Blitz Research News...
Monkey Forums/Monkey Programming/Blitz Research News...
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| Hi, Just posted this to facebook: Hi everyone, A slightly sad update... After careful consideration, and in order to concentrate more fully on monkey2, I have decided to downsize Blitz Research operations. In particular: * MonkeyX will be completely open sourced and the Monkey-X.com site will be closed. * Blitzbasic.com will be closed. * The monkey2 site will remain, as will the monkey2 Patreon page. My plan is to continue working on monkey2, but to also enhance my income by creating things with it to be sold commercially such as an IAP module for mobile, a simple 'Maplet' style modeller for the upcoming 3d module, and hopefully even a game one of these days! I would urge monkeyx users to switch to monkey2 if possible. It is very similar to monkeyx, and is by now just about 'feature equivalent' with it. Monkey2 does not alas generate html5 code so you'll still need MonkeyX for that, but MonkeyX will still be around. Website closures will probably happen before the end of the month. This is definitely a bummer. BB.com in particular has a long and colorful history and is IMO still a great programming site. But the truth is BRL isn't even making enough money these days to keep the sites running. I've been hosting them on a dedicated server which is not cheap, and while I guess I could move them to a smaller, cheaper server, I think it's time to let them go. I've been coding and hosting community websites for over 10 years now and I feel like I've had enough of that for a while. All in all, I just want to get back to hardcore coding! I've been having a great time working on monkey2 and, even if it doesn't turn out to be as popular as stuff I've done in the past, I don't really care if I can manage to make a living out of it! Thanks for everyone's support over the years! MonkeyX will definitely still be around. It is still up at github, and available for download from blitzresearch.itch.io (need to add a linux download). If people want, I can add a monkeyx forum to the monkey2 site (I'll probably do this anyway), but I'd really like to see monkeyx users switch to monkey2 if possible - there are some cool things coming very soon such as a new 3d module! |
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| For me, Monkey is all about game jams and mini games or experiments, largely via HTML5. Hopefully by making Monkey X open source it can have a sustained lifespan and keep developing in our hands. MX dev pretty much stalled dead, so hopefully this can re-inject some life into it. If there's one thing I'd ask it would be release any work you had done towards a Monkey X native C++ based Android target. That has been the one thing holding me back from using Monkey X more, lacking the raw C++ performance boost compared to Java bytecode on Android. |
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| Yo! I saw you just put MonkeyX on itch.io, guessing that's getting in front of the inevitable site closure. However, it appears to be several versions behind! Listed is 84f. Stable is 86e, Experimental 87b.... |
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| Why close the site? A site costs nothing, fundamentally. I am not happy with this. [Edit: in fact I am angry] What about old forum posts? The posts that compensate for the lack of documentation? |
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| I'm also not switching to MonkeyX2. I couldn't care less about the 3D part of it - for that, there is Unity. Monkey strongest points are exactly the 2D part (which generate really small binaries both on iOS and Android) and the HTML5 target. Also I'm not very fond of porting everything I have once more. XML parsers, Spriter anim loader, texture atlas code - not to mention my own screen manager and graphical libs that sits on top of Mojo now. So MX2 is not actually a choice for me. Specially since Mark a couple of years from now will probably ditch it too, to make MX3 or whatever... Isn't there anyway to mirror this site somewhere? It would be a shame to lose all the threads existing both here and on blitzbasic.com... :( |
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| Hosting the sites shouldn't cost more than $5 a month, and with very good quality service. Killing the sites is a long term mistake, but if your priority is personal gratification first no one should blame you for doing what you want. https://www.linode.com/pricing Any other commercial developers out there I highly recommend you give Defold a chance. I've been using it for over a year now on big projects. It has every feature I want, and it has a big team behind developing it with no signs that it will stop being made. https://defold.gitbooks.io/dive-into-defold/content/2-get-defold.html https://forum.defold.com/ |
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| Partly sad but wise and understandable move! Focus on Monkey2! |
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| At the moment, I *can't* switch to Monkey2 for my current "big" project since it relies heavily on some IgnitionX features and a **huge** amount of work would be needed to maybe be able to convert it to Monkey2/Pyro2. Since I'm a long time Monkey2 backer I will probably switch to Monkey2 for my next games but I'm working on this game for /years/ now (I don't have much time to code) and I need to be able to finish it, and sell it without having to worry about its future. As for websites, I would never have been able to do anything without the help of the community on the forums. Just last week I learned about the existence of the "ResetInput" command via a search on the forum which just saved my life since I couldn't find anything about some FlushMouse/FlushKeys equivalent in the docs. We need to keep all that precious knowledge somewhere. I will switch to Monkey2 but at the moment need to be able to finish and keep at least that current project working on Android/MacOS/Win/iOS for the years to come... |
