What happened to everybody who used to login 3 times per day in these forums?
I wrote a post asking for help a few days ago and got only one reply.

I remember when A6 was fresh this forum was a nightmare to post into, my post always went on second page in a few hours and I was afraid noone will look at it. Now , I barely see anyone posting.

Probably, noone remembers me, it was years ago, but I remember all the great guys who made 3DGS what it is today, eighter through contribution or by giving ideas about future features and helping eachother to learn even more.
I dont see that now.

Where did everybody go, or just life happened?

PS.: Dont look at my registration date, this is my second profile I'm here even longer.

Hi there.

Most of the users left the forums, cause they've changed the engine (to unity etc). Some of them needed mobile port, others were looking for a better editors. Other just couldn't develop farther their projects with GS, cause they weren't supported with monthly updates and fixes they needed badly to release the project. But sure, I hope there are some other guys, which overgrow the Acknex, and made their own engines or so on.


Greets

By your words, I guess there is no hope in restoring the former glory of 3DGS...
This is sad.
Maby its just me, being nostalgic, but I was hoping that I'll see even higher peaks for this community...

Wont the devs do something to attract more newcommers? Some ad campaigns or free lessons? Or an amazing AAA title with a few thousand dollars investment in models and animations?

No mate, you are not alone, believe me. The are still some old wolves around here, which aren't even working with Acknex anymore, but they are still visit this place from time to time, only cause they feel nostalgic same as you do You may have noticed those thread, about GS dying and so on.. I'm pretty sure, that dev (ATM there is only jcl behind the Acknex as far as I know) have seen this thread as well. Those thread were created by old members same as by newcomers, which just had payed for the Acknex.. And there is no reaction from the conitec's side at all.. I guess, if they were that interested in developing Acknex farther by catching up with other competitor engines (unity etc), they could move their asses a little bit, and at least create a thread, where they could explain how the things could go on in the near future (f.e. "we aren't going to develop Acknex, cause....").

Anyway, it's really sad, that we have to discuss such things at this forum, instead of discussing new features and new community projects.

A hard peace of work...
I normally dont post in such "GS-dying"-threads but i just wanted to say that ure fully right with these points. At least some words from the dev's are long overdue. To hold old users ( fex iam using this engine since A3 ) and/or to attract new ones. If i missed this "clearing words" somewhere, iam sorry but i dont think so.
But this would stop interested users from buying it a uneconomical decission, i guess.

So i hope and believe in JCL words, that they develop this great product further ( some time ).

Why not make Acknex Open Source?

I barely have time to work on my projects, then i dont want to write my engine first. ^^ This is just my personal point of view.

Slin, SchokoKeks and I decided to do the only logical step: Create our own game engine.
There is a point where the waiting game is no longer any fun, and with the lack of alternatives... Though one probably should add that all three of us has previous experience in this field, so this might not be the best course of action for everyone (plus what Rayp pointed out). Anyhow, you guys should all buy Rayne licenses anyways instead of brewing your own soup.

[/shameless self plug]

Writing a 3D engine is quite impressive for me. Guess everybody who wrote, lets say, a simple 2d sidescroller in any "non-gameengine"-language, knows which skills are needed for that. If i had this skills and time i would give it a try like u guys do I mean look what dimensions some game scripts here have and these are only things that will "execute in your code". Freaking!

Edit: Ah i forgot about writing a Compiler and and...what a work !

[/crawl into a** mode]^^

See, that is the point where I think Gamestudio went wrong. Writing a compiler is a task that you don't want to do. If you think writing a game engine or a kernel is a crazy idea; Writing a compiler tops that in a heartbeat.
Yeah, a piss compiler like the Lite-C one, that's possible in a year or so, but one that actually works and that generates good code? A lot of people with really fancy degrees spend years on optimizing compilers like LLVM/Clang, writing single optimization passes like the new loop vectorizer which take advantage of the specific architecture the code is compiled for and some very specific edge cases.
Writing a compiler that generates good binaries is a daunting task, there are so many things that may slow down the execution, so many things that can be optimized... It's not feasible, don't do it.

To add some perspective to this, the HEAD of the Rayne repository currently tracks 1552 commits made by 4 people (the initial commit was made on december 8th last year, if anyone wants to know), and consists of 59080 lines of code spread over 229 files (all of this is just the engine core, not Downpour or any plugins or third party vendor code).

The latest Clang core (just clang, not LLVM!) version I just checked out from SVN has 191020 commits and 1261859 lines of code spread over 7349 files. This is "just" the compiler C/C++/Objective-C front end.
Moral of story: Don't write your own compiler.

Yeah, I realize, LLVM/Clang wasn't around when A7 was made and MSVC is closed, so it can't be hacked to support the Gamestudio quirks like wait(), and GCC... Well, it's mostly undocumented spaghetti code.
Looking back, I'd say the biggest mistake JCL made was the Compiler. Just look around, it only supports a very limited subset of the C standard and has a tremendous amount of bugs that will probably never see any kind of fixing. And it doesn't optimize anything.

This is probably what's taking the android port so long, because now the Lite-C compiler has to support a completely different ABI and architecture.

Edit (because I like rambling about this topic): Of course the problem you end up with when you don't ship your own compiler is fragmentation. Linux/Android uses GCC, Windows uses either GCC or MSVC and OS X/iOS is LLVM/Clang. The compiler on all platforms are moving targets, and the C++ ABI isn't standardized, so you end up having to compile your project with all compilers you want to support for all platforms (ie x86 and x86-64), just to get these damned things to link nicely together.