Hi Davy and others,

I wanted to stop by and briefly explain my current intentions for BGT. When I started developing it in late 2009, I had absolutely no idea how it would do financially. Now, 4 years down the line I can say that while sales have been reasonable considering the number of potential developers in the blind community, BGT is not and has never been something that I am going to get rich from. I never figured I would, either, but the truth is that it simply would not make sense for me to spend the amount of time and effort that would be involved porting it to a new platform. I am certainly not discounting Mac OS X/IOS as viable distribution channels. They are growing every day and I target them in all the mainstream projects that I am involved in at present. These other projects were written with cross platform support in mind from the get-go, while BGT was written exclusively for Windows. This means that BGT would require a major overhaul to be portable to other platforms, and I do not feel that an investment on such a scale would be viable at this point considering my current schedule.

Had I decided to create an audio game engine at this time, it would certainly have been written with cross platform compatibility in mind from the start. This is not the case with BGT, however, and I cannot spend much more time and money developing it considering the sales figures it has been generating thus far. This certainly does not mean that BGT is going to be abandoned. Far from it. I still enjoy making games as a hobby from time to time, and for that, it works very well for my needs. But I will not be working on it full time as I did a year ago. So for those of you who have been hoping for a cross platform BGT release, I am sorry I can't bring more positive news. However I felt it was better to clearly announce my intentions as opposed to staying silent and leaving users to wonder and speculate.

Kind regards,

Philip Bennefall
----- Original Message ----- From: "Davy Kager" <m...@davykager.nl>
To: "'Gamers Discussion list'" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 5:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] BGT, Mac and More


Hi,

With all due respect, but you really don't want to pick up coding in VB6 anymore. PureBasic I wouldn't know, I haven't looked at it before. With C++ (or Java) you really aren't coding from scratch. OpenAL has a C API, Java has an OpenAL wrapper, and of course there's DirectSound and XAudio2 which have their respective APIs. Oh, and Java's own sound API, which is good enough for basic stuff. I'm not even going to try and list all the third-party options. The one thing you will have to do yourself is resource management, but that is true for any language if you want to write efficient code that doesn't eat your system memory. And in C++ you'll require external libraries, dynamic or static, to do certain things. Java is a lot nicer in that regard, but as Thomas pointed out it takes less than a minute to get to the entire code-base of a project.

Also, I haven't actually tried BGT myself. All I know about it comes from the website. I'm not criticizing it, only trying to find out what it can and cannot do.

Cheers,
Davy

-----Original Message-----
From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of shaun everiss
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2013 00:04
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] BGT, Mac and More

Well davie, when danny and I were working on the deathmatch series danny found out we all did that there were limitations with bgt.
Sertain things need to be written a sertain way.
And the way we were expanding the deathmatch series was just really going outside of bgt's limits.
deathmatch1 is not finnished to what it was going to be.
There are so many issues with bgt and its limits and we came on them with saving, arrays and a lot of other things that we have exhausted the language.
It was never meant for really large games at least we think so.
The engine is good but there is a limit how much you can really do with it.
Deathmatch1 was planned to have 10 missions or as many as we could put on.
however by mission 3 danny was running out of ideas and as it was there were so many issues by this time. I can tell you we were going to have 4 missions but after all the issues danny has lost interest in that game and decided to end it as quickly as possible. Deathmatch2 started in pure basic but there are some issues to and so its visual basic 6. If you know c++ davie and can code with it then I suggest you stay with it if you can. I think danny and some others would like to learn but its a lot of work writing everything from scratch. However if you do use it on a daily basis I'd stay with that then I would stay with it.
As for jawa, I do have java loaded.
I've never had much fun with games based on it though.
On the subject with sounds, music, etc.
There is a way to do this, A lot of games that are comercial that have come lately depending on what additions you get, and how much you pay do include soundtracks as actual files as bonus content.

At 09:08 AM 12/12/2013, you wrote:
Whoa, has been ages since I last posted here!
Anyway, nerd questions coming up.  I’d be interested to know if there
are any plans to turn BGT loose on Mac OS.  I believe the scripting
language it uses is capable of running on Mac OS, so that’s a start,
isn’t it? Here is the background story, for those interested:
I’ve been developing both “regular” applications and games,
although to be fair I’ve spent very little time on games over the
last few years.  I use mostly Java, occasionally
C++ as well.  Recently I figured I’d start
being serious about games again.  The obvious thing to do would be to
turn to Java (which is what I did), since I have to use that for more
professional projects anyway so I might as well stick to something I
know.  Java is great for cross-platform work.  Except for a few nitty
gritty details you can basically cook one executable and run it on
Windows, Mac OS and Linux.  Java’s performance is good too, and with
the upcoming Java 8 and 9 it will become less painful to distribute the
required JVM with your source code, removing the need for your users to
install extra software.  Not to mention that debugging code is a
breeze.  The single disadvantage is that it is super easy to decompile
Java, to the point where the original source emerges, so encrypting
user data is virtually useless.  Things like TLS for secure Internet
communication still work of course, but all security keys you store in
your code are visible to anyone and everyone.  .NET kind of suffers
from the same thing, by the way.  Had some good times messing about
with Entombed back when.  J So then, I could use C++ (and optionally
one of those executable scramblers that the cool kids love to use).  To
the trained professional disassembling a program written in
C++ to find a certain bit of logic can be as
straight-forward as decompiling Java, but it definitely makes life
harder for the average Joe who wants to hack some sounds he
particularly likes.  On the other hand, as a developer you have to take
a few extra steps to produce the required executables for the platforms
you want to support.  Debugging might also be a bit more cumbersome. In
comes BGT.  It’s very secure (although no software is truly
unbreakable), its syntax isn’t a problem if you know C++ already, and
it creates very efficient executables.  On the donw-side, I’m told
it’s only available on Windows, and you don’t get to use standards
directly (AKA OpenAL, Java runtime, standard C++ library).  I really
don’t mind about the standards, but I believe I’d upset a few
people if I’d leave out support for Mac OS. Actually, knowing
standard things can be fun, too.  If you want to develop for Android,
Java would be an excellent choice, so it helps if your products for PC
and Mac are already using it.  Similarly, knowing OpenAL is great for
moving on to iOS games, since Apple natively supports OpenAL.  But
really, Java’s not good at running on the same machine where the
encrypted data lives without applying security on the OS level.  I’m
not too concerned about people coming up with their own keygens.  If
you have a members-only area inside your game that requires
authentication with a remote server you won’t get anywhere with just
a serial number anyway.  But not being able to securely encrypt sounds
is a bit of a boring thing to live with. So, I thought I’d check out
alternatives, since I’ve not paid much attention to recent
developments and would like to know how things stand these days.  (Oh,
and no, I don’t want to use Python, sorry.  At least, not just right
now.) There, your daily dose of nerdy musings. Enjoy! Cheers, Davy --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the
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