This topic contains 51 replies, has 32 voices, and was last updated by 
Mark Sibly
1 year, 6 months ago.
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Not sure I need to state the obvious but I love BRL products and I would be sad to see it go! Monkey is great but the world has changed and there is a mindset that when you want to be a ‘serious’ programmer that you need to start with Unity or other bloated crap. But the kind of games I want to make like Revengestar or Dumbot ar far easier to make in monkey than Unity or whatever. And I have been playing with Unity on and off. We are even going to release some asset packs for it soon but that is not for fun but for the money. Monkey is for FUN!!! Now fun doesn’t pay the bills so he needs a plan. I am not talking about big roadmaps or whatever but a ‘short term’ plan to earn some money would be a great way to start! I think monkey2 is not making ( so much ) money because not a lot of people want to pay for a programming language anymore. Although it seems to be working for AGK. I do think the way Unity is doing it is brilliant with their asses store. Give away the main product for free and make money with add-ons. I think this can work for Mark but he needs more add-ons than AdMob. The landing page of the monkey website could use something else than a blog. It doesn’t say what monkey is! Get the community involved. Now if managed badly it will give you more work but if managed correctly it can save you a lot of work. 1 guy in charge of the docs, one guy for tutorials, one guy for the website etc. Maybe get a job or source of additional income and enjoy the programming and be patient! And 1 thing that I would like to see happening is Visual Studio IDE support ( or another ‘pro’ IDE ). Now not for me but this can attract a new crowd. And please don’t drop the mobile!
I think with things going free to use till you hit x income has put a terrible squeeze on indies and small companies, after all why go with an unknown when Unreal and Unity could get you a job.
It’s this mindset in today’s world that has caused this problem unless people know about monkey nobody will use it.
Mark should get some products out there real kick ass products that show what it can really do. No offence to Playaniax but Revengestar to some looks like a afternoons coding. They won’t see all the engine work behind the scenes but they only will see the graphics you show. It’s why people instantly are drawn to flashy graphics but deep retro graphic games are overlooked.
We need some kick butt products which kick the others to shame.
Revengestar to some looks like a afternoons coding
Basically it was… I was waiting for my artist to finish up stuff so I started a new project that became Revengestar. It was an accident. But the point is, it was effortless and easy in Monkey / Pyro.
Why go with an unknown when Unreal and Unity could get you a job
Because not everybody wants a job in coding but just wants to have fun and maybe make some money in the process.
I, like many others I guess, aren’t socially active on the forums but that doesn’t mean I don’t love what Mark does. Maybe its our fault for not showing support, if it is I feel ashamed.
I have bought into Marks work at every step (until Monkey 2). It gives me a lightweight base to build what I love. I cant count how many times I have used Max in my professional day to day job, to quickly write a bit of code to covert this to that, or try some idea out before I HAVE to move over to Unity/Objective-c/Swift/Java and deal with all the bloat or doing things a certain way that those languages force on you.
Thats the beauty of Marks languages, if somethings not working its usually because I messed up. In a lot of the other languages, things don’t work because the environment you have set up is wrong. How is that useful?!? Why should it be so over complicated?!? I think a lot of the over complications come in because people feel that if they aren’t struggling then they are obviously doing it wrong. I don’t know how to put it into words…
Mark, I love what you do, it fits in with how I like to program and think of programming. Like I said on Twitter, the dev world would be a much bleaker place without your products in it.
Playaniax it wasn’t written in a day of sorts as the back end stuff has taken you ages to perfect to that level, your selling yourself short.
Some users aren’t in it for fun but want to make as much money as they can from it which is where my comment about jobs comes in.
Perhaps there could be two available options for Monkey: One is to complete the puzzle and become one a full-featured-game-making-framework such as providing the essential features as Cocos2DX does. Or it becomes a standalone programming language, that it will start becoming popular in the applications and scientific world.
By becoming a game framework: There is the prospect of the language becoming better but there is still the idea of trying to push the same thing and thus the risk of running in circles.
By becoming a standalone programming language: This is trying something completely new, a completely new demographic, going into a new road with fresh air and fresh ideas.
