Re: please send me bgt.exe
@11, um... Phillip did say to stop using BGT. I quote, from the very post:
After a lot of consideration, I have decided to remove a few things from blastbay.com that I no longer maintain and/or support. BGT has been officially removed, and so has the game Palace Punch-up. I know that a lot of you are still using BGT, and while I am flattered, I do think it is time to move on to other languages and frameworks in order to take audio games to the next level.
That's pretty clear. The reason we have been pushing devs to move away from BGT is because most of us who were doing the pushing knew, years ago that this was going to happen.
Not everyone needs to learn about dependencies and libraries.
This is only true on a primitive level. Everyone has to deal with libraries and dependencies at some point. It is a truly inevitable thing. Ironcross32's statement is not presumptious whatsoever and I never got the impression that he expected anyone who wants to jump on the BGT bandwagon to 'make something great', as you put it. In fact, from his statement:
I get that with other languages, you have more to deal with as far as package management and dependencies and so forth, but that's what programming is, and if you aren't going to step up and take this on, then why exactly are you doing this?
I interpreted this as exactly what it means. If you want to make anything (i.e. a game even to tinker with) in any other programming language, you need to deal with dependencies and libraries. It is absolutely inevitable. If I want to play a sound in C I need to depend on the windows APIs and libraries. The same goes for quite literally any other language. Even PureBASIC (which hides a lot of that mess) forces you to depend on various libraries to get things done.
Most people who use BGT want to make a game. Even if they're tinkering, even if they're just doing it for fun and have no reason to make something great, they'll still end up making some kind of game. By continuing to use BGT, you are deliberately ignoring the dependency and library area, which will significantly hinder you when you do decide that its time to move onto Python or any other language. By impressing onto people that they should use a mainstream programming language like Python, we are not only preparing them for that dependency and library issue, but we're also preparing them for the real world because they will be familiar with a language that is deployed literally everywhere. It also has an absolutely massive community. BGT has none of that, and as time goes on, less and less people will use BGT purely because the developer has publicly discontinued it (and AV software still marks it as malicious). So, the community will shrink until there are hardly any people using it all and it will be even harder to get help at that point.
And, of course, I forgot until now that we're also preventing the AV issue too. No one will play a game if, when they download it and try running it, their AV program pops up and says "Hey, this is a virus!" No one is going to play a game if they have to go adding exceptions to their AV software just to play the game.
This is not just limited to BGT, either. This very same thing is happening to the Python community. Various projects have been backed by Python 2 for years, even decades. NVDA is a great example of such a project. Various parts of desktop environments on Linux are also fine examples of this. Only now, when Python 2 is officially being deprecated in January of 2020, are people finally making the change to Python 3. They know that, to continue using Python 2, they would not only be losing the support of the PSF but everyone else that has moved on. I like your idealism: let people use what they want to use. But while that's a great idea in theory, it never holds in reality. If we all did that, the internet would be about a million times more dangerous than it is. (I guarantee that if we didn't practically force people to upgrade to something better in areas like the security industry we'd still have businesses using DES.)
What this boils down to is simple: we get people to use better products -- newer ones, even -- because we not only want to help them, we want to be able to provide them with assistance and support when they come calling for it. If people remain on BGT, that ability goes away very, very fast, and before you know it, people will be asking questions about how to do X and Y in BGT and people won't be able to help them, or they'll only be able to help them by telling them to search the forum. Is that really something you want to happen?
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