This topic contains 51 replies, has 32 voices, and was last updated by 
Mark Sibly
1 year, 6 months ago.
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Hi i just read Mark Sibley s Twitters.
Read it here…
https://twitter.com/blitzmunter?lang=en
Mark. If you read this. Get i touch, I’m behind you with monkey2.
I have used blitz like languages since the amiga 500 days. I would not like it if there would be nothing left. But if there is no future in it then I would understand. A few hundred dollars a month income (patreon) is not enough to live from.
I’d hate to see Monkey go.
I’m a veteran CG artist with an interest in programming, and have been using Monkey since its first iteration.I tried a lot of other solutions – Unity3D, Construct, Haxe, Nim, etc. – but Monkey was the only one that had the blend of simplicity, flexibility and usability “out-of-the-box” I wanted. It also offered the opportunity to deepen my programming knowledge in a somewhat friendly way, despite being rough around the edges.
I feel like Monkey2 is very close to find its footing, but in a reality filled with mature Game Engines and Middleware created by relatively large teams, I wonder what would it take to cross that threshold.
If I had to pick one, and only one, thing to work on before calling it quits, it would be an organized effort to “open up” the language to more developers. Mark has put an admirable effort into Monkey, but it’s too hard for a single person to compete in the current game/app development arena.
Cheers.
Ethernaut, you seem to have no history with BMax and all that stuff? Please correct me when I’m wrong. Your proposals are good but all of this has been proposed a million times already. I mean what did Mark expect after cutting of 90% of his user base? The real world out there just don’t wait for “just another language”. Don’t get me wrong here, MX2 is aweseome but you have to convince new people to see it the same way, and that clearly starts with the first impression – the website. Well beside that a newcomer would probably look for some documentation in the next step. Shall I continue? The name maybe?
I do NOT think that maintaining such a beast even cross platform is an impossible task for a one man show. Mark did this for years in the past with quite some success.
@Mark: Over there at twitter you were questioning if the days of BASIC are gone. I do NOT think so. Look at AGK2. They make a living of it. And yes, it is basically BlitzBasic3D v2.0. I know you don’t want to hear that and do not listen anyway but THERE IS A MARKET for this kind of easy to use language. Not everyone wants to use killer features like lambdas. There is a NEED for rapid prototyping environments and NO, Unity is NOT for everyone.
I just can assume that you’re kind of tired, burned out. I know that stuff and feeling and can just say, take a step back and a deep breath for a couple of days/weeks. Rethink your strategy.
Do you want stuff you like to do but probably do not earn much money? => Continue with what you like to do.
Do you want to make a living with what you’re doing? => LISTEN to the community. There’s ton of money out there which wants to flow into your pocket. JUST LISTEN, god damn’it…I’m not an expert in creating languages but I’m actually more an expert in how to sell stuff. And I LOVE what you’ve created here. Can’t you see that? Don’t worry about complainers! Every complaint means that there is actually interest in what you’re doing! It’s a treasure not something to worry. As long as people complain they want something and are hooked. Nothing would be worse as silence.
edit: Ok, this posting doesn’t make sense now. Mark deleted his own where he wrote that “oh god, here come the ‘experts'” where my answer is related to…
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I need to make games. I am not, programming wise, up there with the people that can use all the bells and whistles a sophisticated language like MX2 has to offer. I trick myself into thinking I get it, but, that lie dies quickly.
We were all, and I speak of those who were here during the early days of Blitz, young and ready to code. We were able to do that because BRL & Blitz helped us to make games.
I just want to make games. So, help me. Please.
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It must be exhausting to have the internet second-guessing your decisions all the time, whether well-intentioned or not it is still a drain to motivation sometimes.
Personally I feel like a failure in this story as I have done little with Monkey1 (one game) and have not done anything with Monkey2. My plan all along was to make games and help get the word out for Monkey2 with splash screens or whatever.
Instead I just lurk and read forums/updates and dabble sometimes and get nothing done. Except monthly $ sent to Patreon which is enough for a sandwich.I thought Mark’s latest shared plan/roadmap was a good one. Get the main “paid for” feature up and running (recently done), make some games to subsidize income which would also help get the word out for Monkey2, etc…
Mark this is as blunt with out being rude as i can..
Drop mobile support it is now just full of unity clones make Blitz3D Next Gen bog stranded basic language but do it in parts windows first get it stable and docs then look to port stop trying to have every system known to man the people that will use it will use it to make easy 3D games you could maybe charge later for ad-dons for mobile but first get some thing selling that’s finished.
Stop trying to reinvent basic it worked just fine before so why and turn it into a hodgepodge of not being basic and not being anything else Blitzmax in my opinion was a good language but still Basic Monkey2 i dont even know what it is standardize the language back to Basic.
You was always good at making the language just work bug free as you could thats were ur success in the first place came from now you need to be good at oop to even use monkey2 and all it feels like is a less capable C#, Monkey2 has no soul its a total contradiction to what Basic stands for.
Mark the world has far evolved now every thing is usable so many books so many tutorials if we wanted a more advanced basic i would not be using it in the first place.
Do your self a fav and make a win only DX/OGL Blitz3D 2.0 go big on the old code in basic when you have it stable then work on mac/linux as you will have an income from the windows build.
Its either that or go work at a software house like every body else left behind by the industry.
BASIC DOES NOT NEED TO BE AS OOP.
Anything creative I’ve ever done coding wise, was either on my old A500, or in one of Mark’s languages. I hope monkey2 is here to stay.
Some ideas for Mark
* make something different, stop working (for a while FOR Monkey2)
* create something different – not a language, compiler or whatelse linked to Mx2
* if the temptation to work in Mx2 is too hard, just use what exist to make something IN Monkey2! (A game, an antivirus, a virus!, a database crawler for big data analysis, an artificial stpudity/intelligence)in any case, remember, that I will pay for a native GUI module to port my bmax application (I mean ‘real’ OS gui, not graphic simulated like in mojo!)
cheers
I hope Mark is ok in himself,and it is nothing to serious.(funny how no one has mentioned that).
@MarkSibly take a break bud.
Hey everyone, just wanna say I’m here and reading the comments.
I haven’t quite decided what I’m gonna do yet, but it’s reassuring that at least some people seem to think monkey2 is worth continuing with so I’ll definitely keep that in mind. Things get so quiet around here it’s hard to tell sometimes.
I’m actually OK with how much money patreon is pulling in. Sure, it’d be nice if it was enough to be able to work on monkey2 fulltime (which I have been doing anyway, but is gonna have to end SOON!) but still, 400/month is nothing to be sniffed at!
At the end of the day, I will almost certainly keep hacking away at monkey2 no matter what happens. As I’ve said before, I really have no desire to do another language, so at the very least twiddling with monkey2 and fixing bugs etc gives me a little ‘fix’ of language-dev every now and then.
Will post more as it occurs to me…
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