Nothing lasts forever, it just doesnt... When using dev tools like B4X or others, the end will inevitably come eventually, not nice to see, but I've used two game dev BASICS and one community has completely disappeared in the most part, the other is hanging on in there, but alas... All roads really point to oblivion.
The first one was a language I used since 2001, some may know it here, and that was BlitzBasic, it was great, it had a thriving community, source code and documentation was second to none, and it's price was really competitive. The Blitz brand was created by Mark Sibley, really clever egg too... There was many versions of BlitzBasic, you have the original one, then Blitz3D, then BlitzPlus and finally, BlitzMax. BlitzMax was the pinnacle of the brand, and it was everything I wanted with the language.
Though, when it came to the game dev side of things, it was dated, and running on DirectX7, there was no real improvement in this regards, users pleaded for an update, someone made a driver so it ran on DX9 (Which eventually got into the official distribution), but overall, there was nothing brought to the table. The problem it had in the most part is that, Blitz3D was great, it was a magic bit of kit, but, again, the DX7 engine was well out of date, and most users wanted the same setup in BlitzMax, but more access to DirectX, like shaders and what not... It never came, we got a Max3D module from Blitz Research, but that died a death, he handed over the code to the community, the people that had the know how tried to work with it, people promised they would "Look after it if it was open source", but the ones that knew, got bored, and well, buggered off, the ones that shouted the most, never had a clue really...
A lot of people moved to Unity by then, I dont like point and click programming, I'm a relic, GUI based stuff I can get away with, but for game programming, give me a text based IDE, or even Notepad, and I'm happy as pig in poo!
Eventually, the language died a death, the site closed down, prematurely, luckily someone backed up the forums and put them back online for reference, but yeah, quick as that... It was gone! Such a shame...
Anyway, he [Mark] changed tactics and created a language called Monkey, people flocked to start, but again, for me and many others, it wasnt what we wanted, he pounded it with syntax sugar, but under the hood, it was still BlitzBasic, with longer compile times, and less power as it was multi-platform as it had to adhere to the lowest spec in its target list... Which was HTML5! This went open source, plonked on GIT, but, I havent seen much of it...
Cut a long story short, Monkey got dropped and Mark returned with MonkeyX, same sorta setup really... He decided to go Patreon, but this never brought the cash in... Again, it never caught me at all... I did prick my ears up when I learnt he was exploring VR and other features, but... He dropped that pursuit, and again, started chasing bollocky syntax sugar instead... It's still going, but the last I heard he went for a full time programmer job... I think its doomed.
The next tool I used was GLBasic, not many people liked its old school syntax, but I got on with it, made a good few games for iOS, it was simple, did the job, cannot ask anymore when your planning to sell games for 79p, this eventually went the open source route as well, Gernot (Its creator) did well in support for it, the language has been around for years, but, for me, once something goes that route, I tend to drift away... Again, a shame.
And even with main stream languages, language standards change, chain tools change, libs go out of date and stop getting supported and, well, your back to square one...
It is what it is, roll with it, you cannot 100% plan for the future, so there is no point worry about it, you've just got to get on with it!
Dabz
), what happens to b4x?
