Serious question. Support requests are going unanswered, and his own account here at the forums is gone.
If he’s passed away, or incapacitated, or has abandoned the project, that means World Machine is pretty much over?
Well, I found some proof of life last month, through my routine online tracking lol. Functional? We can only guess.
If it was ANYONE else, I’d go ahead and ask. Or I’d assume the worst. But we’re talking about one Stephen Schmitt, not the first time he has disappeared off the face of the earth. He disabled his forum account though, that worries me a little.
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I wish there was a plan in place in case of his demise, getting incapacitated or just not bothering with WM anymore. Seems like this application is the work of a single man, and it will only be supported for as long as he is around. I’m happy with paying for World Machine while he’s still alive and capable of maintaining and supporting it, but maybe open sourcing the whole thing in case the worst happens would be a good idea.
World Machine is just too good to just fade into oblivion.
I’m concerned as well, but this is the second time we’ve had a gap in communication with him on these forums of this length, so it could be that, like last time, he’s preoccupied trying out a bunch of stuff. The last time we heard from him, he kept hinting at a bunch of new stuff he was working on, so I really wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just in hardcore development “Let’s make this idea work” mode. Being a developer myself (primarily web dev, but I dabble in a little software dev occasionally), it’s real easy to get mentally stuck going down a rabbit hole and forget to communicate with pretty much the entire outside world.
As far as being deceased, I’ll check every couple months if any obituaries that might be him pop up in his general area, and nothing has yet (at least, not in any publicly available places). Also, if he manually disabled his forum account (instead of my assumption that it’s disabled or deleted due to inactivity), I would think that he would have either put a post up first explaining it and/or would have designated a new moderator/admin. I think all signs point to him either having something going on in his personal life, or being so deep in development that he’s forgetting to check here. With any luck, with the rise of Vulkan, he’s just trapped in a development cycle of trying to add GPU acceleration ahaha!
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He’s alive, guys. He’s just replied to my support request! Phew 
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