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Well I have not been on here since last year patiently waiting to give time for more NPC's to be ready for Beta4 and the airship cannons are cool but I am still disappointing nobody is interested in creating Urchin, the remaining Hammer Bros and Beezo. Also I heard that Beta4 is now planned for the second quarter which I kind of expected and I would not be surprised if it's not even ready this year at the slow speed things are being added and how it seems like the few things holding back Beta4 never get solved. I am starting to wonder if the interest in this project is starting to fade away. I am not trying to start anything here but it gets frustrating when someone like myself who has such high hopes for this project comes back after several months and finds little has been accomplished with the project going off the claims sheet and this site. It's not even the holidays anymore and you are all still struggling just to add a few NPC's to the game. Some have been a WIP (Work in progress) for more than six months now. I mean how are we supposed to take this project seriously when it seems like the people working on it are not taking it seriously?
I will check the development blog right now but that to has probably seen nothing new since the last update several months ago and it seems like even the blog does nothing more than collect dust. This is very disappointing. You guys really need to put a little more time and effort into this project in my opinion.
Anyways good job on the small handful of things that was added in the last several months.
Teemster2 wrote:Well I have not been on here since last year patiently waiting to give time for more NPC's to be ready for Beta4 and the airship cannons are cool but I am still disappointing nobody is interested in creating Urchin, the remaining Hammer Bros and Beezo. Also I heard that Beta4 is now planned for the second quarter which I kind of expected and I would not be surprised if it's not even ready this year at the slow speed things are being added and how it seems like the few things holding back Beta4 never get solved. I am starting to wonder if the interest in this project is starting to fade away. I am not trying to start anything here but it gets frustrating when someone like myself who has such high hopes for this project comes back after several months and finds little has been accomplished with the project going off the claims sheet and this site. It's not even the holidays anymore and you are all still struggling just to add a few NPC's to the game. Some have been a WIP (Work in progress) for more than six months now. I mean how are we supposed to take this project seriously when it seems like the people working on it are not taking it seriously?
I will check the development blog right now but that to has probably seen nothing new since the last update several months ago and it seems like even the blog does nothing more than collect dust. This is very disappointing. You guys really need to put a little more time and effort into this project in my opinion.
Anyways good job on the small handful of things that was added in the last several months.
We have lives you know. And this game will not give anyone a dime unless they use it on their resume. So I say there is quite a lot of work for a project of this kind.
Teemster2 wrote:big wall of text that comes across as rather disparaging and back-handed
Okay.
So.
1) We've said it before, but this isn't a full-time job. It's a hobby project. Everyone on the dev team has their own projects and lives outside of SMBX2.
2) Those few things holding back Beta 4 are important and complicated tasks involving updates to the editor and further assembly hacks into SMBX 1.3 itself. We technically could release Beta 4 without them but it would have serious implications for usability, performance and backwards compatibility with 1.3.
3) Only a few members of the team (Rednaxela, Kevsoft, Wohlstand) have the expertise to work on those things. Said people, again, have their own lives to deal with, but they still get work in when they can.
4) Those of us working on NPCs and other Lua-side tech are different people from the ones working on the major stuff, and our work on the minor features generally doesn't have much of an impact on their work. We do occasionally ask Rednaxela to add a hook or some other hack to help with NPCs and stuff but said requests generally go to the bottom of his to-do list unless it's a quick, simple side thing for him to do while he's implementing something more important.
6) Rather than just popping in here once in a blue moon to rant about our progress, you could join the codehaus discord server to keep up with development. The main development channel is visible to everyone and there's a separate channel specifically for discussing SMBX2 with the devs.
SMBX 2 works really well with the added characters. However, whenever I use the default characters, my pc lags every 5 seconds. Is there a way that SMBX 2.0 will get rid of this lag in future versions?
Teemster2 wrote:I would not be surprised if it's not even ready this year at the slow speed things are being added and how it seems like the few things holding back Beta4 never get solved. I am starting to wonder if the interest in this project is starting to fade away. I am not trying to start anything here but it gets frustrating when someone like myself who has such high hopes for this project comes back after several months and finds little has been accomplished with the project going off the claims sheet and this site. It's not even the holidays anymore and you are all still struggling just to add a few NPC's to the game. Some have been a WIP (Work in progress) for more than six months now. I mean how are we supposed to take this project seriously when it seems like the people working on it are not taking it seriously?
I will check the development blog right now but that to has probably seen nothing new since the last update several months ago and it seems like even the blog does nothing more than collect dust. This is very disappointing. You guys really need to put a little more time and effort into this project in my opinion.
Anyways good job on the small handful of things that was added in the last several months.
I'm going to go at this at a bit of a different angle than Rocky and say directly that you're being utterly and unnecessarily rude.
Not only are you not following SMBX2 on Discord so you're not aware of the development going on, but you're making baseless claims. The people working on it aren't taking it seriously? Little has been accomplished? Only a handful of things have been added in the last several months? All very untrue. The thing that's holding back Beta4 mostly is a few backend issues that make less-than-desirable to release atm and very few people have the knowledge and ability to resolve them.
