Is worth to buy MonkeyX right now ?
Monkey Forums/Monkey Beginners/Is worth to buy MonkeyX right now ?
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| Hello this is my first post here. I was thinking about buying MonkeyX in the next few days, but came here and read the sad news about the future of MonkeyX and now I'm not sure, I just want to know because I live in a country with a strict control of money exchange and I only can buy 300$ per year. So my question is. Do you think is safe to buy right now or is better to wait until the next year and see what happens ?. Thanks in advance |
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| The future of monkey is something I am personally very worried about, so my response should be yes buy it as that reply would help secure its future, but truth be told I honestly have no idea what you should do, it is at the end of the day your call, you need to look at monkey at this current time as a product which may have a very short shelf life, if your happy with that then buy it, if not then go for something else. :( |
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| With out a doubt a resounding 1000% vote for yes -- worth every penny of it.. |
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| If you want a development system for - Desktop (Win, Mac, Linux) - Android / Ouya - iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) - Windows Phone 7 + 8 - Windows 8 - XNA/XBOX 360 - Flash - HTML5 - PSM ...you could buy now, and start using it right now, as it is. It's only $99 for everything. If you wait and see, you will not get the fun and enjoy it. ;) |
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| Given the way its built, I think it would be very complicated for Monkey to die. It works well for lots of platforms as it is, and it's getting maintenance from official sources very often, not to mention the core components of it are open source, so I would buy it without any doubt. |
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| I just bought Monkey and Jungle IDE a week or so ago (after reading Mark's disheartening post) and I have zero regrets. As the program stands now you can do almost anything so long as it's 2D which is my primary interest. To me the investment is tiny compared to what you get regardless if Mark continues development or not. Obviously I would prefer he did, but that depends on people like you and me purchasing Monkey. While the community is small, especially when compared to Unity or Cocos, or any of the other mainstream languages, the people here are fantastic. Just look at some of the 3rd party tools like Jungle IDE, IgnitionX, Diddy, and Fantom. And there are some great modules to be found scattered throughout the forums. Luckily Ziggy is taking it upon himself to help organize that mess. As far as I'm concerned, Monkey is a great language and while it's future development is uncertain, they're many who will do their best to keep it alive and prosperous. This is what will ultimately keep Monkey.moving forward. gasmonso |
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| I would easily buy Monkey again. I've already made more from my games than what Monkey costs. Not only is it a fun and easy language, it's also a great investment. |
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| @ziggy the community even with it being open source is so tiny that I am near 100% sure if mark was to call it quits on his updates the language would die very rapidly. As for longevity the mobile world moves rather fast just look at marks recent android changes, if mark stops updating it because its not paying the bills and who could blame him if he did, then it would only take a major update from either of the main mobile platforms to really kill off monkey, sure there may be some people out there able to hot fix it but with a small community like we have which will only get smaller if marks stops working I fear what will happen to monkey.. This is not like Blitz3D, or BlitzMax, mark could go months, years between updates for those products because the platforms they targeted were and still are increadibly stable, the same cant be said for monkey. I REALLY HOPE your all right tho, I love monkey its by far the best product mark has made, its syntax is a joy its structure is simply amazing and it's so simple to get into in my opinion it beats his others easily, its just such a shame that he's having trouble with it. |
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| Since Mark "dreaded" post (April 26, 2014), its worth pointing out there have been a few releases afterwards already... We are currently at v79e and when he posted we were around v78c, which included a major update to Android target version. And really the "new" Android target version you could say was already created by IronStorm, a community member: https://github.com/Ironstorm/bbd |