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| This is really sad news.. Putting a match to the blitz community is not gonna drive people to Monkey2. I hope this and Blitzmax/Blitz3d community can live on with another home. Start a mailing list? |
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| This is awful. Good bye then. I will not switch to a language which is somehow similar to C++. I will use C++ directly then together with AGK2. Monkey 2 might be feature wise the same but it has an unusable IDE, almost NO documentation. Good luck anyway Mark. I followed you all the time hoping you would at least learn just a tiny bit about marketing and product placement but I just give up now. Good luck with Monkey 2, 3, 4, ... whatever will follow with new websites and split ups. I don't get why you want to close down the sites. I'm so pissed... |
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| After Mark and Simon talked so "nicely" about the Blitz user crowd, I am surprised that he asks to move over. Are the superior coders he wanted to have not coming? Getting desperate? |
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| I just posted this on FB, but I might as well do it here. I'm not surprised about Monkey's site shutting down, as it's been pretty silent lately, but the Blitz forums still seemed a bit more active than that. -- On another note, I wrote an incredibly unforgiving site downloader (with link fixes) that eats up my bandwidth while it's running. You mind if I backup both sites? I typically use it for downloading forums that are going away. Aside from that, how much bandwidth and server space does it cost to run these places? I have a VPS (not as good as dedicated, but up there. I do have full control.) and would willingly host the sites for free (I know you want to let them go, but...). I host other people's websites on occasion for free, like this pixel artist (http://lolipopsicle.com/) and was hosting a hardware engineer (http://hackniac.com/). I have about 950GB of bandwidth a month that is left unused... Edit: Or, other idea, instead of me downloading the site, just strip the user password hashes and emails, disable registration, and just release the site database and code so that it's easy to display in read-only mode outside of here. Because I'm looking at the site structure, and my tool which was designed for vBulletin forums, is going to have a little trouble since you did some strange things, like multipage threads, the last page is first. It's weird and hard to work with. Edit: Okay, I've come up with another alternative if you don't release the database. The site structure, thankfully, is super simple and I figured out an easy way to strip the data directly into a database I made. |
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| I have unlimited bandwith and storage with my webhost and it's NOT expensive at all. I don't think this move is financial. IMO It's attempt to drive people away from Blitzmax/B3D and Monkey over to monkey2. I've been a patreon supporter of Mark from the beginning, but I get real work done with blitzmax and monkey and Monkey2 just isn't ready. |
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| I have unlimited bandwith and storage with my webhost and it's NOT expensive at all. Can I assume you have a shared host? (Dreamhost probably) Shared host servers are not great. VPS and dedicated are quite different as you actually have to know what you're doing to run them. For instance, I had my clock go ahead by 17 minutes over 5 months without me noticing and then I had to resync it with a world clock. Shared hosts would be paying attention for things like that. |
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| Mark, thank you for creating those great languages. I'm also one of your followers since BlitzBasic on the Amiga. I totally understand your decision to move forward because legacy projects always keeps someone back to move forward faster (even if it doesn't eat up that much time, but it's in someones mind all the time somehow). Also, thank you very much for making Monkey-X open source. And also a big thanks to everyone in this community. |
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| This will not make me move to MX2 until my current wips are done, and even then I'm not sure if I will, I will deff stay on the forums tho keeping track of things to see if anything improves, annoyingly I am one of the people who's been suggesting for a while that all the brl sites be merged but this is most defiantly not the way I would have gone about it. I can totally understand the costs tho, the MX1 site is lucky if it gets a post a week I am actually amazed that he kept it running as long as he did, that being said its downfall was rapid and brutal specially when compared to the blitz community, I hope Mark you learn from that but sadly I do not think you have. I will always be a fan of your work, I wish you all the success with MX2 and I hope at some point it becomes something I am happy to move to. Until then I will be in EvE Online blowing shit up. |
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| Sorry for my rant, just want to say thank you to all of you, especially Mark. |
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| oh boy! I understand your decision, and I think its crusial to add this forum to monkey2 forum since I need this site time to time to get answers to many questions about monkey code.. I will make atleast one game with monkey-X and after that i shall start chancing to monkey2. |
