Wick Editor Is Now Part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center

Hi everyone! :grin:

I’m Anthony, or @etcanthony, and I am writing to announce that thanks to a generous gift from Luca @luxapodular and the Wicklets team, Wick Editor will now live and grow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center.

I know that this change will bring about questions from Wick’s dedicated community, and I want to do my best to answer some of them here.

Q: What is Carnegie Mellon University?

A: Carnegie Mellon, cmu.edu, is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 14,000 students in the university’s seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.

Q: What is the Entertainment Technology Center?

A: The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) is an interdisciplinary department of Carnegie Mellon University established in 1999 by professors Randy Pausch (of “The Last Lecture”) and Don Marinelli. The ETC exists at the intersection of technology, art, and design, and encourages both students of its Masters program in Entertainment Technology and all other learners that fall under its umbrella to create experiences that engage, transform, and inspire.

Q: What does this mean for the Wick Editor Creative Community?

A: Right now, we are exploring how to sustainably grow our team. While there will be no immediate changes, we will focus on how to improve the user experience across the website. We recognize and are in touch with Wick Editor’s most dedicated users to learn more about what the community wants and how we at the ETC might facilitate growth and change on both the forums and the platform itself.

Q: What else is new?

A: Wick Editor creators are encouraged to prepare for the 2023 Games For Change Student Challenge. Rewards for 2023’s Student Challenge have not yet been announced, but the rewards for 2022’s Student Challenge included a $10,000 scholarship. More information about Games for Change and the Student Challenge can be found here: https://gamesforchange.org/studentchallenge/about-the-competition/

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I knew this was coming. Wick shall prevail after all.
Can we say bye to luxapodular one last time?

Also i have to get this out and i know it’s cliche but IT’S ALIIIVVVEEEEE!!!

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This sounds great!! I hope the new and Bigger fund that is behind wick now will improve the features of the software :slight_smile: also I think it’s excellent that wick Editor is part of a university now, it worked for scratch pretty well!

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Woot woot!
Hopefully it can get new updates soon!

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Hi @etcanthony,

I sincerely hope Wick editor will see new versions. I’m using it extensively in a project and think there is potential for a lot wider audience. As it is, it is very usefull, but it could be much better - the groundwork is great! I’m sorry to not have time to dive into the code, but I have too much on my plate allready :frowning:

Hoping for the best,

Paul

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Thankyou Antony for keeping us informed.
I’m both a programmer and an animator and the wickeditor project looked very promising to me.
It makes alot of things in a niche that no other open source softwares cover right now.
So under this point of view its potential is terrific
On the other side it is still not mature enough to be easily usable on real production situations
In my opinion before the website usability and general user experience it should be made clear wich are the plans for the development of the application.
It should be decided whether it is meant to be an amateur app targeted to teach basics of programming and animation or if it will eventually cover also more advanced features and a more robust approach
I know how much work is needed to develop such an application but hopefully you have the means to do it

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I wonder if Wick editor will still be free and open source.

Yes, it will.

The number 1 thing you need to do is contact github about the money people are giving to wickeditor and cancel that immediately since they are still collecting money but are not involved in the project. That is called fraud and is not only a violation of github terms of service but it’s also illegal.

You should also make sure the money collected from the patreon is canceled immediately or moved to people actually involved in the project. Failure to comply with doing this is also a violation of patreon terms of service and is illegal. It’s fraud.

If I don’t see any change in this then I will contact github and patreon personally myself and the accounts will likely be banned. I’ll check back in a couple of weeks and allow this to happen gracefully because I don’t want to have these accounts terminated but I also don’t like people committing fraud.

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It absolutely will remain free and open source. :slight_smile:

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We at the ETC are working hand-in-hand with the Wicklets team to ensure that the funds collected through Patreon (and anywhere else) will continue to support the development of Wick Editor.

OK thank you for the response. I just didn’t want people to be defrauded or unintentionally have their funds misused. That makes me feel a lot better about it.

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At the least we have an answer, but we can have some leaks about upcoming updates? Please :sweat_smile:

Where has the money from the last 3 months of ownership gone to?

Hi Tryo,

The money that Wick Editor receives through Patreon helps keep the webpage, the editor itself, and the forums online. All of the residual money is being set aside and will be put toward the development of future Wick Editor releases.

To put it more simply, we are setting aside the Patreon money to pay a small team of developers to work on improving Wick Editor in the very near future. I hope this answers your question.

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It does answer my question! Thank you for your clear response

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I appreciate the responses, I’ve been waiting to see where this project goes for some time. I was even willing to contribute code, but was waiting on user Jovanny who said they would be doing a meeting where they got people up to speed on how to edit the code. I had some simple requests I wanted to work on, such as a button to toggle all layers between locked and unlocked.

Sorry, I haven’t heard anything about it. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t started on design and logistics, but I’m not on the loop. So I don’t know. I think at some point I’ll share my custom editor, but I haven’t work on that in a while.

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I really had big hopes for this project.
If someone is working on it he’s very good at keeping secrets

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