You are currently viewing Major changes in the Speed Dreams project
Major changes in the Speed Dreams project

Post author:Leillo
Post published:5 April 2024
Post category:Development / Project

This time this news does not have to do with new versions or features of the game, but with certain events that have taken place in the project and that you need to know about.

First of all we have to inform you that two important pillars of Speed Dreams are leaving us for personal reasons that have nothing to do with the project. These people are Xavier Bertaux (the main developer) and Beaglejoe. From the Speed Dreams community we would like to sincerely thank them for the invaluable work they have done to make our game what it is today, and we wish them all the best in their lives outside the project. We hope they will continue to follow us from now, and any contribution from them will be welcome.

After a 6-month open candidature to take on Xavier Bertaux’s former role, Xavier Del Campo (yes, another Xavier 😉) appointed himself as a candidate. As there were no other interested persons, and after some discussion and general agreement of the community, the decision was taken to appoint him to replace Xavier Bertaux. Here is a letter of introduction for you all:

Hi all !
I am a free software advocate, not only using free software on a daily basis, but also contributing to it and recommending it to others. Speed Dreams is one of the few free motorsport simulations around, making it a highly valuable project within the free software community.

As a user, I enjoy realistic simulators, and in the past I was heavily involved with the Spanish/Latin American FlightGear (a free flight simulator) community. While my experience as a developer with motorsport simulators is somewhat limited, I have extensive experience with C and C++ projects, both free and proprietary.

Some of my more mature projects include slcl (https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/slcl) and libweb (https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/libweb), licensed under the AGPLv3-or-later license and self-hosted from my own Gitea instance.

I have also contributed to several free software projects, such as Dino (https://dino.im), PCSXr (https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/pcsxr), PSXSDK (https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/psxsdk) or the PinePhone (https://gitea.privatedns.org/xavi/pinephone-scripts).

My main goals when writing any piece of software are: simplicity, portability, readability, robustness and efficiency. Also, these will be my main goals for Speed Dreams.

Cheers!

Also, and no less important, is the decision taken to replace the version control system, moving from Subversion (SVN) to GIT. This change, which was discussed on multiple occasions in the past, has finally received the final “push” at the request of the current contributors to the project.

Regarding the hosting and repositories of the project, we have to say that after evaluating several options, we have finally decided to accept the offer made by Libre en Communs (thanks neox !). Libre en Communs is a non-profit French association that works to build a supportive community around free software and the commons.

Libre en Communs
We have also decided to make these changes:

Split the current repository containing code and assets into 3 different repositories:
–speed-dreams: engine source code
–speed-dreams-data: free assets
–speed-dreams-non-free: non-free content
Migrate to Libre en Communs’ Forgejo instance at https://forge.a-lec.org/
Migrate current website at https://speed-dreams.net, as well as the “master server”, to Libre en Communs’ VPS.
In the mid-term, think about new services, such as a XMPP server or an improved Matrix bridge.

As you can see we had a lot of things to tell you, and we are looking forward to start this new “era” of the project. To keep up to date we suggest you to visit our news blog regularly and stay tuned to our Mastodon and Twitter-X accounts. We will also be happy to receive your feedback about these changes.