Re: why bgt dont continus
Great post, I love your unique insight and the way you broke down the various different outlooks made it easy to follow. I'm honored that we have you as a member of our forum.
However I do have a few points to bring up.
And I too am a man of many words, so buckle in.
1. Players not getting mad at BGT, aside from the virus problem for less savvy computer users or those forced into using inaccessible AV software, it's very much true that no one really cares. However the exception lies in network heavy realtime games like FPS's and Side Scrolling PVP titles, because only Sam and Mason have managed to make the BGT network object actually work for them at this point and that took a long, painful time.
Even after that we still can't have proper automatic weapons or extra elements like dynamic shell drops, positional bullet zings/impacts ETC because with distance and firing rate,e specially with a larger server load (more than like 6 people) things start to slow to a crawl from the players point of view.
It takes allot more effort to get BGT to behave in those situations, and many new coders don't have the experience to really get their hands dirty and figure it out, because it takes allot of hacking and hours upon hours of frustrating trial and error which cut into school and personal time, leading many of them to burn out.
Even with that, I believe Sam's network code is still pretty inefficient so he has to shell out for a much more powerful VPS than other games with the same amount of players, and he doesn't even have to deal with visual stutters. This makes a consistent stream of donations a necessity for him, which means catering to the players willing to pay, leading to imbalance.
As players I think we use BGT problems as a scapegoat to avoid laying the blame at the feet of inexperienced coders, and the developers are happy to follow along. But that said, every experienced coder I've seen try out BGT is horrified by networking with it and refuses to touch it.
2. The reasonable among us don't compare audio games directly to mainstream triple A titles outside of proving a point, but instead to mainstream Indi ones, so while your observations are still good ones, your missing the mark a bit.
Our community is full of people with depression/anxiety and social problems, and that's not a dig that's just the truth. The large majority of us are early teens to early 20s so you can add emotional immaturity into that mix, and now our problems with forming teams, code theft, piracy, project management over time, community entitlement, and developer PR start to make allot more sense.
I believe the small market issue is secondary to this, with the bigger issue being a deep sense of envy and discontent around mainstream games, which tends to manifest in a demanding and hard to please audience who often say things without considering the impact on the developer's confedense, and the fact that so many young developers create games to fill a void in their lives and hang their self worth on the success of their projects, leading to half baked new features taking priority over bug fixes and gameplay balancing, or a prickly and dismissive attitude towards the community at large.
As you can see, these two problems feed into and magnify each other, and the more community involvement and popularity a game has the worse it gets.
It's not all doom and gloom as some of these things are improving, we're moving towards an account based, limited license, phone home on launch system for anti piracy, we're cracking down on clones, and we still have a consistent but slow stream of higher quality projects from established developers, and smaller, less popular games receiving highly positive/enthusiastic feedback.
3. Aside from the typical pissing contests that have been raging on the internet for years now, I think most of us actually have a problem with the user end limitations of developing for a specific OS.
I understand you might have only been using OS choice as an annolog for language choice, but it's a real problem when people develop for IOS and not Android for instance because we already have so few audio games to begin with, and allot of people can't afford a reasonably new IPhone without selling their soul to the devel via a contract, and even then only in more developed countries.
And now that the Somethinelse titles, Sixth Sense, and Storm8 games are gone, it's a problem when games are only developed for the Android, too.
As for coding language, well, blind people as a rule just don't have gaming rigs outside of a handful of us, not even five year old ones. So if a game requires a certain version of Direct X or some special audio driver that the average somewhat out of date mid to high end business laptop doesn't support or something because you had no choice but to use that library as the developer, your going to have allot of users that can't run your game.
But that's just my take on it, I'm not a developer and I've only been involved in a few projects my self, so I encourage you to keep up with some of the threads and make your own conclusions.
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