Perhaps you might have objections to this idea, but you can consider that Mark has already tried game development tools for good since 2003. Now at this point in history things are changed. You can consider that there is so much wide availability in game making technologies, and this leads to saturation of development tools. Monkey will have to fight for survival against the big players in terms of existing “ideology” (which is mostly herd mentality). In game development the big players have defined a prefixed notion how game engines look like and how they should be. (For example this herd mentality is something like: What is this multi-million-company is using? OK I will use it too. What is the most popular game engine? OK if it is used by the 70% of the demographic it means that we are forced to use it too because we don’t want to be left outside.)
By having a general purpose programming language there are lots of possibilities to expand the user base into new areas: Such as IOT, Server, Commercial, Business, Logistics, EShops. Basically Monkey has tremendous interoperability with native C and C++ libraries and this simply makes it useful everywhere in place of C++.
Now if you have the question if non C-esque languages are a deal breaker. I can safely consider that they have lots of potential. There are various tools that are quite popular such as Python or Delphi. Other people are still using VB classic (they even created cults and factions that demand its revival). If you search on indeed.co.uk about Cobol, Fortran, Ada, Pascal you can see that still there is demand for it – even as side knowledge, is still appreciated by managers. So basically it means that people will try to use a programming languages that is best suited in the application domain rather that it would be for name purposes, for example many business applications are written in Delphi due to having proper language constructs in relation to C++ which is highly technical oriented.
However one huge problem with all of the previous programming languages is that they can’t offer the same cool single features as Monkey does. I wonder how is it possible that Monkey is superior to any other programming language and remains so undervalued and unknown, perhaps it business software will give it a second chance.
I don’t know what it would be best, I just throwing some ideas here. However if you know about any technical consultant that would offer some tips of advices, I would be interested to know as well.
I think another thing that would help MonkeyX2 a LOT would be a code archive like the old blitz one I know we have the code forum BUT thats a forum, the original archive was arranged in a way that made things a little easier to find. I hope that with a website overhaul it would be nearer the original Blitz site (with a graphic overhaul) than this one as to be honest this looks like a afternoons clicking.
I prefer the MonkeyX1 website over this one as well and that actually looked professional, maybe Mark can get a volunteer to overhaul the website and make it look professional and flashy so he can upload it to the site making it look the part.
Following what written by Cocon et al above…
the choice is to go ahead with the idea of considering Monkey2 a ‘game tool’, or change it in ‘a generic developing tool’.
I’m stick with BlitzMax not because ‘it’s superior/by faith or religious fact’, but just because it’s VERY flexyble: with a bunch of modules (sqlite+cairo+MaxGUI) it’s possible to write a simple account/billing/warehouse application.
It’s work.
Can you do this with Monkey2?In the real world what is the probability to write (and sell) a mobile (or not) game compared to the case of writing a ‘boring’ application/tool for a specific job?
And usually this kind of application are not ‘free’ or ‘ad-based’, so people is willing to pay… (choose a way, FREE=no value!)And as said, in game/mobile there are too much competitors, free/open/mixed etc, it’s difficult to emerge.
I don’t think is the ‘right’ moment for Monkey2 (as game-tool) in that specific market.Another note:
nor in MonkeyX neither in Monkey2 is possible (maybe I’m wrong!) write a mobile application that is ‘GUI-native’. Maybe it would be an interesting (and paid…) feature – as not all are interested in writing GAMES for mobile, but simple APPLICATION.
The idea to ‘go to solution X’ or ‘use Android SDK’ are not ‘proper’ solutionOk, going back to digging between numbers in firm’s balance!
Well that’s sad, but not really a surprise I guess.
- B3D was great: did only one thing, but did it well. Very well documented, easy to understand, community support, many example. The only bad things was the lack of support (bugs were fixed, but almost no additional feature were added)
- BMax was good: Mac/Windows compilation, documentation was so-so, many contributors many new ideas (BlitzMax NG, Brucey’s module, …) but as Mark stopped the website and the forum he killed the bmax community.
- Monkey 1 was not bad: it solved an issue for me (be able to generate JS and AS3 from the same code) but other than that was not really finished and polished as previous languages.
