Important updates to this topics original post below:
The current build of Sable has now been discontinued and is no longer in active development. Full details of why we have stopped development on this build can be found in the original post underneath this update. In this topic Paul (AKA Lemm) also announced he would be stepping down from his role in Ebon Sky Studios due to family health reasons, his announcement with full details can be found in post 251 in this topic. Following all the feedback and suggestions we received, we have however decided to continue to allow access to Sable past the 8 week expiry date. However, since the current build of Sable has been discontinued and is no longer under active development, access will be limited to purely private use only, so Projects you create cannot be shared publicly. A Full list of all the limitations and restrictions can be found on the Sable download page, it’s very important you read through these in full before downloading and using Sable to understand the full restrictions. Please be aware that we will not be updating this build of Sable, we are also not offering any technical or product support for this version of Sable, so please do not email support questions, feature requests or bug reports. The download link is below:
https://ebonskystudios.com/download-sable-demo/

This topic's original post is below:

Hello all,

We regret that we have to pass along some very bad news to all of you:
we are going to have to put the production of Sable and our first game--Crimson Eclipse--on hold.

Without going into excruciating detail, we have discovered that BGT has an inherent issue with memory management, in other words, memory leaks. This memory issue isn't as noticeable in most games created using BGT, given that they don't require large amounts of data to be saved/loaded into/out of RAM using the scripting language's built-in memory management functions. On the other hand, game projects created using Sable are not hard-coded, but are frequently reading/writing to numerous project data files. This difference in process is where BGT's memory management functions do not work properly and why we have the potential for severe memory leak issues. After some investigative tinkering with Sable’s source code our programmer  Paul was able to optimize the application a little. Unfortunately, the optimizations just weren’t enough. Since the memory issues are inherent to BGT itself and not Sable, no matter how much we optimise, they cannot ever be completely overcome.

During our team meeting on 1 February, we discussed our best course of action. After some soul-searching, we decided that we needed to suspend all operations on both Sable and Crimson Eclipse. We do not want to release a product that has the potential to crash any of your computers. If someone did that to us, we’d be pissed and want to go running for the torches and pitchforks. We decided, that no matter how painful and soul-destroying it is for us personally, we will not release any sort of commercial product written in BGT.

At the moment, we have decided to step back for a little while and catch our breath. We need to give ourselves time to recover and think things through before we decide on our next course of action. We still want to create both quality developer tools and games with those tools, but we will need to reconsider our approach. The good news is that we learned a lot over these many years that we worked on Sable and Crimson Eclipse. We know what, and what not, to do in the future and have a better understanding of how not to make a nonsense out of this. So don’t count us out of the game yet.

After some additional back-and-forth, we decided that we will release the current build of Sable but  only for a limited 8 week period, similar to what we did when we released the public beta in 2020. We appreciate this isn't a perfect solution, but we know many of you were keen to try Sable and We didn't want to deny you that opportunity. Furthermore, we are hoping that any of you that do want to play around with this proof-of-concept version of BGT Sable can pass along any suggestions that you think we ought to consider for a new version of the application. Again though, we need to emphasize that this version of Sable has those memory leak issues, so use at your own risk, also any projects created  during the release will be lost and unusable after the 8  week period. the link can be found at the bottom of the post.

We want to conclude this message by repeating our apology to all of you who have been waiting for us to put out Crimson Eclipse and/or the public release of Sable. We accept the fact that many of you will be sad, disappointed, pissed off or some combination of those emotions. We are prepared to take it on the chin, but we do hope that you will not lose your trust in us. Ebon Sky Studios exists to serve the community—that’s all of you—and without that community, we are nothing.

The Ebon Sky Studios Team:

Paul Lemm – Programmer
Justin Jones – Game Designer
Thaddeus Podtepa – Game Designer
Brian Fairbanks – Sound Designer
Kelly Baughman – Volunteer Project Manager