Monkey has 8603 users!
Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Monkey has 8603 users!
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| Edit: Woo! If Mark did a kickstarter for more features, what would be some big ones you think would be useful in drawing in the bigger game dev crowd? |
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| Given the nature of Monkey, I think such features would have to be in the form of new targets or modules. |
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| I would really like some additional graphics features (I know some are being worked on.) Shaders, render to texture, etc. and I think that might be important to some others as well... |
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| Only need one more user until it's 1k! http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Account/showuser.php?id=1000 |
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| Whenever I talk to folks from AAA or "large indie" shops about Monkey, they are all always pretty impressed. Unity has all the momentum there, of course. But if I had to name some things that would help get more attention: - support for the new gen of consoles - more libraries for analytics, monetization, etc. All these folks depend on those. - the shader-type stuff that is already in progress - covering 100% of all the SDKs for services for each platform, Steam included Basically, the more turnkey stuff is there, the more attractive it will look. |
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| I agree with that. Getting support for all of the next gen consoles as soon as possible. I can help Mark get access to everything he needs for some consoles and have offered to him directly already. |
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| We have our thousandth user! |
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| We have our thousandth user! awesome! |
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| Great milestone for a great product.. |
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| Getting support for all of the next gen consoles as soon as possible. Yup! Apparently Sony and Microsoft are getting way more open to indies... even me, here from Brazil can have a shot! :) And I wouldn't mind having a PS3 target either... (just signed an NDA with Sony, so fingers crossed on that one!) I'd also add something else: a Direct-X target on Windows. XNA is dead, and it's a hassle to install/distribute, while MINGW is easy enough to get going (just extract it somewhere, place the value into config.(os).txt and it's compiling) - but OpenGL, specially on Intel cheaper videos, is a mess on Windows. XBOne, PS3 (PS4?) and DX targets... I would pay another Monkey license for those :) |
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| Hah! Crossing fingers really works :) I was *just* approved to get Devkits for PS3/Vita! If Mark needs someone to test a PS3 or Vita Target, I may be able to help out in the near future :) |
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| How much are these dev kits? |
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| What the hell? 1000? How is BRL financially solvent? Monkey has been out for roughly 2 years if I remember right. $100,000 is not a lot of money to run a company on even if it's a one-man shop. |
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| >How much are these dev kits? Not cheap. They cost extra because they have extra hardware for debugging - meant for AAA 3D games and not necessary for most 2D games, but still it's a required cost. It's an investment. >What the hell? 1000? Meanwhile Unity 3D costs a ton more and has many times more users even 2D only users. Marketing! |
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| Monkey has been out for roughly 2 years if I remember right. $100,000 is not a lot of money to run a company on even if it's a one-man shop. I think BRL is just a side business. From what I took the sparse info that was posted, I think they have regular jobs and do this only part time. |
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| Mark is full-time. |
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| Cool. |
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| The main problem with monkey is hardly anyone that isn't a monkey user has heard of it; he needs to get it mentioned in develop or something. |
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| he needs to get it mentioned in develop or something. I think it was... http://monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=3725 |
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| @simonh: As you said that Mark is working fulltime on his products, do you know what he is cooking atm for Monkey? Right now development of Monkey feels to like it has slowed down quite a bit, but that might be because he works on something bigger for it and you can't see that in the Github. |
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| Yeah I got the same impression, the last few unpdates have been small bug fixes and tweaks there have not been many if any big additions for a while, at least not that I have seen. As for that 100k, if you assume he takes it all, that's 50k a year, if you factor in some guestimation of over heads and wages, he's probably taking home 25-30k a year, thats a really good salary and not something to scoff at at all. |
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| I think you have to consider that some users have multiple licenses, and it's the cumulative sum of both monkey and blitz purchases (which are probably less, but still happen). It's not great money, but it's more than enough to live on, particularly if you work from home. Releases may have also slowed because he's working on items in the roadmap which very likely require significantly more time to develop and will be released in a larger update, rather than trickled over many small ones. |
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| >>How much are these dev kits? >Not cheap. Actually, it was free. Sony has an "incubation" program (at least here in Brazil, started this year) and if you get approved, you get the devkits you ask for free - it doesn't mean the game I develop will be published, I'll only get the devkits to make it. I still haven't the devkits here, but I got the acceptance letter yesterday :) |