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| The main problem with Monkey is with the packaging, not the product. And thats something that can be easily addressed. The first thing is to define the scope of Monkey. Many people want it to do many things and that is impossible for Mark to do all himself. In my opinion, Monkey's strength is in 2D gaming. If 3d is needed then people can either create a 3d addon or use Unity. Next is the Ide. Luckily there are several solutions for free and pay. Next up are the solutions for collisions, particles, touch detection, scaling, etc. Once again the community has provided various solutions. Diddy, Ignition, Fantom, and other mods for scaling, touch control, etc. Next up is documentation and examples. While the docs are OK, the examples need some love, unless your using Diddy, Fantom, or ignition which all have nice examples and ignition docs are great. Lastly, all of this needs to be tied together so people can find it. Sites like unity and Cocos have a nicely organized site with everything easy to find. Mark simply doesn't have the time for this, but we can do it as a community. If we could just organize what already exists, Monkey would be far more appealing to new customers. An example of what I, as a new customer like to see, would be similar to the ignitionx/playniax website. They really showcase what's possible with Monkey and their docs/examples are great. Add on a good Ide (like jentos, or jungle) and we're halfway there. I've seen many people complain about the name Monkey or the cute picture. I think playniax.com makes it look awesome. Am I nuts or does anyone agree? Keep up the great work Mark! gasmonso |
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| therevills you'r right of course, what worries me is when mark simply no longer has the time to work on these updates because he's had to go get a real paying job, something he himself mentions. Bottom line is I highly doubt he would have even brought this up if it was not really worrying him, and if something is a worry to the creator and author of our favorite tool then it should be a worry to us, which of course it is. I'm less worried about today, tomorrow, next week, and more worried about what's further down the line like a month or more from now, marks money issues can only be getting worse as again he said himself the changes he made had very little impact on sales, and with a tiny community there is very little we can do to help shy of buying loads of extra copies of monkey and giving them away to friends or random people on the internet, he is trying tho which is a good sign such as the recent affiliate program. What would be really amazing would be a massively successful game written in monkey where the author makes that fact very public, you know really good publicity, the real shame is that there are actually a handful of games that could have fit the bill but that next to no one knows the're made in monkey.., bah this thread is getting very doom and gloom and that's the last thing i or anyone else wants, I hope mark pulls something amazing out his ass and is able to continue working away on monkey, if he gets his dream so do we. |
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| Mobile platforms aren't as stable as Windows (where a QBasic program recently got greenlit for Steam I believe!). But they are not as unstable as all that, and it doesn't seem likely that any major platform will completely throw away backward compatibility! I'd say go for it if you want it, it's cheap, easy to learn and use, and it works and IMO whatever happens will stay working for some considerable time given that everything is pretty hackable at a pinch. Remember, the Monkey output is actually a currently working *native* program for each platform. |
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| I bought Monkey a few months ago as I had a very specific game idea and I wanted to write for as wide a market as possible, figuring if I was going to spend hundreds of dollars tooling up (buying Monkey, an Android tablet, a Windows phone, etc.), I wanted the best chance of making money back. I had quite a few teething problems, especially relating to how to set up all the tools to build for different platforms. I also had loads of questions about the language (because in my eagerness to get started, I hadn't even noticed the "documentation" link at the bottom of the website). Every time I posted a question, I got multiple helpful answers. I now have a game that's up and running, with surprisingly little code, and running on five platforms. Is the future of Monkey assured? No, of course not. Anything can fold at any time. But a game you write today will still run on most platforms for several years, even as they are updated. You don't need to be targeting the absolute latest version of any platform, unless there are very specific features in that latest version you want, and in that case, you're probably not targeting cross-platform development anyway. I tried Unity for a while - if you want 3d it's awesome, but I found their 2d implementation hard to understand and it felt shoehorned in. I've also written a working version of my game in Cocos with C++, and the learning curve is a LOT steeper (see my note below) even for me with 25 years of C++ experience. There wasn't any significant benefit writing in Cocos compared to Monkey, but I will say that while the community was good at answering questions, they weren't as friendly as people here. So it's up to you, especially with your financial constraints, but I would say that the advantages of Monkey vastly outweigh the (possible) issues with future development. Cocos have a nicely organized site with everything easy to find I beg to differ - their API documentation, while complete, is out of date, and most of it is automatically generated by a script from the source files, so it contains very little info on how to actually do anything. Plus, many of the tutorials out there are way out of date and simply don't work any more due to language features being deprecated, and again, the documentation tells you they are deprecated but gives no indication of what they're replaced with. I found it enormously frustrating, and ultimately, didn't find anything I couldn't achieve in Monkey one way or another. |
