what do you think. any theory

[magic]

Why there are huge people using monkeyx when it's close source and not free. Then when it open source and free, people are gone ;(

 

[dawlane]

Why there are huge people using monkeyx when it's close source and not free.

MonkeyX didn't have that much of a following. Mostly because it wasn't BlitzMax. And then, BlitzMax NG from what I can gather is starting to suffer the same fate.

Then when it open source and free, people are gone ;(

Because people moved on to something that better fitted there needs, or had a much larger following.
And then:

• There's not enough people to update the sources with the changes that keep happening with operating systems and tool chains. Or there's bugs that still haven't been fixed and may require a lot of effort to fix. And these people have jobs of their own, so can only spare so much time on it.
• Those that were using MonkeyX couldn't write code in the native format that each targets build system needs, or haven't the knowledge to set up the build environment to build the sources from scratch. So they have to wait for those mentioned above to do the work for them. And by the time that happens they've lost interest and moved onto Godot or Unity.

 

[Wingnut]

I'm sure there are many factors, one is psycological.. no activity on the forum makes people think its dead.

Demos are really old and i am afriad that is what newcomers will see, not a good represenartion of how powerful Cerberus-X is.

Also like Dawlane said above, people might have ideas in mind and might miss certain fetaures which means that Native code needs to be fulfilled somehow. Either by the crew or by other people so there better be lots and lots of people around so at least someone knows how to fill in those gaps. I would call those features "killer features" and they don't need to be amazingly big or anything, but they need to exist.
These are probably the features that the examples should focus to show.

MonkeyX happened in a starving gamemaker era. We are not any longer in that position, and this will of course make it harder. Not that i think that CX would have any problem to be amongst the top 10. It's just the matter of packaging and showing of the right features togethr with having the right psyhcology. Sometimes free stuff are not considered as "good" as something you paysed a million bucks for. But that's how it is of course.

 

[Phil7]

I also think there were a lot of psychological or emotional reasons for not having a large community when Monkey X went OpenSource. The easiest explanation to me is that it failed as a business, certainly because of multiple bad decisions regarding the community and marketing. And at the time the captain left the ship i.e. opensourced it, all passengers were gone already.
The reason we are still with CX is that it is pretty powerful while certainly not well rounder around the edges. And my experience with it in the last two years have let me come to the conclusion that it is also capable of handling really large projects in terms of code base and in terms of the huge amount of available mobile devices.

 

[ddabrahim]

Just because something is open-sourced, it doesn't guarantee it is going to be updated and maintained.

When the developers dropped Godot and open-sourced it, the only reason people jumped on the wagon was simply because of the fact, at the time Unity, Shiva and Unreal was 3D only and not available for Linux and GameMaker was not free while Godot dropped out of the blue like a super hero just dropped from the sky that did support both 2D and 3D and also Windows and Linux and it was free to everybody, no strings attached. So it was the perfect free alternative especially to Linux users which I was using at the time and this is the no1 reason why I remember so well and why the release of Godot was so epic.

But for example when the Xenko game engines was dropped and open-sourced, because of the AAA 3D graphics, there was some whispering "unity killer, unreal alternative" but people didn't jumped because it was Windows only and by this time, Unity did support 2D and Linux and we also had Godot, Defold, CocosCreator, even GameMaker Studio had a free version around this time. So people didn't care that much. Being open-source and being free is not a big deal anymore and certainly no guarantee the project going to be maintained so people choose to go with more popular options instead. There is plenty to choose from and Xenko (now Stride) is still not very popular. Still 3D only, still Windows only, still have no terrain and the developers has no intention to create a new cross-platform IDE. When asked the answer is straight NO despite the fact there is plenty cross-platform GUI libs for C# and .NET and they had years to come up with something at least some plans but nothing. The answer is straight NO. (period)

Around the time of Monkey X I was way too focused on visual game makers like GDevelop, I honestly can't say why it failed but I can imagine something similar happened. Because it was dropped, people jumped from Monkey to XNA or MonoGame or LibGDX or AppGameKit maybe and they didn't looked back.

 

[MikeHart]

IMO it is what it is. People change so is the software environment. Before Martin came along with the proposal to create CX I was completely into AppGameKit. Even had a project going that was promising. At the beginning I was just doing the website and the forum for CX. When Martin left in 2018, I took on the development for CX because I didn’t want to let the community down.
I admit that since I took my second parttime job in 2021, there isn’t much time left in the day. So if people leave, I can totally understand.

 

[SLotman]

I'm still here and intend to keep going
Mostly using Cerberus-X for Windows/Android/html5 dev

(But yeah, I also have a new job, so time is scarse)