The people who are personally invested in Pulsar have been talking it up for a long time and nothing has ever come of it. Cata:DDA it ain't.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see it in a playable state... but I don't think it will ever get there and am not particularly motivated to sink my own time into someone else's failing project when I already enjoy Aurora as it stands. Granted, Steve took a decade to get Aurora from the first release to 6.43, but he also did it alone as a hobby that often was interrupted by real work while using a suboptimal format. Pulsar's been working in a better environment with multiple contributors since 2012 and they still don't even have the engine finished. :|
That's the sort of attitude that stops progress, seriously. it's discouraging to try work on a project and feel it's not getting anywhere, and that people who're capable of helping wont because... the snake eats it's own tail I guess.
...and also the sort of recognition that, externally, working on a game that's already cursed by the language it's written in that renders it extremely slow. Pulsar hasn't had a complete engine yet, but it's open source and a lot of the processes are already significantly faster in C# than whatever the heck aurora was written in. In the long term, it's just simply better if developers focus their efforts on that, rather than try to mess around with improving aurora as it is.
Aurora is written in Visual basic. on top of that it was started as a tool for a tabletop game that turned into a game in it's own right. so the design from the bottom up is broken. (which honestly is a vastly bigger drag on the speed than the language)
I think the big issue overall is the lack of motivation and passion into this new project, on top of the apparent lack of audience.
Also the fact that making a new engine from scratch is /hard/, especially when the people who work on it just simply can't spend as much personal time on it or even have as much experience programming it up like that. Not that I'm saying all of these are the strictest case, but it's all true for one dev or another on this project at this time.
Honestly, at least trying to contribute to the project will provide some learning experience, it's why I'm trying to read up on C# and might make some contributions in the next few months if possible. But you don't need to feel obligated to work on it if you don't want, though.
It *is* hard. it's even harder when we're using a paradigm/design/architecture that unless you're actually experienced in game development you've likely not used before. I'd not even heard of ECS before we started doing this, but having learned a bit about it, and having experienced the problems and frustrations of similar, larger game projects that used a more OO approach, I'm sold.
It's slow going and frustrating for me since the guys who know a bit more about it have gotten jobs and other life has gotten in the way, so their time has been taken away from the project, I've stalled due to being unsure of how to tackle a fairly large core part of how components should work from description of what they're capable to being able to design them to an actual ship component that affects the final ship design in the ECS environment. I was hoping one of the other guys would tackle the problem so I wouldn't have to go around in circles trying to figure it out, but as I said they've gotten busy.
So I've started re-writing an Asteroids clone that I'd half made a few years ago, using an ECS type architecture to give me a more simplified testbed to see if that'll help give me some ideas/get me unstuck.
I could dump the ECS branch and go back to working on the original branch, but I can already see future design problems, poor code (there's a serious amount of copypasta, and thousand line functions going on in there) and other problems getting in the way.
I'd rather keep slugging away at getting an actual engine going that content can be added too, than trying to work on a spaghetti mishmash of enginecontentwtfisthiseveninthisclass?
We got a shitton of work done a few months back when we all had more free time, we even got a resharper license which has helped tremendously in keeping the code in a clean and readable state, and yeah you've kind of hit the nail on the head iceball - motivation and passion begets motivation and passion, and when some of the core workers drop out due to real life stuff it can cause a chain reaction/spiral of being unmotivated and non passion.