So Waste's Edge was born, somewhat inspired by the Trinsic murder-mystery but set in the world that had been devised for Adonthell. It was released for GNU/Linux on January 28, 2002. Ports to BeOS, BSD, MacOS X, Solaris and Windows followed eventually. It also slowly found its way into various Linux distributions and sparked another year of fast-paced development.
But it also turned out to be a dead-end, technology wise. Its 320x240 resolution made it the perfect toy for devices like the Sharp Zaurus, but it was limiting our artists and starting to look dated.
The game engine was not very modular either, and the code had become convoluted and cruft had accumulated over time.
In brief, it wasn't the foundation we wanted to build upon any future releases.
And then, somewhere during that phase of redesign, the team ran out of power. Some key developers got busy in real life, others perhaps frustrated by the slowing progress and the rest might have thought the success of Waste's Edge meant "mission accomplished". Whatever the reason, there Adonthell was, with a shiny new architecture, tons of new features that weren't properly integrated yet and, maybe the worst of all, a half-finished map engine. For the first time, there was nothing graphical to show, so sparking new interest in the OSS developer community became very hard.
Should that be the end? Waste's Edge had turned out fairly nice, but it was nowhere near our original goal yet. So the answer was found quickly and it was "no". But how to breath live back into a struggling project? Stay tuned and you'll find out soon ...
