Hi,
Would the memory leaks cause a large issue with Crimson Eclipse on
computers with large amounts of memory? Would you need to re-write the
game in another programming language?
On 2/5/2022 12:25 PM, Dakotah Rickard wrote:
Thank you, all of you, for your openness and honesty in confronting
these issues.
I know I am somewhat disappointed that a promising development tool
will now be suspended indefinitely.
On the other hand, the fact that you are taking a break, dealing with
the consequences, and making plans gives me confidence and hope.
All I would ask is that your team continues its work eventually. One
of the reasons there are so many games for the sighted community is
generalized engine development which people can rely upon to produce
games without reinventing the wheel every time.
Please don't allow yourselves to forget the encouragement and desire
of the community at large. You are wanted, your product is wanted, and
we have faith in you all to deliver.
Take your time to catch your balance, then run ahead with the same
zeal and promise you've shown for several years now.
I believe in you. We believe in you!
Thank you for all you have done and for all you will do in the future.
Dakotah Rickard
Phone: (336) 662-2423
E-Mail: [email protected]
On Feb 5, 2022, at 12:20, Ebon sky studios <[email protected]>
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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