a good start would be a flow chart? Rofl, anyways, everytime someone says OSS, I keep thinking about that movie Primer.