On the one hand, I have never expected GD to be the best game-engine/ide in the short term, but I’m excited by the speed with which changes have been made recently. I think we should be grateful for the work that @4ian and the contributors have done over the years (after all, we wouldn’t have a piece of software like GD if someone didn’t have the will to do it just for the love of it), and not underestimate the time it takes to debug any inconveniences that happen along the way.
On the other hand, and I’m saying this as an user who makes his modest financial contribution to the project every month, I understand @ddabrahim frustration regarding priorities. For example, it is surprising to me that we now have layer effects, dialog trees, Shopify and Admob extensions, etc, etc (and don’t get me wrong, all of that is awesome!) but there is not a clear solution to the problem of looped music (… and yes! that’s my specific feature-related problem)… I can perfectly make a game with a professional look in GD (including deep optimization for better performance) without the need of all of the above mentioned features (or just developing them on my own), except for the problem of the music (and currently I don’t know whether to start developing my music for my project in MOD/MIDI or as MP3/WAV format, because I have no idea if the implementation for sequenced music will take weeks, months or years), and that’s essential for any videogame IDE.
Personally, I have taken most of the limitations of GD as a challenge and as a standard within which to develop the project; but it is also true that there is the anxiety of having NO IDEA if some necessary solutions will someday see the light of day.
Lately I have seen in this forum impressive projects of people who take videogame development very seriously and, for them and for future users, I think that solving some basic problems is essential before implementing additives that (sometimes) are more decorative than necessary.
In any case, I reiterate my thanks to 4ian and contributors like @Bouh and @arthuro555 (and all the others, I just don’t know all of them); and I hope that we all can progress coherently in our personal and cooperative projects.
That is well true! When i started to program computer almost 40 years ago, the informatique programming language were not too very well extended considering their number of instructions (i think to Basic, etc.). At this time, it was after all not a severe limitation to make good software and there were great limitations of power and memory. In short, the software don't do all!
As somebody had said in the past, if you are trying more and more to do something, after many fails, you’ll success!
I used to be a Moderator (still shows me as one actually) on Construct and a long time user, mainly for making classic remakes from the Spectrum, Amiga days,
The move to an annual subscription, which is basically renting the use of Construct 3, was no use to me, and I left in frustration.
Testing GDevelop has been interesting, and I like where it’s going, but it desperately needs such things as Tilemaps before anything a litle more complete can be built by anyone but coders.
I have always my Amiga 1200 but don’t use it anymore today (i use to take an emulator).
I think we’ll get along because I enjoyed playing with my Amiga and programming too.
What Amiga games did you do?
I used to have a Spectrum and Amiga too way back in the day. My favourite games on Spectrum were Renegade and Jet Set Willy.
On Amiga I used to play a lot of games too, Streetfighter 2, Lotus Turbo Challenge, Arkanoid, Prince of Persia, Flashback, Shadow of the Beast, Turrican… and others…
GDevelop is a great engine, especially for a beginner like me. I’ve tried game programming a number of times over the years but could never get into it so I gave up pretty quickly. Years ago I got a huge book on C++ and probably only read the first few pages before it got buried in a cupboard.
With GDevelop I was easily able to make a functioning game scene very quickly indeed. And translate ideas from the mind into an action scene quite easily. Having that ability, and the almost “instant gratification” aspect, was enough to convince me to try programming my own complete game.