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| he's probably taking home 25-30k a year, thats a really good salary and not something to scoff at at all. Not for a top flight programmer it is absolutely not. In fact 50k/yr is just terrible pay for an astounding piece of code like Monkey. In my understanding there are a number of large shops that use Blitz for tool development and the like. If he worked at one of those places he could command $100k at the very least. Obviously I don't know the whole story here but I just don't believe he's living on $100k for two years. |
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| Well 100k a year and work for someone else on their scheduled having to go to work each day on the 9-5 or 30k and be your own boss. I'd choose the 30k. |
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| >Actually, it was free. They have a quota of loaner devkits per country. USA is already all claimed. You are lucky if you were able to get one but it's not the rule. I can't say what price they are but they are much more than regular consoles. Getting into the program doesn't guarantee you will get a devkit I assume, and you can only keep it free for a year after that you have to send it back or pay full price. Mark owns BRL and that's worth a lot. I would greatly prefer Mark make as much money as possible. I've purchased a bunch of Monkey licenses even though I only need a few and I encourage you all who are able to to do the same to encourage further development. An investment in the tools you use is an investment in yourself. Here's the link: https://secure.shareit.com/shareit/checkout.html?productid=300439755 (Pretty sure you can disable that backup CD option.. who needs it, Share-it keeps all of the money from it, and most people would disable it anyway, so it probably lowers conversion rates for being there because it's friction.) |
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| Good point, I've chosen comparative poverty rather than big dough on someone else's schedule. I was just astonished that this product hasn't sold more units than that. |
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| Well, there is no advertisement whatsoever for monkey, so that's now a big surprise. Quite opposite, I think it's quite good! BRL could at least give one or two copies as a prize on some Ludum Dare or some contest with the same or higher visibility - some way to reach users that never heard of Blitz3D/BlitzMax/Monkey... But just as a comparison, here in Brazil, if I was making 50k/year I would be more than happy! Would be living a pretty good life with that kind of money... |
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| @Soap Mark owns BRL and that's worth a lot. I would greatly prefer Mark make as much money as possible. I've purchased a bunch of Monkey licenses even though I only need a few and I encourage you all who are able to to do the same to encourage further development. An investment in the tools you use is an investment in yourself. Soap, if you have spare licenses, then why not put your extra ones to good use by offering them as coding prizes on some of the indie coding sites? This would be great advertising for Monkey/BRL IMHO. |
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| 1144 now... big increase since Monkey X ;) |
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| >>1144 now... Where do you get the number? |
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| Where do you get the number? Click on a user name such as yours and it will take you to their profile page with the URL: http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Account/showuser.php?id=865 Then just change the number at the end... For example: http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Account/showuser.php?id=1160 |
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| 1412... |
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| I wonder how many are actual people versus just being bots that signed up. |
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| Wow... monkey userbase is growing... fast! |
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| Cool it was about 1250 just a few days ago. |
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| I keep telling everyone I know about it and tweeting about it as I'm sure we all are so it may have reached a critical mass where recommendations start snowballing. |
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| Now we just need to see all these new users post and share their questions/comments/thoughts on all things Monkey X! :) A new line of thinking with fresh ideas is always nice. |
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| 1966 :) |
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| My year of birth :-) |
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| Hey! mine's too! |
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| Is that nearly a thousand new users in around 3 months ? , that's fairly good, and its users most of whom we would not have had without the change that was made. lets hope it continues to grow:) |
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| So... 1,000 users. That means since the initial public release of Monkey BRL only made $100,000 in the past 2.5 years. Impressive for a fast food manager. But pocket change for an independent business. =P |
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| well, we're just 27 users away to making 2,000 !! |
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| @TKG: Users of the free version can also register in the forum, no? |
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| yes, they now can register too to ask questions. |
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| ^It didn't use to be like that. At least I thought. I remember when I wanted a monkey account I couldn't find a way to sign up but when I bought monkey my account was automatically created so I could just sign in. |
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| 2000... |
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| Crikey, that was quick... site change/freebie seem to have made a hell of a difference! |
