Roadmap for Monkey
Monkey Forums/Monkey Programming/Roadmap for Monkey
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| I was just thinking today how much more productive this forum could be if Monkey had a Roadmap just like the one Corona has here: http://www.coronalabs.com/resources/roadmap/ It should be a link right at the top next to the Module Registry IMO. I think SO MANY topics that go into no-mans-land could be avoided if we knew it was on Mark's mind, and what level a priority it was. Heck he could even put a little voting thing on it. He doesn't have to acknowledge it or pay attention to it :) But it could be there. I, for one, would like to know if IAP is even on his radar, or if adding PubCenter advertising is in there for Windows Phone because Admob doesn't work there, or if OUYA controller support is coming, etc. Even if it's LOW priority, it can help me decide what to work on next. If OUYA controller support isn't coming for a LONG time, well, I may just put my efforts elsewhere. If it's a top-priority, I might just get all over it and start working on my app as if it's coming. BTW - Don't derail this discussion with the OUYA controller stuff or IAP, it's not really about that, but more-so about having a roadmap. What would YOUR reasons be for wanting a roadmap? Or NOT wanting one? Anyway, just my 2 cents. |
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| I HIGHLY agree. I think the problem is Mark decides on the fly so I am not sure there is a roadmap. |
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| I would love to see a roadmap. It might even give potential buyers a extra bit of confidence. |
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| Rofl. Big time. Coronas roadmap is a bad example. A very bad one. Cause in the past it meant diddly shit. In 2010 i was heavily using Corona. And had heated discussions with them. The former Ceo tried to explain the dissapearence of their roadmap that they lost it. LOST IT. I switched to Gideros because i didnt believe in Ansca anymore. They didnt lost theirs but are helplessly back in schedule. Now TGC has brought in a Kickstarter to develop features they have promised before for free. While a roadmap is nice, not many companies stick to them. It will cause even more complaining because things do not get developed in time or at all. I do not see many things missing from Monkey anyway. It is so frickin open that you can do everything with it. But i can see you point when you want to be catered all the way or taken by the hand. If that was my goal, i would use a different tool. |
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| I don't know that sticking to the roadmap is necessarily important. I would like to see that IAP is on Mark's radar, for example. Even if it isn't high priority right now. The point is, if IAP isn't even on the list, I think we deserve to know that so we can determine how much time we need to dedicate to our own custom modules. So, when new stuff rolls out like Cloud saves on iOS, and Google Play Services, it would be nice to see a roadmap where these items get added to the bottom. I see a lot of people on these forums highly influencing the direction of Monkey with their persistence. I just don't know why some things are chosen and others are not. The GLFW thing for example. Aren't MOST people using Monkey for mobile dev and other Blitz products for Desktop? So, why on earth did this window resizing update get to seep into the top-priority list when Mobile technologies like IAP are still un-supported? Obviously this is just my opinion, and I get that other features are important to other people, but it would be cool to see a roadmap with IAP on it, and the GLFW window resize above it. That way - when updates like this come out - I'm not surprised at all. That feature was above the one important to me, I knew that, so it was expected that it would come out first. |
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| Why would wanting to see a roadmap mean that you want to be "catered all the way" or "taken by the hand"? |
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| For what do you need a roadmap i say? Because you need a feature that is not available and want to see when it comes. Because you want to vote on which feature is developed first. Imho if someone can not implement stuff they need themself, then Monkey might be a bad choice. I would then rather stick to solutions that promise these features to work right out of the box. I see Monkeys philosophy as been open at a max with a powerful language to support your dev. Mark said right from the beginning that he does not intent to enhance its feature set big time. I would rather see him spent time on the easiness to add stuff and enhance TED. I am also worried that his motivation will slag again, if he is pressured to much. It happen before i think when he announced that he rather work on his games. of course this is just my opinion. You have a different one. |
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| I see a lot of people on these forums highly influencing the direction of Monkey with their persistence. I just don't know why some things are chosen and others are not. The GLFW thing for example. Aren't MOST people using Monkey for mobile dev and other Blitz products for Desktop? So, why on earth did this window resizing update get to seep into the top-priority list when Mobile technologies like IAP are still un-supported? I'm with you on that one. Mobile should be 1st prio! |