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| jboadas, Try out the demo and see if you like the language. If you don't like the language you will never use it. I personally love the language. Just wish I had more free time to use it !! |
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| Absolutely go for it! First try the demo - as tiresius said - you'll see how easy it is to make something with Monkey. It's a little hard to install some SDKs, but you would have to go through it no matter what language you're using. And in the end of the day, Monkey is just a translator, and open source for those who bought it. So you can take the generated code (even if Monkey is abandoned) and mess with it as much as you like! |
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| It's worth it absolutely if you are wanting to do cross platform development. There are many well selling monkey powered games in every digital store now. |
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| I like Monkey X, would buy it again. Also bought Giderosmobile 1-year subscription, which would cost more on the long term and uses a 2d scene graph which I dislike. Monkey X comes without DRM, there's no activation needed. So in theory what could stop is really only the further development of Monkey X itself. But I see it more as framework anyway, a framework-creator, actually Monkey has a very good design. Just see it like a book. You buy a book, it could get outdated some day, but what you pay for is what you learn and what you can keep. Just like SLotman said, with Monkey you can create games which will be completely self-contained and open source. So there's no danger at all on the technical side. And how well other products sell, who knows. I've come to the conclusion from a support ticket that I *might be Gideros customer number 303 (in mid 2013). 303 buys * $149 for a few years of work, that would be low. And there's plenty of other software with developers that generate no big income, but it doesn't mean you'll get a problem with their software. Usually I get problems only with DRM. |
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| Nice thing because of that is even if Mark went MIA there is enough work done that some of us could maintain it, improve it over time to fit our needs. Making your own targets, improving what is already there is very possible if you are into long term game dev. Not the case with many DRM and closed source tools. |
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| I would definitely say yes. Worse case, the monkey of today wont get updated to the latest targets and you wont be able to take advantage of any new candy of those updates. In reality, you probably won't be using any candy from whats available now anyways. The games your likely to start making as a beginner wont be using any of those high end features and will still run on the available targets for a long time. Even if Mark stopped updating monkey today, I will still be using Monkey for a long time because the language is awesome and right now it still does what I need it to do and will for quite a long time! If I can make a game like this...  with the monkey thats available now, I don't really see much of a need of anything else. This game represents the extent of what I'm capable of, so even with upgrades and updates of a slew of features, more than likely I either wouldn't use them or lack the knowledge to use them, lol. Good luck! |
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| Don't you all think Mark is crazy offering lifetime updates for free with such a cheap product like Monkey? I seriously advise him to change "lifetime" to 6 or 12 months the most and charge for updates some reasonable money. Monkey is great as it is and we rarely update it to save work on integrating our fixes to the Monkey over and over again, but I wouldn't mind paying $30-50 a year for updates. That's what Ziggy does with Jungle IDE and I bet it's easier to develop IDE than Monkey ;-) |
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| $30 for one year seems ok, but only for being able to download new versions, no DRM in the Monkey package itself please. |
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| Can Monkey X create Windows application or is that only BlitzMax that can do that? |
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| It can create Windows desktop or Mac desktop via GLFW. That said, there are some limitations that make some people choose to use the BlitzMax target or to use BlitzMax directly. |
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| I seriously advise him to change "lifetime" to 6 or 12 months the most and charge for updates some reasonable money. Monkey is great as it is and we rarely update it to save work on integrating our fixes to the Monkey over and over again, but I wouldn't mind paying $30-50 a year for updates. I think your information is a little out of date. Ziggy now provides four option for jungle IDE.That's what Ziggy does with Jungle IDE and I bet it's easier to develop IDE than Monkey ;-) 1) The Free version that is for one user, non commercial use and has limited features. 2) The Starter version that is for one user, FontMachine Editor, digital download and license, commercial use with full features and 6 months of updates. Price 30 Euro 3) The Life-time version that is for one user, FontMachine Editor, digital download and license, commercial use with full features and life time updates. Price 65 Euro 4) The Premium Support version that is for five users, FontMachine Editor, digital download and license, commercial use with full features, life time updates and premium support. Price 250 Euro |
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