Skylines next development

Hey Everyone,

We have been looking into ways that we can improve skyline and our efficiency with working on the engine.
This means we have some important news that we need to share with you all regarding the skyline community and direction that we are taking and the changes
which we are going to be doing to skyline as a whole.

Community

There has been many complaints that our community is inactive and we believe this is due to a couple of things:

Discord is where we have been showing development updates and images but not all users are on discord. For us, discord was an experiment to see how 1-1 chatiting with users would work but at the same time we have lost the forums activity which is one of the main points of contact for the engine and without the forum being active, it makes skyline look like it is not being developed and this has performed negatively on the product.

So, this is where we say farewell to discord for ourselves for every day checking and updates and instead we will be moving our focus back to the main forums and through the blog system for updates, news and development related news.
A lot of time has been lost due to talking on discord which has detracted from skyline as a whole and having 2 inactive communities which were meant to be linked is just not manageable.
We would like to bring focus back to the forum community as it has a few more advantages:

• It is skylines main area for information and should be the first point of contact.
• Everyone who is interested in skyline will go through the forums.
• Information is stored and easily searchable for future reference or help for other users, whereas discord has a lot of information but is all lost as a conversation progresses.

For this, we have had a meeting internally and have decided to remove discord from our daily work ethic and instead we will now only respond to posts from the forum or through email.
We wont be closing the discord servers, but will be stripping it back so other users can continue to chat, but it will no longer be used for chatting to us.

Instead if you have questions, issues or bugs, then it should either go through the forums, support site or through email which we can then respond to within a day or 2 tops.

https://forums.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk
https://support.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Documentation:

Soon we will be restarting the documentation as we have some changes coming to the editors which means it would all have to be done again anyway and we also have some new software for developing the documentation easier on our end.
This means that in the coming months new pages should start appearing on the documentation site even though we really dont like writing documents haha :P
https://learn.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Skyline Lite Version will change license to commercial license making skyline game engine a "Free Game Engine":

We also have some news regarding the lite version of skyline and will be making the Lite version have commercial usage to all users but still with restricted features and built in boxes to purchase the full version. Certain tools and limitations will be stay in place to warrant moving onto the next versions of skyline that are too be paid for. 

The reason for this change to come is so skyline can start to be used as a free game engine with commercial rights meaning anyone can download the software and make a game for free. Sounds fantastic right! This change will be coming very shortly and will be posted on the forums and social media once completed.

1-1 Tech support and Teaching:

As for tech support, there are a few changes coming to this also. Live 1-1 tech support will no longer be free.
By this we mean, if you require direct help and need to chat to us directly or screen share, then that takes time out of our day which needs to be covered.
We have had quite a few users take the mickky and a lot of time out of our daily work routines has been lost which puts us behind on our work schedules.
This does not mean you cannot have free tech support, if it is done through email or forums, then that will be free as usual, but direct 1-1 tech support or teaching will need paid for.

This could be implemented as a yearly subscription or as a straight one of payment for each session. More to come on this....
However, note though, that the paid tech support / teaching will be cheaper for users who have purchased the engine than those that have not yet purchased.

By Teaching, we mean that one of us developers will be on chat and screen share showing you step by step how to use the engine which will be the fastest method to get going using the product. Think more like a course or something.

Thats it for this news post and look forward to hearing from you all on the forum.