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| I can see that asking for desktop things is equally important. There Re some here on the forum that made more money with desktop games than a lot of us will ever make in mobile. In some genres, targeting desktop is a better option. |
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| Mike, I didn't say "why do we need a roadmap?", I asked why you think wanting a roadmap means that we want to be "taken by the hand", as if the two are somehow linked, which is ridiculous. Being able to add the features yourself is irrelevant, this isn't a "good coder v bad coder" argument, it's a matter of being able to plan our projects and coding time better, and possibly entice more new users to Monkey as they can see it's got a future... If I spent time coding something myself only to find out just before I complete it that Mark has released the exact same thing I had been working on, I would be cheesed off as I could have used that time elsewhere, whilst waiting for the feature on the roadmap to be completed by him. If it still isn't done by the time I have coded everything else then fine I will do it myself, but it means I haven't wasted time coding something that Mark had planned to do all along but we just didn't know about it! I think updating TED is a pointless task, there is Jungle, Molusk(sp?) and no doubt some others around which are all miles better than TED, and I think if you are even half serious about coding you would be using one of those already. Money isn't an issue as JungleIDE has a free demo, and the time spent "updating TED" to even be in the same universe as the others I would much rather Mark spent updating/adding to the existing features. |
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| This has been brought up a number of times. Most recently here: http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=5376& For me it doesn't really matter so much what people think should or shouldn't be high on a priority list. Arguing about them here is just continuing the frustration that leads to wanting the roadmap in the first place. The point is the have some communication between members of the community and Mark about those priorities. Mark gets to know what his customers want and the community gets some view, however murky and provisional, of what he intends to be looking at. If people really want IAP and Mark says he's busy looking at other things then at least they know it's appropriate to do something themselves or put a bounty on the feature for someone like Jon. |
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| Is Jungle OSX version available? Personally i love simple clean IDEs and find Jungle bloated. I do my dev on OSX so windows IDEs are a no go for me. And if you believe you need a high class IDE to produce high class apps, then i leave it like that and wonder what all these devs in the 80s and the 90s did. btw. what do you consider TED to be lacking of? And please don't answer everything. Let me guess one feature, code folding. �� The more we talk about IDEs, the more i get the itch to port my IndeED IDE to support monkey. |
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| Mike, twice now you have twisted my words...nowhere did I say that "I believe you need a high class IDE to produce high class apps", but using TED compared to another more featured IDE makes the job much harder and time consuming. Devs in the 80's and 90's didn't have a choice - we do, so why use the most basic IDE available when there are much better ones available for free? I only use a Mac to compile, so don't know what IDE's work on OSX, but if there are none other than TED then maybe you should take your own advice from above and should have chosen a language that "holds your hand" and has an IDE that is fully compatible with OSX? You really need me to tell you what TED is lacking? Port your own IDE and make it work on OSX, there seems to be a niche in the market. |
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| rIkmAN, I don't need to tell you as I find TED working fine for me. Monk was even for me. Sure, some small ajustments I would be happy about but there is no deal breaker for me. I need no code folding, I need no intellisense. I navigate fine there, the commands I use I have in my mind or I know where to look them up in the help files. nowhere did I say that "I believe you need a high class IDE to produce high class apps ..... and I think if you are even half serious about coding you would be using one of those already. Sorry, serious development and producing high class apps were somewhere related in my believes. What you basically said (what I understood) was that someone who uses TED, isn't serious about game dev and so can't produce good/top/quality work. If you really believe that, then have fun! :-)))) I stop here as I certainly can't argue which such a mindset. |
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| I have to agree Ted is shocking, and does make life so much harder specially for some one like me, that's why I got Jungle, Jungle has a descent lite/demo version as well, its just a shame its got a few restrictions on its use, if those were lifted I think the lite/demo version would be the perfect accompaniment with monkey. In terms of a RoadMap I think if it was something mark used he would probably have blogged about it, or posted about it, I suspect that he honestly does not roadmap anything, in favor of just fixing and adding things as they come to his attention. Would a RoadMap help him become more efficient, I'm not sure, only he could answer that, trouble is we do not know how he works, we do not know how he prioritizes his tasks or how he decides if something is even worth adding or not. |To many unknown variables, and only the man himself can answer them. |
