Mark considering shutting down Monkey 2

[Steve Elliott]

Mark Sibly produced some fantastically efficient software at his peak.  Far better than the rubbish those Dark BASIC guys were churning out at the time (now AGK).

AGK's 3D Engine isn't much to write home about, unless you bypass most of it and write your own code, great for 2D though.  Mark Sibly abandoned his 3D Engine for Monkey.  Huge mistake, even by his standards.

Monkey was a stupid name, especially if you're aiming at people using C++.

Mark Sibly is and always will be hopeless at business.

[GaborD]

Makes me sad.
He had such a fantastic product with tons of future potential in Blitz3D.
Not sure why he dropped it and went off in weird directions. Could have become one of the bigger guys in the engine space.

[Steve Elliott]

Makes me sad.
He had such a fantastic product with tons of future potential in Blitz3D.

Totally agree.  I was blown away seeing a BASIC run some of the 3D demos that came with the language.

[MikeHart]

I am glad I didn't put effort into M2. And I feel sorry for the people who did.

[Holzchopf]

*sigh*

Monkey 2 † 2019


Actually I never looked into it seriously. I remember having done some sort of research about it when it was quite new and already back then hearing sceptical voices about it's longevity, which stopped me from digging deeper. It's a shame. I like to present BlitzMax (one of Mark's more glamorous things) to beginners as a beginner-friendly language. But it kinda sucks to be forced to mention it's from a guy who drops his products. Even though there's a rather active community behind it - nowadays you just can't make anyone interested in something that seems dead.

[Derron]

Dunno about the userbase of Cerberus-X but it seems as if Mike still does stuff there.
The BlitzMax NG front is also still active and reported bugs get fixed pretty quick (especially compiler/language bugs, not module ones).

Still I have to guess user numbers for all of them - and they are so few that it is hard to attract users.

NG is uses by some but yet the contributors code wise are ... countable with one hand. Assume it's not much better with Cerberus. Still it has the benefit of being a coding-language-project. So users are already coders (even if they came from another language).
My game TVTower is (F)OSS for hmm a decade now? Guess how many contributors I had till now? It was played by some thousand people but there only was _one_ other person coding with me for 2 years. Other contributions were some lines in Lua and number/spelling mistakes in the code.

I actively develop on my own so this is not a biggy - but it cries "lie" to the old saying that a FOSS project cannot just get uploaded to github and get then adopted by the crowd without any major activity by the (former) lead developer.

In this very example it might of course be the biggest hurdle that the game is written in BlitzMax (NG) and so potential developer crowd is rather small (the dude who coded with me for 2 years - was not using BlitzMax before but adopted it rather quick!).


bye
Ron

[Xerra]

Reading that post I assumed he just meant shutting down the website and putting Monkey 2 somewhere else.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5e25b7c6-8923-415e-84f3-d9b6bfe50066

Hahah, that gave me a giggle

[Rick Nasher]

Let's face it folks: the entire Blitz thing has been killed off by it's own author. R.I.P. Blitzy 
He donated some 'organs' but that just doesn't cut it. Is there gonna be an official funeral/service where we can go to to show our sympathy? 

Remains rather silly, how a brilliant, intelligent coder can't see what's needed, right in front of his nose.
If he only had listened to some of his customers, would still be there, but alas.

[therevills]

Am i surprised... a little... I know I shouldn't be, but I had hope since in Monkey 2 he only really had to support one base language (C++) instead of all languages in Monkey 1 (C++, Flash, Java, HTML5/JS).

Also quite a few people did support him financially via patron for M2...

 

[Qube]

I've said it a zillion times, but... Mark should have done a yearly paid model for Blitz3D 2 for Windows, Mac and Linux. A guy has to eat and pay the bills and the donations model is a terrible method for this type of thing. The best way I've seen is you charge for your product and get 12 months worth of updates. If after that you want more updates you pay a smaller fee for a further 12 months. If you don't want to pay then you can still use the product for ever but you're just not using the latest version.

Sure, Monkey 2 is a very clever technical language and shows how talented Mark is at making languages but meh!, all your community love BASIC and want to code in variants of a simple to use BASIC language that has grunt, so why go from the super popular Blitz3D language to the ill received Monkey-X and then scrap that and go onto something worse called Monkey2?

I guess in the end it was Mark's personal passion vs what the people wanted. I can understand the personal passion side but I can't understand having no passion to give your audience what they wanted.

[3DzForMe]

I still rate Monkey-X, and more so Blitz3D. Time for A Blitz3D_20, Blitz3D for the next decade. You heard it here first..... And last probably.

Mark is a visionary, just at got a few too many coding tools on the market. So, here's a request for Blitz3D__20, not that it'll happen, after all, Blitz3D still works!

[degac]

I see one only solution:

Mark should write a language that writes itself - in an infinity loop, always up-to-date!


Just kidding (*)

I suppose that mixing hobby/boring (and repeated) things/work is not a good combination.
Speaking of the past is too easy now... surely letting BlitzMax becoming 'open' source (=free) AND stopping the support (not updating it) was the first big mistakes.
It's better (always) have a 'mature' (sold and working!) product that having just something that 'works' like Monkey, without a seriuous userbase, starting from scratch and limited in a specific field (game). And then Monkey2...
Monkey was too ambitious... 2d language and too much targets
Monkey2 was (from the start) just an 'experiment' - in any area: website, community, editor, modules, documentation etc... a very bad way to waste time and energy.

Said this, I hope (still!) the Mark will be back (... well, it sounds like a revenge )

(*) = well, it would be a nice experiment for the IA guru ahahah

[iWasAdam]

I wouldn't have thought that anyone would stick with him after this.
He picked the plot, dug a nice big hole and jumped right in it.

So much talent

[MikeHart]

So what is the real deal here? Is he dropping M2 or just the website?

[Steve Elliott]

It seems like dropping any kind of website, and working on yet another language when he has the time.