Okay now. I'm approaching my fourth year of being a verger here. It's been about three years since my last public demo.

Why? Well, mainly because I didn't want to release another demo. I wanted my next release to be the full game.

So... Four years. You'd think that'd be enough time. What happened? Some of it was life taking time from development. It happens.

But some of it is that since v2's disastrous release (which I had no small part in disatering, mind you. But's that's a different story), we've gone through a new engine every 6 months. A new unstable flavor, with more features. New functions without much documentation or examples. And with each flavor, a new smoke-and-mirrors promise for a new engine.

And so it goes. Everyone always waiting for the 'new release' that'll make everything better. Each release not being complete. Engine coders come, engine coders go. Same dance.

Not that this is all the engine coder's faults. Everyone whom didn't ever release *anything* because they were 'waiting' are just as bitch-like. Without seeing anyone excited to use the product, really, would you want to code the grinding, mundane parts of an engine? Interest is a mutual thing. The Engine Coders generally did so because they wanted to see games.

Hell, I want to see games. Don't you?

Well, the engines kept coming. Revision and revision and revision. Nothing ever complete. Occasionally large parts would be ditched. This last time, everything was ditched and recoded. And the syntax all changed.

I was fine with this. Because the_Speed_Bump was promising to complete the engine. Of course, everyone was intending to. Only, I actually believed Bump.

It's funny. Anyone around when vecna was still the active 'V' in VERGE knew a little gaming community that was really quite fun to be in. There was nary a month when there wasn't a new little demo. Mind you, these aren't the short 'demos' that show off a special effect like you might see these days. These were little beginnings to amatuer console-Style RPGs! 15 to 60-minute-long freeware RPGs!

And some were even fun!

Now, we still have them. Slower. Fewer between. Much smaller community. Much fewer games. Not gaining newbies much at all, and when one's intrested enough to try, they're heckled by the masses of 'vergers' who've never really made games. Because they're waiting.

And, really, this last point is what annoys me. nearly zero growth. It used to be hopping because there was always new blood checking it out, and for every hundred that downloaded some games and thought it was neat, maybe we'd pick up one or two who'd give an effort enough to release something. Growth is important. New people are important. It keeps things intresting, dammit.

The question becomes: Why has growth stopped? Well, there's a few reasons. The main one is that there's no real unifying demo/tutorial/documentation like verge1 had. This is no new news. Most everyone who remembers knows this. Still, it's no less true. Without a common, well-formed and easily accesible entry point into the system, you will not catch any new flies.

I miss the flies.

Anyway... I believed Bump when he said he would finish v27 as it stood. I believed him when he said vc would have structs and multidim arrays. All these candy-corn wonderful things we've always wanted. I, and many of you believed. I was working with Bump, trying to piece together some user-end tools to provide the missing newbie techDemo and documentation. Praetor was good enough to start recoding v27's vc parser to make structs possible, and to allow error-reporting to be better than a 'the bug is in the general vicinity of this line' message.

I put in a lot of time. So did Praetor. And god knows tSB put in a hell of a lot of time. And for the first time in quite a while I was excited about VERGE again. And I was actually doing things.

And then, Bump did what everyone else has before. I have come to loathe the phrase "But I can make it so much better, if I just restart". It's always true, too. Everyone doing a project this size will naturally learn from it, to the point that near the end, they'll always want to redo it.

All programmers do this, unless said programmers are gibbering morons. Morons wouldn't've gotten as far as each of the Engine Coders have in turn. However, inertia and entropy, not to mention disgust at 'old code' have claimed each one in turn. Vecna himself will admit that v1 'wasnt pretty'. But it was a learning experience. Over the years, he's done many projects, and gotten better after each one. He can now code your ass into the ground. Even if you have a *really big ass*.

But, all this time, we haven't needed the 'next best thing' or the 'cool new spin'. We just needed the old crappy code that was complete. Some people think v2 failed because it was too flexible, and want v1's rigid lines back. I thnk v2 is fine, and just needed stability and some standard libraries to go along with a standard packin, so every new verger could start with baby-steps into the world of bigger and better scripting.

So v27 was going to be stable. And better. And everything we always wanted. Until, that is, Bump decided that he could do bigger and better things. A quick paraphrase of "But I can make it so much better, if I just restart", and he's switching out vc for Python.

