Oh man, that's a rough break! Thanks for the transparency. Here's hoping
that the team can regroup and find a way forward.
All my best to everyone who's invested effort,
Scott
On 05/02/2022 17:20, Ebon sky studios wrote:
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
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