(Note: There will shortly be (quite overdue) demo alarms for both Kambou and Epic of Serinor. And *after* that will be the judgment of the most anti-climactic compo ever!)

In an attempt to get things into a little less derelict and a little more organized around here, I've created three google groups.

• The VERGE 3 Engine Development Groupmeant to organize and focus developers who want to improve the main line of the engine. The Engine's open source now, after all, and as such we should try to manage it in the style of the more successful open source projects. After all, collaboration doesn't just Spontaneously Generate. That's a trick only maggots can do!
  
  
• The VERGE 3 Pack-In Demo Development Groupa group dedicated to discussing and organizing people to clean up and betterify the pack-in demo, The Sully Chronicles. There's a battle system in the working build (I'll be making the sully SVN public shortly after (hopefully) some people join the group and some chatter happens), and I'm interested in seeing the demo polished off and the libraries made awesomer/more useful.I'm also very interested in any ideas on how to make verge libraries more easily portable/insertable. Any ideas at all are welcome.
  
  
• Finally, there's the Verge General Interest Group which is basically an unmoderated do-whatever group. Sure, we do have the forums for this, but I figured if I set up groups, there'd be a desire to fool around in them, and the first two I'd rather stay courteous. Which is to say I'm moderating them, so you'd better remain nice.

The groups are meant to provide a better forum for the development of the engine and the packin/devtools in an organized manner, instead of being developed in a sort of clandestine, darkroom environment with all of the goings-on hidden from most of y'all.

Because, frankly, that really hasn't worked well for the past 10 years, now has it?

It may seem a little redundant right now since we have these forums, but google groups has email, rss, and google search at hand, and it was easier to set these up for now than to implement things in the site. I'm fairly busy, and if we were to wait upon me to update the site... well... yeah. I'd rather see progress actually made so I can sleep at night with (slightly) less shame. ;)

When the next site revision occurs (no breath holding) the forums will finally have optional email alerts, individual rss feeds, and all sorts of goodies I really am looking forward to coding (because I'm a dork like that), and I'll integrate the groups backlog into the forum structure for a sense of completeness, but until I have some blessed free time, just think of these three groups as a much more notice-me-notice-me version of the vrpg boards.

So, please, join one, join all!