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| anyone got any html5 code that can parse a website? was thinking we could create a nice looking pie chart in html5 that parses the user list and plots out total users and the country of their origin. |
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| Where are you guys seeing the member count? |
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| Where are you guys seeing the member count? http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=6086&post=74375 |
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| 3762 :) |
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| 3765 Still increasing! (hope they are paid users :P) ps: btw, why there's no a 'users panel' ? I mean we can check for a single user all the info he/she want to make public just using /Account/showuser.php?id=XXX - I know it's no a vital information, but just it will show tthe 'vitality' of the community (and other informations, like place, posts, apps and so on) |
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| I could edit my little scanner to count the number of users with more than 1 forum post , that should reflect the actual number of contributing members. |
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| I don't think they are all paid users. I saw the users going up a lot faster after Monkey was renamed to Monkey X. Before it was not much more then a 1000. But if so 3765 x $99 dollars is nothing I would complain about :) Free users of Monkey, it's time to buy a license I would say! |
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| Currently there are.. 58238 total forum posts 1538 total stars awarded 247 apps in the app section 129 playable apps in the apps section 3776 users of which 540 have made more than 3 forum posts. |
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| go Monkey !!!! |
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| the numbers just highlight how small the community is, if you look past the last total posts, and the 3k users the metrics soon show you that a massive amount of the sites traffic and contributions or posts are actually coming from a very very very small group of people, the result is that the forum looks a little more active but its actually just the same handful of people posting so its actually hell of a lot quieter than it looks.. :/ |
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| I'm happy that there are users :D but I believe the main problem is still that no one knows it exists. It should be on steam and also on other sites just to show presence. Some people might think that this sounds stupid but how are new users supposed to find it? Getting more if you have nothing is easier than you think. There is no need to overcomplicate things when things are simple. No users, no sales. New primary target is getting people to find and use it. I already spend some hours posting at all the sites where I could post to help it grow but I have no fancy graphics to show... (I think it helped a bit :) ) It would also be cool if people who have some gfx to show could take a bit of their time to write a 'Dev-Blog' at some of the better known developer sites like gamasutra gamedev (... Maybe you know more sites like this?) To make devs notice that Monkey X exists. (I know some people already did this BUT you should too!) One night I had some really mad thoughts about simply uploading it to some site and selling it there because mark is so dedicated to development but unfortunately I had no clue of how to forward the sales to the original site... I also thought about making a bundle but it looks like something like this is not possible from the shareit site without proper access. I have to think again before I can come up with something better... |
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| One night I had some really mad thoughts about simply uploading it to some site and selling it there because mark is so dedicated to development but unfortunately I had no clue of how to forward the sales to the original site... I also thought about making a bundle but it looks like something like this is not possible from the shareit site without proper access. I have to think again before I can come up with something better... Affiliate program? |
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| Monkey X (MX) is just starting... :) |
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| Affiliate program? The problem is that you link back to the brl shop. Many sites have their own shop system so they don't accept this redirection from one shop to another. They get the money by handling your sales not by redirecting to another shop which does that. Monkey X (MX) is just starting... :) I totally agree. It's a future proof concept even if some things don't run as round as they could, but I remember the time when BlitzMax started. It was the very same. You had to flush everything and there were quite some quirks. Good software always takes time and Monkey X is a step into a new world for BRL. I have a early adopter mentality anyway, so my opinion is not very representative. |
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| 4132 registered users. |
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| 8603 registered users. |
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| And if you check now, the number is up past 8610. It has clearly increased quickly.. but it doesn't feel like there's that number of users on the forum :-) |
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| Great to see more people are hearing about Monkey X and joining the club. It is a fine programming language and game dev framework. Maybe the recent game jam helped to get the word out! |
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| I use Monkey X for small proof of concept code and its brilliant for that, I would love to use it for more in depth stuff but at present im not moving in that direction. Its nice to write once and release everywhere :D |
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| I'm more interested in active user count than just a database ID :) 66 people are supporting Mark Sibley's newest efforts. Plus anyone buying Monkey-X licenses. |
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