- Monkey 2 is full of new language features like Lambdas or Fibers, These things are very useful in Java or C#, but that’s not what I am looking for when I want to “have fun” programming quick things. No documentation, no website, no community, no example…
As many already said, we need basically B3D 2.0 but not a Java/C# hybrid with a new syntax, no documentation and issues on some platforms.
I checked AGK2 (as someone mentionned it) and it looks like this B3D 2.0 I am looking for, I will give it a try.
This sound harsh, but I love Marks product. I was able to make a living from my code a few years from B3D, but since several years, product after product, it seems Mark’s product are more for language features lovers than for actual people who wants to create games/applications with ease.
@Mark Sibly: Still loving MX2, great language getting better all the time.
I use it a lot, and find it great to work with. Mojo3D is a wonderfull addition.
Keep on trucking, at what ever pace you seem fit!
If you could get someone to give this site some general TLC like the one monkey-x had (I forget who did it), I’m sure you could grow Patreon contributions and sell more modules.
Please keep mobile alive. It is one of my core uses for Monkey, and MX2 is still hands down the best cross platform language/system for modern indie app development IMO.
Hugs.
people need to stop complaining about the language and features. these same arguments happened when Mark released bmx and many of the b3d users didn’t want to embrace oo. and I really don’t understand the issue at all with lambdas. They are critical to any new language… once you really start using them I highly doubt you’ll stop. maybe it’s the keyword lambda… if it was just “function” nobody would have noticed.
people need to stop complaining about the language and features
Yup, language is fine. Features are fine and more will come but if the money is not coming for Mark than how can he devote his time? I am sure if the income was ‘secure’ he can move forward and comfortably improve Monkey2. So if you like Monkey2 and have not donated yet even if it is just $1 dollar a month. It won’t kill you!
About business software and scientific stuff…
Well. How to say that. To make it usable for that purpose Monkey would need some major work to make it professional. For scientific stuff there is Fortran, C/C++, Java whatever, Monkey doesn’t stand out here.
For application development Monkey would need a native GUI like Qt or vxwidgets. Mojox is not a gui it’s.. a nice try.
Further more a professional website would be a must plus a professional branding.Game Development:
I don’t see how one guy could NOT handle multiple targets. Mobile SDKs change but not that heavy. Monkey 1’s core still works for iOS and even Android even though it’s about 4 years old.I’d rather see Monkey as a game dev tool. But yeah, it seems Mark wants to create an all purpose language which I’m fine with. Maybe it’s indeed a good idea to drop mobile support. At least that would make things clear to me to move on.
What I don’t get is why everyone including Mark points to Unity. That’s a completely different approach. Yes Unity, is nice, but NO I do not want to use it. I want to code and not to drag&drop and fizzle with funny bugs.
Finally it’s a waste of time to write all this. Mark did not listen 10 years ago, neither does he today.
Again: Don’t get me wrong. Mark’s products are all fantastic, real gems, but the uncertainty makes it almost impossible to plan ahead.
Someone mentioned there should be killer apps to show the potential. Well honestly, why should someone take that financial risk when the plug can be pulled at any moment? All I’d need is some commitment, that this language will exist and be supported for the time being. That’s it.
I guess, Monkey 2 , and even BlitzMax, can be used as scientific language through module developments, like modules that exists for very slow scripting language called Python. Python is being heavily used in scientific communities and research companies. For that, Monkey 2 must penetrate academies. There is a hidden competition between R and Python, both have slow languages, which R became the winner for a while, then Python has got close. Monkey 2 and BlitzMax, in terms of language, are better general purpose language than Python or R, in my opinion, unless someone explain why not, so far, I cannot imagine otherwise. I have talk to couple of scientists, they don’t like Python, they just like its libraries. I see Java and C++ have scientific libraries too, but not as advanced and expanded as R or Python.
Then go to an european university and just try to mention the name Monkey.
Good luck. Even IF they are interested and take a look at this site, they will be gone again. Actually I tried. All I got was a pitiful smile…Maybe in the US “Monkey” is seen as something serious. In Europe that I know it’s a desaster that name.
Scientific languages need a reliable background. Why should someone start using it when there is no documentation and the plug can be pulled at anytime? I mean it’s not that this hasn’t happened yet.
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