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| As was already mentioned, I think the most important part is to have a read-only archive of the forum contents. It basically is an extended documentation. A replacement forum might be the wrong format, as this one seemed pretty dead in the last years. I would recommend starting a discord channel, as that is easy to setup and no one needs to keep maintaining it. Let me know what you think, I could set it up --- And thanks Mark for creating these nice languages. I probably wouldn't have started programming without them. I wish you all the best. |
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| I understand the need to focus on Monkey2 and open sourcing MonkeyX is cool and should allow it to stay functional and updated. I think loosing the forums what be a big shame as there is so much useful information. I would be happy to look at hosting them on my servers? |
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| This is definitely NOT a hosting issue at all. ;) I think it's just a try to move all over to MX2 which won't work. Better would be to do it the other way around as others mentioned already. |
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| Before anyone gets their hopes up regarding the open sourcing of Monkey-X/Mojo2... From its readme file on Github +Republication or redistribution of mojo2 source code is prohibited without the prior consent of Blitz Research Ltd. If that statement has a legal binding, then even creating a fork of Monkey X on Github now, without a prior consent, could place you into troubled land. |
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| Well Mike, I think Mark is going to change that license when going completely open source. |
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| That was changed a few hours ago. I think it is the final version. |
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| I'm impatient, so I just went and wrote a new downloader specifically calibrated for these sites. It's 1/4 of the way done with Monkey and 1/12 of the way done with the Blitz forums. Right now while it's downloading files I'm developing a way to strip the posts (and edit links), users, and forum IDs to reconstruct a database out of it that can be used to display the site's content in any way that's wanted. I was going to wait to see if the database would be provided willingly, but I'm not taking any chances. Edit @ 3:50pm PST: 3/4 Monkey site done, 1/4 of Blitz forums done. However, once these two finish their topic/user profile downloads, I have to write extra code to download the Blitz logs and code archives part of that site. So it'll be a while longer, but it's not that bad since the sites are straight forward. |
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| The new license: Monkey is released under the zlib/libpng license. The zlib/libpng License Copyright (c) 2013 Blitz Research Ltd This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software. Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions: 1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required. 2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software. 3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution. I think it's ok the way it is. You're just not allowed to alter it and claim that you're the author. edit: But Mike just pointed me onto the mojo2 license. So there is a sub license? Mojo2 Copyright (c) 2015 Blitz Research Ltd. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of mojo2 source code is prohibited without the prior consent of Blitz Research Ltd. How can THAT be called open source? |
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| FWIW, I'm not a fan of torching the Blitz and Monkey X communities and development. Just to add my voice. It does seem like torching two villages to drive everyone to a new one, but I'm not paying the bills or spending time maintaining. Monkey 2 initially had me excited but along the way my love of C++ reignited as I discovered the newer C++11/14 features. And it's M2 seems like a completely different beefier entity from the original spirit of Monkey X. I still love MX's lightweight, low drag charm. And for me being able to do the four main platforms plus HTML5, with OpenGL, was killer. Especially for prototypes and game jams. |
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| I just got an automated complaint from BB's website to the wrong ISP about the site scaping that I'm doing. That was funny. I thought they would have disabled their systems since they were shutting down. I'm sure they expected that someone would do this. Either way, nothing is actually stopping me as the data is still coming through and if this ISP forwards to my actual ISP, I'll just VPN it and dance around detection as much as I want. Just thought it was funny to mention. |
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| I don't think it's funny, you could end up in serious trouble. Please stop. |
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| So you guys plan on releasing the forum archives then? There's lots of important info on there that allowed me to get anywhere in these languages. At the very least, I could slow the system down. It's aggressive because I have it going in a very abusive for loop. It's aiming at very specific locations, topics and code archives. Edit: Also, what trouble? I'm not the account holder (if you had gotten the right ISP) and there's no law against scraping site data where I live. I've also done this to other forums that have shut down in the past. None complained, they just relaxed and let it go since they knew it was over anyways. I have slowed the system considerably by the way, so it should result in less issues. |
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| The code archives are public domain. The forums are not. For the last time, please stop. |