And, you know, I've always heard good things about Python. And it's always intrested me to a degree, but I havent really had the time to invest in learning new languages for fun. And I'm sure it'd be a wonderful replacement for vc in the long run.

But I really don't care anymore.

Because the engine coders always quit at 80%-done. And I'm not going to hold my breath another few months to watch this little morality play occur again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the ninth time, I'm ready for a lobotomy.

I just wanted a single engine completed. I believed it would be the engine known as v2.7. I hedged my bets, invested my time, defended it's coder against attacks by people I rather trust, because I believed he'd go the distance.

But Bump's stopped working on vc, and is so enamored with python now, that he's switching brands. In the face of almost *all* of the community. Which I'm amazed of. And he continues because he believes he's right that python is better than vc. And he is right. because Python is what we call a 'complete scripting language'. VC, for references sake, has never been fully completed.

But it's not the point that it'll be better. The point is, I for one am tired of waiting for the white-knight coder to magically finish the product. When I started investing my recent free-time in the little endeavor of making newbie-friendly goods, I made a little vow. So, this really isn't a 'brief moment of anger'. This is me keeping a promise.

So, if Bump insists on changing to Python, I insist on quittin' VERGE. I mean, really. You all understand. I've been working on the same project for four years. It's full of old code and old art...

I can make it so much better, if I just restart.

:P

Bump has until tomorrow to stick to his original intent and do what no other man has done yet. After then, I have over 30 megs and a thousand man-hours of maps, vsps, chrs, music, plot scripts, battle system documents that bloody need a new home. Or a recycling bin. Or whatever.

Good night.

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Sometimes, Ocham's Razor needs to be more like a scimitar...

I've been around since the beginning and I always remember VC. I mean, lately it has morphed into a hideous monster with a zillion faces - one of them a certain blue smiley face - but I still have fond memories of making fun of my brother's best effort of MDF, which had a lot more potential then most people bothered to think, and putting together the occasional short demo in thirty minutes.

Although those days are gone now, as are the days of inlink, vecna, the Verge Repo, and Locke, changing to Python is still a very bad choice. tSB has done a lot, but changing to Python will destroy 5-6 years of coding on vecna's part and it will also destroy VERGE. The whole allure of VERGE was that someone bothered to make their own scripting language for it, showing that it was supported by dedicated people.

Changing VERGE over to Python would take away the feeling, the _adventure_, of coding a new VERGE game with no outside support. Python is too popular; too many people know it. It just wouldn't be the same.

I hope that someone agrees with me here but sometime between the "Changing" and the "same" in the last paragraph I lost my train of thought.. whatever.

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OK, let me get this straight. You want to keep VC because:

- It's what they used in the good-old days.

- It's unpopular.

- It's hard to program in.

- It's fun to watch others struggle to code in it.

People, these are BAD reasons to keep VC. In fact, they are generally good reasons get rid of it. If the whole world felt this way, we'd all still be programming in COBOL. VERGE is supposed to be a game development tool, not some masochist fantasy or programmer hazing ritual.

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v1 and v2. Anyone who says anything past v2 (or anything hicolor or windows) works is overlooking some problems. You're point that there are working versions of verge is still true, though.

For all of McGrue's reasons and a lot of dissatisfaction on my own part, I have always coded in v2. The only port I EVER made was from one complete engine to another v1-v2. If 2.7 was completed as I expected, then I may have converted. If it won't be as I expected (which is the way it's looking) then I will stick with v2.

Grue, if I were you, I would make SotS in v2. What are you losing? Hicolor? From what I saw of your game you didn't need it. And you're point abouting restarting projects is very true - that's what happened to Sphere (although it is STILL slated to be finished before being abandoned).

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More and more people will be unable to play it.

All versions before v2.6 don't work in Win2k, so that eliminates a growing portion of VERGERs (tatsumi and myself included)

Now, I don't know about you, but I'd say that one of the developers not being able to develop it because of compatibility issues is not good form for a game.

v2.6 works in Win2k, but it's so buggy that it's useless to develop for.

v2.7 was the promise of a solution...

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Praetor - Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.

Why would you tell him to use VEW2.0 if he quits VERGE?

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Praetor - Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.

and that's a very important issue with me when I really get to thinking about it. But the way I see it is that when my game is finished (in v2 as is) THEN I can port it to windows somehow pretty easily. Or someone else can if I die. :)

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You can just shut up. Have you ever, EVER made a game in Verge that did well? No? Then just shut up.

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