Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
I think upon reflection the project needed a working and established engine core to build around, some part of that engine developed enough that there were jobs for people to do at any skill level and somebody to maintain a list of tasks that people could pick up according to size and skill
I strongly disagree with you on this.
You see the main idea of PGDCE was not to take an existing engine and then build upon it but to start creating a new engine from start (that also includes engine core) in order to provide from start to end learning experience for everyone involved.
What PGDCE lacked or should I say is still lacking is a proper design documentation which is written in such way that even those without any prior experience in game engine development would be able to understand it.
But that was never made. The closest that we got were just a few text documents suggesting the basic class structure. Wile design document outlining the basic class structure might be enough for experienced game engine developers to start working on a game engine that definitely isn't enough for people who have no prior experience on game engine development to start any work. Why? Because they probably won't be able to visualize relation of these different classes and therefore understand their role in the game engine as a whole.
That is why (if your remember) I suggested that we instead start making a mind graph which will at the beginning outline all planned modules (the idea was for PGDCE to have modular structure) and which could then later be further extended with more detailed information about each specific module and their mutual relations. But for some reason there was no interest in my idea about creating mind graph as part of documentation.

Any way the second reason why people lost interest in the creation of PGDCE is that at the time when we were still in the process of creating documentation the Castle Engine was published. So many people would rather go making new games on existing engine rather than making the engine itself.
Also at the time user masonwheeler offered a chance to help him continue development of his own partially made engine named The TURBU engine instead.