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| What? That uh, no, that doesn't make sense. I would like to say that it does, but it doesn't. I'm afraid that you can't copyright other people's written messages. Maybe in your country? Technically each message written by the individual who wrote it is copyrighted by the person for whom it originated. At least by the laws here. As an example, this message I wrote is mine. It's automatically gets a copyright under written work, for some reason. Edit: To clarify, I'm not keeping your website files. The BB forums look like crap. I'm grabbing them and ripping post data out of them, which is going into a database. Also, I lightened up the grabber, it should be far, far, less aggressive. Edit again: Now even less aggressive again...I could probably take it another step forward, but the math tells me that it's inefficient and would only prolong the inevitable. Edit again: I had this message prepared before getting that email that made me laugh. - The Monkey forums database is finished. I'm not downloading the apps or anything, so be aware of that. Also, I kept people's websites, not emails, but I'm not sure if I should or not. Not sure how many are bot website SEO link type things. As for the BB forums, they are a beast. I wasn't able to get the worklogs in an easy way, so I decided to skip them since they didn't seem to have anything that important in them anyways. Mostly chit-chat about projects that were dropped. So, in total, the BB forums database is at about 40%. Users: 30%. Code archives at 100%. Woo~ wonder how much longer until it's done. Also, no emails. I stripped emails because I don't want spammers to grab it and spam me or anyone else. It's another reason why I think I should strip the website links from people's data. I fear it's just going to be used for either A) SEO bots who got in to get free links by Google/Bing/Other Bots, or B) Spammers looking for a list of websites to try their bot against. I'm on the fence with this one. - I'm still on the fence about it by the way. I think it's good and bad and I am indecisive. |
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| Technically 8207 of the posts on bb.com are mine. Please stop. |
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| skid actually I don't get what should be not legal about that one? There are web archives out there, mirroring complete websites including forums. There's Google Cache, basically doing the same?! Or do you think about heavy server load? |
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| @skid Then I'll delete/ignore them if you're that dedicated to having them be forever unseen. You're a strange individual, you know that? Everyone is asking for some form of the forums in a read-only fashion, I bother to write code specifically to do that (I even ignored storing emails) so that you guys wouldn't even have to lift a finger, and this is how you treat me? This is why I'm not supporting Monkey 2. A while back I had a rather nasty bug get ignored and I quit Monkey for a while because of the unprofessional treatment. This behavior is unprofessional from you guys if you're serious about moving forward. Let me finish and it'll be out of your way. Think of me as a needle. It's a little painful for a bit after, but it'll stop. I'm already 50% done. Might as well go for the goal. @Xaron I've lowered the load of it by quite a bit. It's not downloading even close to as many files as it was earlier. It shouldn't be that bad. If it had kept going at full capacity, it would've been done in about 10 minutes from right now. Speaking of which, it would've been done 10 minutes from now had you not done anything to cause me to slow it down skid. See, that's strange. I don't understand why you want me to prolong this. |
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| Please stop. |
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| ... |
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| @skid I'll tell you what I used to tell the shadows that used to talk to me before I got medicated: no. I really don't like being told what to do. I've also enhanced my code to jump my IP and remove cookies if anything suspicious is noticed. Unless you can straight up tell me that a database backup is coming minus emails, password hashes, private forums, link fixes, etc. I'm not going to stop. It's not fair to the community built around these products for me to stop at this point. I don't care if you ban me or whatever. This place is shutting down, so it's really a moot point. (Also, I'm of German heritage and I am extremely stubborn. Say, "please," while commanding me with, "stop," all you like. I'm going to be a jerk till the end.) |
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| So he should say "HALT", right? HA, another German. Man, we lost two wars, you're going to win this one, right? ;) (just kidding, I'm an evil Kraut!). |
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| @Xaron Assuming I have enough IPs in stock if he in fact goes that far, which would be ridiculous and ludicrous, then yes, I'll win one for Germany. Edit: Oh, progress report, BB forums 54%, Users: 80%. Forums are moving at the pace of a snail since implementing the download speed reducer in my software. From 2-4AM: 50%, 4AM-7AM: 4% -- See the difference? Edit: Oh crap, something I didn't foresee, my SSD on this machine is close to blowing up. I need to find some files to delete... Edit: My network speed analyzer says I'm downloading between 0.2Mbs and 0.4Mbs. That's like 18Mbs per minute, which is 2.3593MB per minute. That's uh, that's even smaller than I thought. -_- It would explain why my CPU usage for the software is at 0%. Edit: BB Users database table is done! Hooray for Germany! (Now I have to go in and delete skid as he has clearly requested.) Edit: Do to a minor bug, skid wasn't downloaded along with like 50 other people between 1 and 500. Hmm...not sure if I want to even bother getting the missing ones. Nah, I will. I'll just wait until the forums are done. Having both threads running at the same time might have been downloading more than I thought. |
