In terms of bureaucracy and development:
Ever since we upgraded our entire infrastructure, back in November 2019, the acitvity in development has increased.
Not only is developing more fun, but also more independent and consistent. Each and every 'live' update has to be reviewed and approved by other core developers, leading to better and more stable updates.
Developers are free to help each other and been doing this for a long time now.
Recently, we have further improved the relations among contributors and developers, by linking the developers workflow to the contributors workflow and vice-versa. Lua-Contributors are now able to access their own/requested code freely without relying on a developer. They can also submit their changes for review, fully automated. Those changes can then be reviewed by developers and be applied on to the beta server. In addition, Contributors have received a bunch of useful dev-commands (such as /restart, bot commands) that aid in their development.
I understand that a lot of development is being done behind closed doors, mainly because these are either backend/infrastructure related services, or don't add much value in terms of information.
We've been transparent from the get-go when it comes to development.
Our first approach was the
changelog-thread which was created by
back in 2015.
We then slowly shifted to providing a
changelog-viewer (V1 and V2, V3 currently in Development).
Internet then provided the community with additional insights into development, by hosting the changelogs
Discord bots, that are responsible for logging Web and other non-cityrp updates.
Last year, Internet and Bambo then setup a
Blog, that further helped getting the word out in terms of updates related to HR, Limelight, Development and Co.
Not to forget our public
Github Organization where we provide our opensource software and/or styleguides.
The Limelight
Twitter Account is being updated regularly too.
Last but not least, there also is our
Info-Site where we regularly update major development milestones.
Taking all these sources of information + the roadmap + our public Github Organization with Opensource Software + the limelightgaming.info site, I can't see how development is not transparent enough.
Now in terms of the hype:
I understand that this is something we all would love to see, yet it failed miserably in the past.
Whenever we hyped huge projects, they either died or caused major issues.
That is why nowadays we rarely hype projects and if we do, we are 99% certain those are functional and ready.
These are the dev stats of May alone:
I understand these stats don't add much value information-wise, but just so you can get an overview
how active development really is.