Hi, Definitely. I think people completely forget the fact BGT has a lot of the hard work done. If a developer has to write something like PB Streamway, for example, that's going to take time. DirectSound 8 is ok, but it has none of the features of Streamway like the support for compressed file types, sound encryption, and doesn't even have a way to load PCm wav files without you creating a wrapper class for that purpose. So right there the audio support in BGT is first rate, and better than DirectSound by itself. Another thing that most new BGT users probably don't understand is how much easier using it is compared to using C/C++ directly. For one thing you don't have to mess with pointers which are always something of a pain. Every pointer you asign you have to remember somewhere in your program to release/destroy it to free up that block of memory. Most people hear probably have no idea whatI'm talking about, but the lack of having to deal with pointers is a very good thing for new programmers. Also BGT seams to handle strings without worrying about unicode vs ascii code. that's a good thing, because a C++ application written for Windows generally gets pretty picky about string types. To pas an unicode string to a string constant you have to do something like LPWSTR strText = L"Hello world!"; which cconverts the words "Hello world" to unicode and stores it in the string constant strText. We don't have to worry too much about that in BGT which makes it much less confusing. Bottom line, some of these people really have no idea what they are talking about here. BGT is simple and easy to use which is worth its wait in gold right there. The builtin features and simplicity of the scripting language makes it a great tool to use for game development if you don't have the years of experience as a software developer that someone like me has. Then, as I pointed out before professional tools cost money. Visual Studio itself isn't cheep. Oh, there is the Express version, which is free, but it is also a very stripped down version lacking most of the features and tools you get with Visual Studio Pro. One of these additional tools you don't get with Express is Microsoft Advance Setup Installer which is really the best installation system for Windows. There is Dotfuscator which helps a developer protect his/her .NET applications from reverse engineering. On and on we can go. So if you want to develope a game right and have all the pro tools you are going to pay some serious big bucks for the tools, and still have to write your own game engine from scratch. It isn't worth it for someone who doesn't have that stuff to begin with.
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