Hello all,
We regret that we have to pass along some very bad news to all of you: we are going to have to put the production of Sable and our first game--Crimson Eclipse--on hold. Without going into excruciating detail, we have discovered that BGT has an inherent issue with memory management, in other words, memory leaks. This memory issue isn't as noticeable in most games created using BGT, given that they don't require large amounts of data to be saved/loaded into/out of RAM using the scripting language's built-in memory management functions. On the other hand, game projects created using Sable are not hard-coded, but are frequently reading/writing to numerous external data files. This difference in process is where BGT's memory management functions do not work properly and why we have the potential for severe memory leak issues. After some investigative tinkering with Sable's source code our programmer Paul was able to optimize the application a little. Unfortunately, the optimizations just weren't enough. Since the memory issues are inherent to BGT itself and not Sable, no matter how much we optimise, they cannot ever be completely overcome. During our team meeting on 1 February, we discussed our best course of action. After some soul-searching, we decided that we needed to suspend all operations on both Sable and Crimson Eclipse. We do not want to release a product that has the potential to crash any of your computers. If someone did that to us, we'd be pissed and want to go running for the torches and pitchforks. We decided, that no matter how painful and soul-destroying it is for us personally, we will not release any sort of commercial product written in BGT. At the moment, we have decided to step back for a little while and catch our breath. We need to give ourselves time to recover and think things through before we decide on our next course of action. We still want to create both quality developer tools and games with those tools, but we will need to reconsider our approach. The good news is that we learned a lot over these many years that we worked on Sable and Crimson Eclipse. We know what, and what not, to do in the future and have a better understanding of how not to make a nonsense out of this. So don't count us out of the game yet. After some additional back-and-forth, we decided that we will release the current build of Sable but only for a limited 8 week period, similar to what we did when we released the public beta in 2020. We appreciate this isn't a perfect solution, but we know many of you were keen to try Sable and We didn't want to deny you that opportunity. Furthermore, we are hoping that any of you that do want to play around with this proof-of-concept version of BGT Sable can pass along any suggestions that you think we ought to consider for a new version of the application. Again though, we need to emphasize that this version of Sable has those memory leak issues, so use at your own risk, also any projects created during the release will be lost and unusable after the 8 week period. the link can be found at the bottom of the post. We want to conclude this message by repeating our apology to all of you who have been waiting for us to put out Crimson Eclipse and/or the public release of Sable. We accept the fact that many of you will be sad, disappointed, pissed off or some combination of those emotions. We are prepared to take it on the chin, but we do hope that you will not lose your trust in us. Ebon Sky Studios exists to serve the community-that's all of you-and without that community, we are nothing. Sable download link below, please read the full details on the download page before running Sable: https://ebonskystudios.com/download-sable-demo/ The Ebon Sky Studios Team: Paul Lemm - Programmer Justin Jones - Game Designer Thaddeus Podtepa - Game Designer Brian Fairbanks - Sound Designer Kelly Baughman - Volunteer Project Manager -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#124529): https://groups.io/g/blind-gamers/message/124529 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/88932762/21656 Group Owner: blind-gamers+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/blind-gamers/leave/607459/21656/1071380848/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
