Re: why bgt dont continus
I read the entire thread and there are some things I'd like to address. Being concise has never been my trademark so be warned.
First of all, remember that the game makers are not necessarily developers. One might have the required creativity and originality to make amazing games, but lack the know-how and skills to concretize it. The other way around, one might be a proficient developer in multiple languages, know how to optimize L1 and L2 cache, but have no inspiration nor game design knowledge. Now one could have both and thus be total rockstars. It's just like how an engineer will make a app that works wonderfully but no one will be able to use it because the user experience is terrible (it's an analogy of course, not an absolute and generalizable truth, you get the idea).
So what do we have? Some brilliant people with exciting ideas not being able to develop games, and developers developing ok games. It's asymetric, because one produces average quality content while the other one could produce quality content. Now this is a gaming community, an audio gaming community and we all want the same thing: good games. One of the ways to have better games is to simplify the game creation itself which is just the application of an idea. The real fun is in the idea, not really the implementation to certain extent. Now I don't know BGT, but it seems to me it was an effort made years ago towards this direction.
Ok, let's imagine some guy makes a game with BGT. The question is, should that person have used BGT ? It's hard to give one answer to this question as I wear multiple hats. So I'll answer for every hat:
As a player, I don't care. What I care is if the game is fun or not. If the game is fun, then I'd say yes, because perhaps the game wouldn't have existed without BGT. If the game is not fun, then I'd think it's either the game is not my style or the guy who made the game didn't have a great idea. However, it would be extremely unlikely that I would blame the language in which he wrote the game. The virus flaging is annoying.
As a developer, I'd say no. I would recommend C# as I love this language and it has accessible tool chain to develop, debug, compile, publish, profile, namely Visual Studio. I wouldn't recommend BGT because there is not a large community around it, because there hasn't been updates in a long time, because it has a limited feature set.
As a former Ubisoft engine developer, it would be impossible to write a game like Assassin's Creed in BGT. In fact, I'd argue it would be impossible to write such a game in Python. It's all written in C++, except for shaders, tools and some assembly optimizations. This is because you have to use all the available resources of a system and to do that you need to be able to control how it's compiled on a specific target. You also cannot afford interpretation costs of scripting languages. I also wanna quickly address something I read about crrappy code written. In the gaming industry, it's done all the time. They do hacks, patches, work arounds, as long as it works and it's efficient. When it's getting closer and closer to a release, this gets even worse. Why is that ? Because all the game code is throwable. You heard me right, they will throw away all the game code, because they cannot reuse any of it for another game. All they can reuse is the game engine. So it doesn't matter if the game specific code is crappy or patched, the only thing that matters is how long did it take to write including the cost of testing and maintaining that code in the release cycle. It's all about money and the quicker you produce code that is good enough, the best return on investment you get.
Finally, and this is the most important hat, as Origine, as a human, it's not of my frickin business. Who am I to tell someone that the game he wrote, must it be good or not whould or shouldn't have been written in BGT ? People do what they want and that's it. I say that because it's not only related to BGT. Whether it's NVDA versus JAWS, C# versus Python versus BGT versus C++, audio games versus mainstream games, Windows versus Linux versus MAC OS, if one uses something that satisfies all of its needs, then there's no point on trying to make that person change because this is better than that. I used to be like that when I was younger. I would try to convince iOS users that Android was the best and that they should switch. No matter the arguments, it doesn't matter if they like iOS the way it is. Trust me, when you start to realize this, everything starts to be cooler. I started to like Apple products, I don't own any of their products, but I have to admit they have solid designs, they are cool and feel somewhat premium. Apple are excellent at marketing (well, less recently, but they were truely amazing at that). You will start to see value in everything, ask yourself why they are using that and not something else ? Why is it so important that they change ?
If someone wants to make a battleship in Excel with VBA scripting, so be it. If someone wants to make a game played by sending e-mails to a game e-mail server, so be it. Hell, if someone wants to use Windows file system as a game engine to make a maze of folder and files with hints to find, passwords to crack encrypted files and find the secret way to a hidden Nicolas Cage picture, so frickin be it. Who would I be to tell that guy that Python would've been a much better solution to make a maze game, because the path length limit on Windows will prevent him to make a deep enough maze ?
Note: I'm not trying to promote Windows file system as a fully featured game engine.
People make libraries, tools, frameworks, wrappers because they have the know-how and would like to see what could come out of it if someone with enough creativity could have access to such functionnality without having the struggle of implementing it themselves.
Second of all, yes there's a second of all, don't you remember the first of all at the start of this comment? If you've read this far, I'm proud of you, but mostly flattered. Let's talk about audio games versus mainstream games. I've seen that mainstream games are a million times more fun and featureful than an audio game will ever be. I played AHC and I didn't have so much fun for so long. Of course mainstream games are rich of features and content, because they have a budget of tens if not hundreds of millions (think of World of Warcraft for instance). However, I don't see often what advantages audio games have over mainstream games. Instead of saying that audio games will never be able to be like mainstream games and that they should be in order to be cool games, let's talk about what audio games could be where mainstream games could never be as well as some advantages of audio games over mainstream games:
1) Audio games require much less memory. Visual assets are responsible of most of the game size of mainstream games. audio however has a much smaller memory footprint. This leaves a ton of memory available for audio games to take advantage of. This means that an audio game could theoretically have so much more content than a mainstream game it's hardly impossible to imagine. You might think that memory isn't the big deal of today's mainstream games. Well, not really. When big companies release on consoles physical games, they have to burn the game on a blu-ray. The blu-ray is limitted on the memory you can burn and I can assure you that when they reach that limit, they will do everything they can to squeeze and shrink the game memory size. This also applies to RAM. You cannot afford to page on a regular basis. You also have more GPU and CPU available, because you don't need to render 3D graphics, calculating collisions, culling, etc. You could use the graphics card resources for your AI in your game!
2) You could also choose to not use those resources available and have much smaller requirements for your games. This means that you could run your games on cheaper hardware, possibly a very cheap audio games console. Think of how Amazon echo dots are sold $40, it's basically a limited audio game console.
3) Mainstream audio games would require much smaller teams. That's right, you don't need visual assets, so you don't need character designs, 3D modeling artists, animators, all the visual game engine features, motion capture, and so on. This means that a project like that would cost a lot less than a mainstream video game. Of course you're gonna say that there's a smaller public and the game is gonna make less money anyway. Yes, but this also means that there can be better quality audio games of a one man's job than visual games.
You get the point. Yes mainstream games are cool, but always wanting the audio games to be like them is an unfair comparison for so many reasons, one being that they don't need to be like video games, they can be their own thing. Also, remember that fun is subjective and it's not because you don't have ultra HD graphics that you cannot enjoy an audio game trying to copy a mainstream game.
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