Oh great. Hosting a tool that the author himself has asked not to be hosted. *sighs*

@2 was about to say the same, he said he wont host it and specifically said in the same topic that people can still host it if they want.

The way I read that and judging by Philip's actions, it seems that what he means by that is that he doesn't mind it being posted on a Dropbox link in a forum topic somewhere, but he would prefer it if it wasn't linked to in a large public place, such as the agarchive or audiogames.net database, since that could imply that it's still supported somehow.

at 6. If in audiogames db they say thats not supported, then what?

@9.
lmfaolmfaolmfaolmfao

Again, tell VGstorm that. Tell Eban Sky that. Tell Pragma that.

I'd like to also say that I'm currently trying to move away from BGT, and I agree its dead and devs should move away from it. But what I don't agree with is Phillip insisting that BGT be removed from all sights perminently. He's trying to errase apart of audiogame history. You may say that most BGT games were shit, but there are shitty video games made in python and those other languages. If Simter, or whoever wants to host it as abandonware that's their choice. Phillip shouldn't demand that people remove it, because at the end of the day, it isn't huring anyone.

@13 and yep we should really tell mason to take down sbyw, and tomp hunter, and btw what do you write programs in?

Okay, two things.

First, everyone forgets that we had plenty of audiogames before BGT.  If BGT hadn't happened we'd have had plenty of audiogames without it.  I would go so far as to say probably the same number of audiogames.  The only people who think BGT is somehow adding a lot of value are very new programmers.  Non-new programmers may use it, but usually with the understanding that it's super limited and that they could move on if they wanted, just they've got all this old code.

Second, let's talk about camlorn_audio to understand why people might want their projects taken down.  Once upon a time I did an audio library called camlorn_audio, for those who weren't around back then.  But it wasn't ever finished, and it couldn't be made to work beyond a certain point.  I gave up on it, left it around for a while because hey, it's an open source project on GitHub, no harm.  No one can really use it because it was my first C++ project and I didn't understand some important fundamentals and OpenALSoft is kind of lame, I told everyone that, but why bother removing it?  Surely no one is going to insist on trying to use the thing that crashes at the drop of a hat without fixing it first, which is so bad that even the author avoids it?

Then I started getting e-mails because it kind of worked except not really, asking me for help using it.  This never happened with Libaudioverse because Libaudioverse could never really be used with BGT or any of the other toy languages people like to adopt, but camlorn_audio got just the right amount of popularity that I think there's even a couple people still using it.  But the problem is that even telling people "sorry, I'm not maintaining this" takes time and gets tiring.  So after round 5 or 10 of "I specifically said this isn't usable"  I did my best to eradicate it from the face of the earth, and I don't regret it.

BGT has bugs.  BGT has a bunch of programmers who would probably love to ask Philip things.  As long as BGT is up, Philip is going to get some volume of people asking questions, or trying to convince him to maintain it.  I don't know if him getting a bunch of requests like that is why he doesn't want it up, but this idea that just leaving projects out there is free to the author is very false.  And it's especially false in a community like this, where you've got a bunch of new programmers who ignore "Don't use this" or "This is unmaintained" like there's no tomorrow, and who think that authors are obliged to never, ever move on just because you want to use it.

It takes energy to keep telling people that you aren't maintaining a thing anymore, and camlorn_audio was much less popular than BGT.  One day you may have a project that's popular enough that you try to leave behind that keeps following you as far as your personal e-mail, until then don't judge.  Or maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't mind just being rude, who will actually ignore them instead of composing a polite reply to the effect of "I stopped maintaining this".  But as usual when I make an unpopular point, people straw man me: I'm not saying "This, specifically, is why people take projects down", I'm giving an example of why leaving projects up isn't without cost to the people who wrote them.  This community has lots of examples of someone abandoning something free and everyone getting outraged about it, even to the point of people trying to revive the game using stolen code, so it's not like that's the only reason someone might want to take something out from orbit.

And to be frank, sighted people have no problem learning all these languages that this community likes to claim are harder.  You can only blame the language or the community, and the language (any of the languages) has literally hundreds of thousands of people proving it's not the language every day.

BGT went like this.  "Yay! BGT!" followed by an army of newbie programmers, most of whom bounced off it, but it felt good because there was a .chm file, you didn't have to learn to use Google, and the tutorials were audiogame specific.  Now people think it's special, because the people who still defend it never learned enough programming to understand why it's objectively bad.  No one put the effort into making anything else mainstream easy, so obviously making something mainstream easy isn't possible and BGT is special.  No one was willing to put in the effort to actually learn programming, just to hammer on the tiny, tiny subset in BGT's .chm, so now anyone arguing against it obviously doesn't have a clue about how important and mystical and powerful it is and why we all need to preserve it forever.

But seriously, look around.  People here make newbie-quality games for 3, 4, 5 years sometimes.  There's also hundreds of thousands of devs proving that you shouldn't be making newbie quality games for that long.  I'm not talking about people using Unity, I'm talking about lots and lots of people who grab HTML or Pygame or SDL in C++ even, and surpass what most audiogame devs can do in 6 months in their free time, plus also they did graphics which is actually a really hard thing to do.  I've got a sighted friend who just went from not knowing how to program 8 months ago, to knowing two programming languages and writing an app for both iOS and Android that has to be able to work offline because it's going to be used in places like the middle of Africa for rather a lot of money.

When you dive into a specialized tool using a specialized language used by no one else this is what happens, because all of the things that could enable you just aren't there.  BGT isn't justifiable, objectively, and the evidence that it actually hurt the community and lowered the quality of audiogames is all around us.  You exhaust what BGT will let you do, then you have to start over if you want to go further, and then either you grind out newbie games forever, be one of the like 5 people who stretch BGT way beyond what it was ever able to do through years of effort, or give up on programming.

As I've said a few times now: we should have had one shades of doom quality game every couple years.  We don't actually have even that.

Camlorn Wrote:
"camlorn_audio was much less popular than BGT.  One day you may have a project that's popular enough that you try to leave behind that keeps following you as far as your personal e-mail, until then don't judge."
Simter having a popular project? That's a miracle.

@arvox, I'm sending you a PM.

@19
Games are different than programming tools and libraries.  You finish them and they're done.  Being able to finish a programming tool and/or library is doable, but hard and something that rarely happens.

If camlorn_audio had been finished to a stable point then it would still be up, but it wasn't.  In the specific case of that, I had to say "This will randomly crash your app just because" one too many times.  And fine, I'd say good on you for feeling like you can just ignore people when they e-mail you, except that even if we leave aside that that's kind of a dickish move, it's a great way to start chipping away at your reputation if no one can get in touch with you because you didn't like what they had to say (plus, you still have to read it, anyway).

Also, I don't know how good Manaman is or isn't.  Some people like it, it's not my kind of thing.  I've not made the claim that we have zero BGT games either.  All I said is that we should have at least one Shades of Doom quality game every couple years.  We don't.  The time between SoD-or-better game seems to be more like 3 or 4, and for the number of people trying to make games, that's not right.  And I blame BGT for that, probably 50%, the rest being the lack of investment, people not working out things like reusable level editing, etc. that we could solve, if we had enough cohesion to take on projects as a community.

@23
I think Simter is just angry at this point, that we're taking their favorite toy away from them with good arguments, or something.  Pretty sure me making the point you're making is what set them off.