Hi, I'm the main developer of Ember and want to chime in with some better information about Ember. Ember is a client for the Worldforge project. The project's goals is to provide the tools (server, client, protocol and base assets) to allow for users to create their own virtual worlds. We have put a lot of focus on developing robust and general mechanisms for world creation. While we do provide a base world (Mason) it's by no means complete and mainly serves as an example of what can be accomplished. We are improving it, but it's not our main focus. Therefore, calling Ember "a kind of big demo, technology preview of sorts" on the basis that there's not much game play in our default world is very much incorrect. It's akin to labelling InkScape of The GIMP as "technology previews" just because those packages don't come with enough pre-created professional assets. Just like those Ember should partly be seen as an authoring tool, empowering users to craft their own worlds (mainly together with the Cyphesis server).
However, the version discussed here, 0.5.7, is over two years old and not maintained any more. Like any other client-server project we strive to keep the clients in use as much up to date as possible, and we don't benefit much from having to support older, unmaintained clients. We of course would love to see our work present in as many distros as possible, but if they are left unmaintained like this package I agree that a better option would be to remove it, unless a maintainer steps forward. Note that we are very happy to work together with distros to make it easier to integrate our work as it is, without having to add any patches. Any future maintainer would be welcome to contact us over at www.worldforge.org sincerely Erik Ogenvik (née Hjortsberg) Ember developer