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| Though I believe we need to archive the blitz basic forums, let not have a bitter sweet ending to this blitz saga (king.com please don't sue me) |
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| It depends on how you look at it. I'm your friendly neighborhood archiver and skid is going a bit off the rails for a dead site that has stated intentions to close before the end of the month. Not really sure it's going out badly or bitter sweet, just seems like skid is having a bad time by their own behavioral choice. They could sit back and enjoy this, but they're choosing not to. I'm not bitter, I'm quite happy and seem to be experiencing a euphoric mania right now. My code for the custom archiver I made for these sites is top notch for something I'm throwing away. I mean, I couldn't be having a better time. |
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| Let's all take a chill pill here. We have most interests in common, let's not fight. The site needs to be archived at least. I think everyone can agree on that. If it won't happen officially, it's good that it happens unofficially. An official archive would be best (short of a complete migration of all forums to new forum, which is probably impractical). It would allow transparent linking on the new Monkey forum. |
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| Let's all take a chill pill here. We have most interests in common, let's not fight. The site needs to be archived at least. I think everyone can agree on that. If it won't happen officially, it's good that it happens unofficially. Who's fighting? What I see is a wall, me, and a dog, skid, barking at aforementioned wall. Also, while we community members have common interests, skid does not. He sent an abuse complaint to the wrong ISP and forwarded it to my email, and then proceeded to bark commands at me while believing that messages that other people had written were copyrighted by Blitz. He didn't nicely ask or talk to me beforehand, "hey, could you lower the speed a bit?" It was "bark, bark, bark, do what I say with threats." I responded in the only appropriate manner for dealing with people like that. An official archive would be best. It would allow transparent linking on the new Monkey forum. What do you mean? I'm going to have a system run through and find and edit all of the relative links in the database so that anyone who uses the database can run a script I'm making right now that will go through it to make static links to wherever it's hosted. Mine is not bad at all for an unofficial one. Mostly just missing those 50 people between 1-500 on the BB forums is annoying. Stupid bug...I can resolve that after I finish the topics. I should note though, I am only providing a database and a script to fix links. Someone else will have to write the code to display the actual topics. |
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| @goodlookingguy: bit of a dick approach, regardless of intent. Hadn't had you down as being that way, you've done some really good stuff. |
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| Not getting dragged into this, but @goodlookingguy - are the results of your web scraping going to be available to all? I'm with many others that the code on the site, the info. on the forums etc. continues to be invaluable. I'd hate to see it all go up in smoke for good. |
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| I want to see the the site archived as much a anyone, but If you're stressing the server and running up charges, you're being the 'bad actor' in this situation and not helping. Don't drive the site offline even sooner with your actions |
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| If I had the kill switch I would have hit it hours ago... |
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| @DruggedBunny Oh, no, I totally am. I'm definitely known as a dick and consider myself as one as well as having given myself the affectionate title "asshole." The reason is because of people when they come up against me, like in this situation. It's basically when I'm not given what I consider good enough reason to listen. I won't back down and will take the knife, as it were, and dig it deeper into the person's wound without relent (wall/dog comments). Also, despite that truth, it doesn't mean I don't help or anything and I'm 100% for open source. I'm also against copyright laws and pro-pirating (when service is lacking), so that might throw you off. @silentshark It's a database generated from the scraped pages (I did not use HTTrack (which wouldn't work in this situation) or anything like that. I wrote custom software.). So take that as you will. I may make a way to display it if I'm given enough time. Are you part of the Skype group that was started a while back for Monkey people? That's where I'm going to announce release if I ever get banned here (or even if I'm not). It's a precaution. @GW_ Are...are you serious? 2.3MB a minute is not "stressing" the server. It wouldn't even stress an old server. Even if php was recompiling all of these pages because they lacked any caching features, it shouldn't stress it out. And yes, I'm a bad man. A horrible abomination! Shame me one with the universe and all that is morally righteous! @Playniax What is that even supposed to mean? You want the site to just *poof* away? You of all people who drove you sales on the back of these products...hmm? Oh well, I never bought your stuff anyways, as I knew how to do all of it myself. As for an update: About 80% done now. It's just so slow since I implemented the speed reduction system. It would have had them done 6 or so hours ago if I hadn't implemented the slow downs. Monkey is 100% done, but I have to reconstruct the forum structure. I'm not going to be done for a few days after this initial bit. Note: I also just woke up from a nap and my program did not alert me to any changes, so skid is either asleep, gave in, or is "allowing" it as long as it's going at the speed it's going at right now. Can't really tell which. |
