Now that the year as well as the decade has changed, it's time for a little status report on OpenMPT development.
Year 2009:
In year 2009 the OpenMPT project in sourceforge became five years old and one can happily say that the project is live and kicking, and perhaps more so than ever. The long delayed new build(1.17.02.53) was finally released to replace the old 1.17.02.48 and a new member(Jojo) in the development team brought a tremendous boost in the code commit activity as well as to the amount of know-how. There were well over 4 times the number of commits made to code repository compared to previous year.
Concrete results of this highly increased development activity was first seen in test build 1.17.03.02, which brought several new features available and many were left to be seen in a later release. And of course the indirect parts of the development, such as the beta testers, bug reporters, forums admins and documentation writers also continued their valuable work. Worth mentioning is also the patch submitters and the helpful people in related software projects whose help has resulted at least to improvements in the OpenMPTs playback engine.
Wishes and prospects for 2010
A new build is to be released early this year but what comes after that, it remains to be seen. There certainly is much to be done and lots of great ideas can be seen in feature requests. But in addition to development matters, there are many things that could be improved what comes to the project as whole. For example OpenMPT doesn't really have a distinct website dedicated to it, although it can well be said that these forums have been and are the homepage. However, the combination of sourceforge, wiki, modplug.com and lpchip.com is quite confusing, the wiki as well as modplug.com has become more or less obsolete and these forums have advertised itself as being temporary forums for over fours years now.
There have been all kinds of plans to improve the situation and at least the developers have longed for a usable bug tracker system to be integrated to the the forums for quite some time now, but as always, it takes somebody to do things like this, but finding somebody who has the time, skills and motivation to do it without monetary compensation is another question. But in the big picture these are nevertheless less significant details and given open source projects such as OpenMPT which rely on volunteer work, it's good to keep the expectations in a realistic level.
Happy tracking and new year.