Changes to Godot Patreon (Patreon)

Hi guys, I am writing this to sort out how we are going to use the money after we have received an Epic Megagrant. 

When we applied to Epic, we asked to use the money on two fronts:

1. Rendering, to have someone dedicated to rendering for two years, either me or someone else.

2. Scripting, to have someone dedicated to fix GDScript and GDNative for two years.

The application was several months ago, actually before we hired George, and the grant was only approved a few weeks ago, so this leaves us in a situation of having to reorganize a bit.

What we are probably going to do is, for these two years, move George and I (Juan) to the Epic Megagrant and use it just for that (Remi continues to be paid by Patreon). The goal of the Patreon donations is that they are invested in areas that benefit all users, and not just some of them, so we want to continue in that direction.

Ideally, we would like to use the donations hire one or two more developers to work for the project, but as this has been very sudden we don't really have anyone ready to start working right now, this will take some months.

So, what we discussed with the other core developers is that we can use the Patreon donations for the following months to hire different contributors for limited amount of time to do work packages. We have been defining the work packages during the Godot Sprint.

Work packages include areas such as:

* Porting the Android Godot port from Java to NativeActivity. This is quite a lot of work, but its required in order to support Vulkan on mobile. Likewise, the iOS port needs to be modified to support MoltenVK (MacOS already does). This is pretty urgent for the 4.0 release and if I have to do it myself (Juan) it would delay the release some weeks (or months).

* Finishg cleaning up the tile editor. Its much better than before, but its still kind of messy.

* Fix the many problems remaining and issues reported in the Bullet physics server.

* Many several usability improvements in the editor interface (we spent most of the Godot Sprint making a long list of things to fix, will be published soon so we can create work packages).

One option to do this, is to via Prehensile Tales, which is Hein Pieter van Braam's (TMM2k) Godot consulting company. He is a very trustworthy contributor, and has also hired full-time several other core contributors to offer commercial support to many large companies using Godot. 

We could rent their time and Hein Pieter mentioned he would charge us significantly less (probably about the same it would cost us to hire a contributor directly), given this work benefits his clients too. In the end, we both benefit (we don't have to do a stable contract with a specific contributor only so he works in one area for a limited amount of time).

Eventually, in some months, when we are sure who we can hire to work on the project, we switch to stable contracts.

In any case, please let us know what you guys think. Also of course, despite me not working under Patreon donations for these two years, I still promise to do the new rewards system we discussed in the previous post, but so far we wanted to wait until GodotCon and the confirmation of the grant to reorder this.