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| As a long-time Blitzer, I came here to check it out for when the "proper" site closes. This is the first time I've been here in years as I've always favoured Blitzmax. And what thread do I stumble upon first? This. Comments like "I'm going to be a jerk to the end" are about as juvenile as it gets. I've used Blitz for 17 years and seen many people like you come and go, and to be honest, I'm just too bloody old now to be dealing with forums and "internet people" any more. I left bb.com for two years cos of this sort of egotistical cockwaving and childish crap so I'm buggered if I'm going to voluntarily sit myself down in the middle of this lot. If you're going to act like a petulant toddler, knock yourself out - it reflects on no-one but you. But do try to stop by a full-length mirror and take a long hard look at yourself, and don't start moaning when another forum/community (whichever you prefer to call it) is dead and buried. Because it's your fault. And that's that, I guess. Um.... ciao. |
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| @GfK Oh no, a "grown up" pretending that he's more mature and better than everyone else because he's refraining from behaving a certain way. Alright. That's your choice buddy. Keep lying to yourself and everyone around you if you want. I am an ass, I am acting immature, and I am proud of it. I didn't stop being who I was just because I went into adulthood years ago. This situation required that I act without hesitation and skid decided to go after me in a childish manner with the abuse report to the wrong ISP, so yeah, I'll sink down to that level as well. You should note, that throughout my time on the forums, I don't think I did anything like this at all. I was quite polite and responsive. Once again, this situation is what created this. Also, I've been hanging around Blitz since long before you ever knew who I was. I had old copies of Blitz shared with me before I ever purchased them. I used to go through the forums way back. I've been here for about 15 years, minus that 1 year. So go get drunk and hate your life somewhere else. As a note to anyone else, I talked to my brother and mentioned this all to him. Not only did he nail that I would react like this once the abuse report was forwarded to my email from skid, but he predicted I would use my ego to derail the conversation into talking about me and the backup. Damn he's good. He does know me well when I'm experiencing euphoric mania. Due to this particular point though, I'm going to refrain from any more posts that derail the thread (after this one obviously). I'm going to stick to releasing it on Skype. |
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| You seem very angry and that's no good for you. You should go talk to somebody. |
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| You seem very angry and that's no good for you. You should go talk to somebody. Once again, I'm attempting to not derail this further, but you temped me and I'm still quite energized. First, I'm not angry, I've actually been on a euphoric mania phase for about 5 days and I've slept about 10 hours in the last 5 days. It's been magical and sensational. Second, I take 6 medications every morning for schizoaffective disorder, bipolar depression, OCD, and atypical autism. If anything, I'm much better than if I wasn't on my meds. I've been told that I make people want to kill themselves when I'm massively down. At least with this you only really want to get rid of me and not feel bad about yourself (maybe). I call that an improvement. Thirdly, I'm damn near done with the database. It's at 92% of BB forums. So, that's pretty cool. Lastly, don't tell me what to do. I talk to people if I want. In fact, I've spoken to 4 different people today already. 2 seemed to get a kick of out me being an ass, 1 was indifferent, and the other one simply gave me the expected response of them not understanding why I act like this sometimes. All-in-all I'd say I'm socially healthy for someone with multiple mental illnesses. Edit: Agh, it took me too long to write this response. Third point is actually 93.164313518811313602026758388579% complete Edit to below response (as I don't want to derail further, I'm serious): GfK seems a bit confused to me. I'm afraid I don't believe in the idea of demons. I don't consider my mental illness or any way I've acted here as demons. It's me, pure and simple. I am who I am and nothing else. Also, I mainly wanted to say, 96.395846624689097852116908453765% complete now (This is nerve racking as I just want to know that it's done!) --------------------------- To clarify to Blitz and Mark, I appreciate what you guys have done over the years. I honestly wouldn't have gotten into doing games if not for the simplified way it was presented to me when I was young. So I'm not doing this to be mean. I'm not intentionally wanting to cause problems. I just don't trust that I'll see results in a way that I expect with Blitz's track record. So you'll have to excuse me as I carry on. At least I'm not aimlessly acquiring files like Yue is. Yue should really stop as HTTrack doesn't know how to handle sites that use queries very well. If you