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| He used to have a blog when he developed monkey but that thing is basically dead in the water. Was always great to read what he was cooking on. |
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| Mike, you have gone from saying you want Mark to spend time improving TED, to then saying in your next post that TED is fine for you as it is as you don't need any other features than what it currently offers. So which is it? Why would you want Mark to spend time working on something that you find perfectly usable as it is? What you basically said (what I understood) was that someone who uses TED, isn't serious about game dev and so can't produce good/top/quality work No - what I said is what I typed - no more, no less. What you spin this into me saying in your head is your business, but please don't try and quote me using different words than what I typed. Just to make my opinion clear for you...TED is a functional, basic editor which will allow you to write and compile code perfectly fine. However if you are are working on a large project (thousands of lines, many source files), and you choose to use TED over the alternatives, then you are making things harder for yourself when they don't need to be - there are FREE and BETTER alternatives. There are plenty of people on here who have bought Jungle. Have they done this just because they like the word "jungle", or is it because it helps them in some way when coding and offers an improvement to TED? I'm not sure how you think you are able to comment on my mindset when your apparent understanding of my mindset is based on you misunderstanding and clearly changing my words to fit your arguments. You are quite skilled at twisting words and then playing the aloof card to leave a discussion, and this time I agree with you stopping there - please do. Something about your forum posts and attitude really grate me the wrong way - as I told you on the Spriter forums - and at first I put it down to your grasp of English, but sadly I really don't think that is the case. Everyone else - sorry for going OT. |
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| Derailed. Every frickin time. This thread is ABSOLUTELY proving my point that a Roadmap is important, even if it is changed and re-arranged EVERY DAY. Doesn't matter. Imagine if there were a Roadmap that listed TED at about "Priority Level 3" and then a few bullet points just to show us that, yes, "code folding" was something Mark was hoping to add to TED at some point? Guess what? We wouldn't have gotten all derailed again!!! You could have tried, but we would have pointed you to the Roadmap and said it wasn't worth talking about here because it's in the plan, Mark is thinking about it, don't stress about it. The thing is, we are ALL thinking about SOMETHING we want to see in future releases of Monkey, and not knowing if it will EVER come is quite frustrating - clearly - just look at the arguments it creates. |
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| IAP is in app purchase? Try implementing it, I managed to implement mobclix and it taught me a lot about android |
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| I did a module for IAP, Android is working, iOS coming next... |
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| yep... i think mark should start something like a feature request week/month... Everybody can write down 5 most needed features... Then he can choose useful features and start a vote week/month and see what we need... Based on this, he can create a roadmap (short, mid, long term) Otherwise, it is possible that he create something without know what we really need. Personally, i do not need big updates or features for editor. And the language itself is good and advanced enough. More important is adding more targets (reactivate PSM, new consoles?), more modules etc. |
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| The community does not necessarily need Mark to come up with a roadmap. Someone set up a little page with feature request submits and voting, and just let him know it exists. He'll be too curious NOT to look at it, and his responsiveness on bug reports shows that he does care about customers. I am sure it will start to influence his thinking. There are many things about Monkey which are great, and a few that hamper it. One of the big things that hamper it is that it is kind of diffuse. You have to really engage to find all the modules, the IDEs, the tricks like devolonter's WebGL thing, etc. I bet that many of the best changes for Monkey would come about from giving the community slightly better web facilities than these forums... |
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| @dragon: Falls Du Dich mal in unserer Sprache über Monkey austauschen möchstest, http://www.monkeycoder.de/ |
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| @MikeHart - da ist leider nix los... The community does not necessarily need Mark to come up with a roadmap this is true, but community roadmap is useless! |
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| da ist leider nix los... Wird halt nur über wesentliches gequatscht. |
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| English only, please. |
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| I don't see how it would be useless. A community roadmap would tell both the community and Mark which features the community wants prioritized. That's a lot better than we have now. |
