Sunsetting AliceOS Development

[alicerunsonfedora]

Hello, fellow AliceOS developers! 👋🏻

For the past few years, AliceOS has remained a good framework used to provide an operating system-like experience to visual novels and other games created in the Ren'Py visual novel engine. We've been excited to see the project grow since its initial technical previews in 2018 and taking a life of its own from the now outdated The Angel Returns project.

You'll have likely noticed development has stalled in most recent years, begging whether AliceOS will continue development in the future. I'm writing this announcement today to let you know that, on May 1st, 2022, the project will officially cease development of the AliceOS project.

This was a hard decision to make. As developers, we love AliceOS and what it has been capable of these past years. However, as we get involved with more projects, maintaining AliceOS and its feature set has been rather difficult. As such, we felt it is appropriate to cease development of AliceOS.

However, this does not mean that AliceOS is completely dead. There are a few options available to developers:

• Using AliceOS as-is: Nothing is stopping you from using AliceOS Prospect Park as it stands today. Prospect Park is still a great release with a number of enhancements and improvements over the first release of AliceOS.

• Making your own fork: AliceOS remains a free and open-source solution under the BSD-2-Clause license, allowing you to make modifications to the AliceOS source code to fit your needs. We've seen a number of forks rise recently with additions for other languages and other features, and we're excited to see AliceOS live on in these forks.

  • Using Candella: Candella is a fork of AliceOS that adds features and enhancements we planned for the next release of AliceOS and provides a great experience for other developers with new APIs and an SDK. Although originally designed for Unscripted, it is actively maintained by some members of the AliceOS team (@alicerunsonfedora). We recommend migrating to Candella from AliceOS for a smooth experience.

Sunsetting Strategy

With this in mind, we'll be doing the following on our end:

• Archiving the AliceOS Repository: We'll be archiving the repository and making it read-only; however, you can still fork a copy of the repository and make any adjustments you want on your fork. This will take effect immediately.
• Shutting down aliceos.app: As we recommend using Candella, we will be redirecting developers to the Candella documentation when visiting aliceos.app. We plan to shut down the aliceos.app domain by July 7th, 2022.

I'd personally like to thank the AliceOS development team, developers, and partners for making AliceOS what it is today. While it is sad to see AliceOS go, I hope to see it live on in the future through other forks like Candella.

- Marquis Kurt (@alicerunsonfedora)