have "posts.php?topic=12934" and "posts.php?topic=12934&page=3", it wouldn't know that they're the same. Same with things like "posts.php?page=3&topic=12934" and "posts.php?topic=12934&page=3". It would download two separate files. ---------------------- UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE! I have completed it 100%! Now just wait for me to get it all structured together and I'll release it in a few days. https://join.skype.com/OD0rfhKvdLYK @Xaron Looks like Germany won this one. This also sums up my feelings about this whole ordeal: https://youtu.be/b0f2V_Jpbv4 -------------------- I was done talking about skid and all, but then I stumbled upon this: http://www.monkey-x.com/Community/posts.php?topic=12834&page=1 | Okay, now I see. skid has a god complex and is easily threatened when he's not treated as such. Narcissism seems to be a good description for this issue. Good to know. Welp, I'm done here. I don't plan to update this post or post anything else on this forum. See you all later! Go to my website or Skype in a few days to see if I've released anything (assuming Blitz doesn't release one themselves. Obviously, if they do, you are free to ignore me :D -- P.S. I think I'm going to go start my own Monkey 2 competitor for fun. I sure did enjoy making MCNE.) |
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| Oh I'm not telling you what to do. I just thought it might help. We've all got our demons - other people don't know, don't care, or just don't understand. And I think we'll leave it at that. |
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| Popcorn anyone! :D |
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| BB forums are gone already. I guess 'end of the month' is the new 'less than 24 hours'. 20 years of game development discussions and useful sourcecode gone in a flash.. I guess there's always http://blitzbasic.ga to fall back on |
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| So Blitzbasic.com Community is already gone. Oh well. Good bye then here as well... Official Gallery are moving to github. https://github.com/nitrologic/gallery Official Code Archives are moving to github. https://github.com/nitrologic/codearchives |
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| Don't get me started again, but after calming down yesterday I'm quite angry again. 1 day (ONE!!!) after the announcement you've pulled the plug for a community that was still very active for over a decade without further notice? Seriously? |
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| Of course Simon blames someone else. The only one to blame is Simon himself. But what to expect from a man that thinks he is above of everone else by calling the blitz crowd "code illiterates". I guess Mark doesn't see who made him that "big". Who helped him growing his languages to the status they had. It is always a community, it was its users. Without them, there is nothing but a lonely bedroom coder among millions. A sad sad individual. But then again, he showed countless times and over many years that he gave a flying rats ass about his user base and has surounded himself with people of the same mindset. If you guys need a new home, use http://www.syntaxbomb.com please. After all it was there BEFORE YUE tried to jump on the bandwagon. |
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| Yeah SyntaxBomb seems to be a good alternative indeed. |
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| @Xaron: http://monkey2.monkey-x.com/forums/topic/maybe-we-should-give-up-on-the-blitzmax-crowd/ I 'hinted' at Mark a few times the same thing. There was a strong anti BRL sentiment going on and yesterday some of the 'less then stellar' individuals were going rampant not respecten warnings from Skid. I did not like going to the Blitz forums for some time anymore because of these people. If they would have shown some restraint and maybe respect it would have made it until the end of the month. I think Mark just hit the kill switch and I think it is a wise decision. I would have done it a lot earlier though! It's mx2 now all the way, like it or not! |
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| Well look Tony, I think differently here. You know, as long as people complain there's still interest in a product. Every complaint is actually gold. When nobody complains it's much much worse because then nobody cares anymore. Communication is the key - always! Killing communities by just pulling the plug doesn't make products better nor do people move to Monkey 2 because of that. Don't get me wrong, I think Monkey 2 is awesome (beside the non existing documentation and awful IDE) and I wish Mark all the best. It's just a bitter pill. You cannot demand respect, you have to earn it. |
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| I don't know, Brexit, Trump, Hung UK parliament and now BB forums gone... need to find a good spot for my bomb shelter/ |
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| as long as people complain there's still interest in a product Maybe, but the way you compain is important. |
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| Don't worry. People will vote with their money, they won't forget. |
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| As I understand it, all the BRL sites are on the same server (on the basis that if one goes down, they all do). I can't imagine bb.com traffic being anything more than "trivial", so it doesn't make a ton of sense to me why the bb.com forum would be closed. Server still needs paid for to keep the monkeyx2 site going, right? |
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| GfK, that's just something personal I guess. Costs are no real argument nowadays when it comes to hosting. |
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if you love them let them go..... |