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| Developer must create roadmap, not user. Otherwise he will ignore it. This is everywhere! For example: Blender users created such request-lists with vote-system. But developer ignored it fully, because developer create stuff for itself. On other side - project leader (blender) create roadmap - and it will be realized http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and-beyond/ (ton is project leader) today, monkey is without any known future plan... it is "nebulous". Project leader should have plans, it is possible that Mark have this, but the community do not know anything. It is also possible that Mark have no strict plan, and do something every day what he like |
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| Ok, I think this is a pretty good idea so I'll try and get something like a roadmap together soon - but it'll be a 'developer' roadmap, not a 'requests' roadmap! I think a feature request system would complement a roadmap nicely, but my personal feature requests will always have priority sorry. Part of the reason I haven't been more forthcoming with a 'direction' for Monkey is because I've kinda been been scrambling just to keep up with getting things working in a reasonably consistent manner on all targets (and win8 has been a PITA time sink...). But I think it's getting there, and I've been actually been playing around with some brand new stuff recently. I'll also admit I've been kind of hit and miss in what I implement in terms of 'feature requests' along the way, but I've always tried to at least focus at least on the 'nuts and bolts' stuff, which IMO is language, graphics, audio, input and more recently networking - and making it as consistent as practical/possible. It's what I know/enjoy, so no great surprise there. The monetization/social stuff I'm way less familiar/comfortable with. I eventually implemented admob and gamecenter modules because people were obviously struggling to get them working, but in general I would prefer to see the community deal with all the chartboosts and flurries out there. I realize this is not easy - I still haven't really come up with a clean/flexible way for people to hook into the guts of the targets, but it's on the roadmap! Well, it will be... Anyway, I'll do a blog update soon and go into a bit more detail. |
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| It's great to hear you open to this, Mark. I totally understand what you're saying about libraries. My hope would be that you start to voice your ideas about what is core, what is community-driven but supported (i.e. you consider important enough to test against or form a pre-release test group for) and what is just in the wind. I would expect IAP to be in the middle group. |
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| Mark I really appreciate the hard work you do and some (most?) might want to hit me hard now but have you ever thought about to make some money from some kind of paid updates (the huge ones) or yearly subscriptions? I mean what you've created here is sooo unbelievable cheap compared to what other companies take (e.g. Corona) and I just don't like the idea that you one day run out of money and HAVE TO create something new instead of making a living with the existing one? |
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| Thanks Mark. I think it is necessary so that people don't waste their time, if nothing else. It would suck, for example, if Xaron spent a month getting IAP working and you were working on it and came out with it 3 days before he was finished. If we have a clear delineation of what we should work on and what you are working on then the Monkey community will benefit greatly. |
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| Wow, this is awesome, that's exactly what I was hoping for. I think we all know that you might stray from the roadmap at anytime, because we all do, but it would be great to know if something were on your mind or not for a future release. Thank you!!!!!!!!!! |
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| Xaron while I appreciate where your coming from, I for one simply would not be able to afford that, so personally I hope he does not do anything like that, it's the fundamental reason that I am here and not on some C++ or C# board, I don't need to worry about money other than the one time purchase. In terms of Mark making more money I it's been clear to a number of us that there are things he can do, like totally overhaul the site, make it way more up market and professional looking, make the forums more modern so people don't feel out of place, spread the word more in game development circles, its far to niche at the moment, take advantage of the fact that big named game designers use and like monkey, like the Ultima Online Lead Designer who's here some where, I'm sure he wouldnt mind having his name dropped if it helps out Mark and the community gain more people. I also think in terms of increasing sales that if BRL could shake hands with Jungle, they would both see a jump in sales as the IDE is a big issue for a lot of people, recent threads are a prime example of this, if for example the Jungle Lite version had its commercial release restriction lifted and was bundled with monkey as an official release I think the IDE worries would vanish over night, Jungle would see an increase in sales as people buy the upgrade to get the extra features, and mark would see sales go up as more people have less trouble with their first few steps into the language. blah , I'm ranting again. sorry. |
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