Also, saying that the devs need to put more time and effort into this is almost bordering on offensive imo. No one is getting paid for this and we're all doing it on our free time as a hobby. You have no idea how much time and effort people put into this and still make these claims
Teemster2 wrote:I will check the development blog right now but that to has probably seen nothing new since the last update several months ago and it seems like even the blog does nothing more than collect dust.
You can be more updated about SMBX2's progress here than in the development blog.
PixelPest wrote:That has nothing to do with it. Looks like you just don't have proper start positions placed and when SMBX2 extracted you somehow lost the sound files
I didn't create any battle mode levels. I thought 2.0 would at least come with the ones that all the other versions of SMBX have.
PixelPest wrote:That has nothing to do with it. Looks like you just don't have proper start positions placed and when SMBX2 extracted you somehow lost the sound files
I didn't create any battle mode levels. I thought 2.0 would at least come with the ones that all the other versions of SMBX have.
It's not broken, it crashed because there are also no battle levels present.
This has probably been asked before, but is there a specific reason why the next release will be called Beta 4 and not a release version of SMBX 2.0? Beta 3 already works like a charm and has next to no errors. I personally feel like SMBX has been losing steam lately, and having a new official version would give it a great boost. I'm obviously not aware of all the bugs and things that need to be dealt with on the development side. It's just that having "beta" in the name will turn off a lot of people from downloading and using the engine, especially outside of this forum where people are not aware why it's called beta. And creating episodes for an engine like that, you lose a lot of potential audience. On the other hand, creating episodes with a limited engine like 1.3 is not an encouraging thought either, so a lot of people interested in creating levels and episodes are currently facing a standstill.
Anyway, not a rant, just a question. Keep up the good work.
Reign wrote:This has probably been asked before, but is there a specific reason why the next release will be called Beta 4 and not a release version of SMBX 2.0? Beta 3 already works like a charm and has next to no errors. I personally feel like SMBX has been losing steam lately, and having a new official version would give it a great boost. I'm obviously not aware of all the bugs and things that need to be dealt with on the development side. It's just that having "beta" in the name will turn off a lot of people from downloading and using the engine, especially outside of this forum where people are not aware why it's called beta. And creating episodes for an engine like that, you lose a lot of potential audience. On the other hand, creating episodes with a limited engine like 1.3 is not an encouraging thought either, so a lot of people interested in creating levels and episodes are currently facing a standstill.
Anyway, not a rant, just a question. Keep up the good work.
The "beta" moniker is kept because there's no guarantee of full backwards compatibility with previous beta versions (besides 1.3). New features are undergoing revisions all the time, and we mark the version as "beta" to note that features may change in future releases. A good example of this is Juni's removal in beta 4.
That said, the "beta" label has put a few people off picking up the engine, so it's possible we may tweak the branding slightly, and release the next version as something like SMBX2b4, rather than explicitly plastering "BETA" all over it.
Reign wrote:This has probably been asked before, but is there a specific reason why the next release will be called Beta 4 and not a release version of SMBX 2.0? Beta 3 already works like a charm and has next to no errors. I personally feel like SMBX has been losing steam lately, and having a new official version would give it a great boost. I'm obviously not aware of all the bugs and things that need to be dealt with on the development side. It's just that having "beta" in the name will turn off a lot of people from downloading and using the engine, especially outside of this forum where people are not aware why it's called beta. And creating episodes for an engine like that, you lose a lot of potential audience. On the other hand, creating episodes with a limited engine like 1.3 is not an encouraging thought either, so a lot of people interested in creating levels and episodes are currently facing a standstill.
Anyway, not a rant, just a question. Keep up the good work.
The "beta" moniker is kept because there's no guarantee of full backwards compatibility with previous beta versions (besides 1.3). New features are undergoing revisions all the time, and we mark the version as "beta" to note that features may change in future releases. A good example of this is Juni's removal in beta 4.
That said, the "beta" label has put a few people off picking up the engine, so it's possible we may tweak the branding slightly, and release the next version as something like SMBX2b4, rather than explicitly plastering "BETA" all over it.
inb4 someone asks 'What does the "b" in smbx2b4 mean?' before downloading and is put off from downloading because someone answers their question.
Will probably get more people playing though, and therefore problems with PGE will reduce as a result.
Hoeloe wrote:
That said, the "beta" label has put a few people off picking up the engine, so it's possible we may tweak the branding slightly, and release the next version as something like SMBX2b4, rather than explicitly plastering "BETA" all over it.
inb4 someone asks 'What does the "b" in smbx2b4 mean?' before downloading and is put off from downloading because someone answers their question.
Will probably get more people playing though, and therefore problems with PGE will reduce as a result.
Here is the answer to that problem:
Call it SMBX 2.4. OR SMBX 2.0.4.
Hoeloe wrote:
That said, the "beta" label has put a few people off picking up the engine, so it's possible we may tweak the branding slightly, and release the next version as something like SMBX2b4, rather than explicitly plastering "BETA" all over it.
inb4 someone asks 'What does the "b" in smbx2b4 mean?' before downloading and is put off from downloading because someone answers their question.
Will probably get more people playing though, and therefore problems with PGE will reduce as a result.
Here is the answer to that problem:
Call it SMBX 2.4. OR SMBX 2.0.4.
I think there's not much we can do here ... we can't omit the beta labelling completely as long as it's not the final product, and also what Electriking said