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| @Supertino: LOL. But yes. After I saw the nuking of the BB forum, I did that instandly. |
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| Sad news, the blitzbasic forum has been around almost since i got a pc. |
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| You may thank skid for that rapid move. I guess Mark even did not notice (and don't care). |
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| Same as Smilertoo, actually. I didn't own a PC til 1998 and bought BlitzBasic as soon as it was released in 1999. Made Hole in One on it. Cyrix 233MHz CPU! \o/ |
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| @Gfx - similar story, held on to my Amiga until about 1998 then no choice but to go PC, first game released to shareware sites a year or so later using Blitzbasic was a sokoban clone, learned years later when I found it on an old CD the .exe has some kind of virus. doh! |
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| My first Blitz product which I bought was Blitz3D, then BlitzMax. On my Amiga I used AMOS back then. |
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| Also used AMOS. I started playing with BlitzBasic2, just as the Commodore/Escom/Gateway thing was kicking off. |
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| Ok guys, I set up a monkey discord channel for those who are interested: https://discord.gg/x6eyYF Just click, and you are in! (get discord first: https://discordapp.com/) Discord is a chat app similar to slack/skype, just way better ^^ |
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| Join the discord server even if you don't intend to use it right away!!! |
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| From Mark on the MX2 forum: Besides, IMO the future of monkey2 is really going to depend on whether or not we can make an impact on the *current* generation of indie game coders (and whatever blitz may be, current it is not), many of whom have c#/java etc backgrounds and I think will ‘get’ monkey2 a whole lot better. This is NOT a good sign for those who will keep up with MX2. Why - WHY - would someone choose MX2 over something like Unity or Unreal? (Since MX2 will have 3D, that's the true competition). And then, a couple of years from now, if Mark decides the impact wasn't what he was expecting... another language? Another community split? I understand (albeit I do not like it) not maintaining BlitzPlus, Blitz3D, BlitzMax and even Monkey. Shutting down those sites (and keeping MX2 one, which looks way more crude than those) - will hurt. Its losing already stablished sites, web traffic and so much more... would make more sense moving everyone back into blitzbasic.com. And betting to get "more reach" under those circunstances, just don't seem something possible to me. All in all, I'm sad this is happening. Long time a fan of Mark's work - even tried to advertise Monkey as much as I could... oh, well. |
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| Monkey2 needs a proper native light weight but feature rich context sensitive IDE to attract the Unity and other coders, it also needs a webpage that is more than a forum page. I support Monkey2 on patreon but I have not used it as TED is simply not good enough, there are a few alternatives by the community but I personally need BLIDE or Jungle level of features, at bare min, function folding, intellisense & auto complete. It's too late address the name "monkey" but that's another issue that has always rubbed me wrong, why Mark didn't go with something like 'BlitzPro' or 'BlitzFusion' to maintain brand recognition is beyond me, just ended up splitting an already shrinking user base and here we are axing off limbs left and right to stay afloat. Anyway thats my rant, not like BlitzMax wont run anymore so as long as we can get access to the forum archive I'll stick around, but Monkey 2 needs to improve the basics before I can consider that. |
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| Monkey 2 is already on a new site on a new server: http://monkeycoder.co.nz/forums/topic/welcome-to-the-new-monkey2-site/ So prepare for a possible shutdown of monkey-x.com, monkey2.monkey-x.com and blitzbasic.com |
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| ...not like BlitzMax wont run anymore... Next year on OSX you will see that it won't. Only 64 bit then. |
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I'm saddened... |
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| So .... good bye to my fun with monkey :( Thank's for many guys that help me for years and to Mark :) Ciao!!! |
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| Well, it won't be disappearing! |
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| Not unexpected news. Without wanting to get involved in the crap flinging I would ask for a dump of the forum posts though. There's a ton of example code and Q&A stuff in here that would be of great use to anyone wanting to keep using Monkey. Not doing the bare minimum of simply publishing a zipped archive seems a little spiteful to those future users and to the efforts some of us made to actually create a body of knowledge about the product. |
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| It's been stated on the Monkey 2 forum that read-only mirrors will be made available. |
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| Ah good. Thanks. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that BRL's habit of avoiding responding directly to questions/requests in the place where they're put continues. |
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| At the blitzbasic.ga forums there is a torrent link to an almost complete copy of the old sites data. 2gb or so. |
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