Hi Shane,
Thanks for the email, this is actually something which has come up and been
requested a lot on the forum. As I mentioned there, our key reason for stopping
development on the current build of Sable is that we didn’t want to put a
substandard product with known bugs out in the audio games community. I think
its important to remember that although Sable is feature complete, its not a
finished product, it still needed fine tuning, tidying up the rougher edges and
since it was only in its beta development stage there may be minor bugs too.
Allowing the current build to stay active after the 8 weeks would defeat the
reason we decided to stop work on the current build, since that would leave a
product of ours out in the community which wasn’t up to the standards of
software/games we want to produce. the last thing we want to do is clutter the
audio games community with potentially incomplete games or games with known
problems/issues.
The purpose of the 8 week trial wasn’t for people to try and build a
fully-fledged game during that time, but more as an opportunity for anyone who
wanted to try out Sable. This is now more just a proof of concept demo that
people can play around with for a short time period if they wish, giving them
an opportunity if they want to give feedback on what they liked or disliked and
to give possible suggestions which might then help shape projects we make in
the future.
Paul
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Shane
Davidson via groups.io
Sent: 06 February 2022 13:30
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [blind-gamers] Important information about the future of Ebon Sky
Studios, Sable and Crimson Eclipse
Paul,
Might I suggest you re-think the making things expire?
Because people might develop things, and maybe just make it so that it
indicates this was built with an engine that was abandoned, and your not
responsible for the engine and it's fitness.
------ Original Message ------
From: "Ebon sky studios" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> >
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Sent: 2/6/2022 4:24:22 AM
Subject: Re: [blind-gamers] Important information about the future of Ebon Sky
Studios, Sable and Crimson Eclipse
Hi enes saribas,
Regarding your question about memory, the issue is less noticeable on
machines with a lot of RAM to spare. However, even though it is less of an
issue if there is RAM to spare, the issue is still there and potentially anyone
running a PC with low amounts of RAM, or other process’s taking up a lot of
RAM it has the potential to cause issues, which is the main reason we decided
to stop development on the current build, since we didn’t want to put out a
substandard product or a product which we knew had issues, especially issues
like memory which could cause crashes.
Paul
From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of enes
saribas
Sent: 06 February 2022 01:37
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [blind-gamers] Important information about the future of Ebon Sky
Studios, Sable and Crimson Eclipse
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] <mailto:[email protected]>
On Feb 5, 2022, at 12:20, Ebon sky studios <mailto:[email protected]>
<[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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