^It's easy to talk about modernizing all of this, but it's not as easy to do it as you claim it to be. Time is also a factor, and Char, with all his skill that he has, didn't have the time, which is the reason why he sneaked away in the dark with no one noticing. He never officially left, which is why most of us were under the impression that he'd come back. All he said was that he needs more time to finish his studies and get his life in order, and it implied he'd be away for a year and then come back. He didn't come back.
Also for still sticking around here and doing the best we can to keep the place as alive as it can be even with the limited time we have on our hands, you have nothing better to do than to call us "not normal"? With that thinking I have to wonder how you expect your vision of a modern MFGG to ever happen, if everyone is just supposed to "move on" and leave everything behind.
As you have said, times have changed. As fangames get more and more too complex to keep being made by one person to keep up the interest of players, likewise a website that has to keep up with those modern standards is not as easy to write with the same manpower anymore either. Especially so, if an already existing code base, that was never designed for current times, is supposed to be modified. It makes me wonder how much experience you yourself have with the things you claim to be so simple.
The database system of a phpBB board is very complex, and the original software is developed by quite a number of people, all with professional skills, working on this thing for years. If you think any one of us people here on MFGG can just casually hack their completely own code to support a phpBB database over night, and while we're at it unify its user database with the mainsite and the wiki, you greatly underestimate this complexity.
RII back then took 1 year to write the current main site. A new version of a mainsite would require the same features and more, would have to keep up to a lot higher security standards as well as design standards and on top of all that has to be backward compatible with our old and outdated software. Modern tools have allowed us to create web systems in less time, but complexity and quality standards grow faster than the tools.
Fangaming in itself is a shrinking hobby. We're not getting less members because we're not good or modern enough, it's because there's no point in picking this up for the average person, when the alternative of going indie exists, that didn't exist when MFGG was founded. With the same effort that goes into making a fangame, you can also create an iOS or Android game and profit from it. So naturally, new people who are into programming, will go with that, and even if they make fangames they can still upload them for example at YoYo Games or other sites with far more professional websites than we can ever dream of. Fangaming is if anything a spring board into getting into programming without worrying about resources and a medium to express your fandom for a franchise, but it isn't what it once was.
The price of entry is also increasing. Both Game Maker and MMF/TGF, the tools that have made MFGG as big as it is, are now way out of reach for the average 13 year old kid to just mess around and start making fangames. And there are no tools that are as accessible to replace them. If someone wanted to get into fangaming these days I wouldn't even know what to recommend to them on how to get started.
The people who have been around since the beginning are by now so great at doing what they do that newcomers have absolutely no chance to ever compete with them. Back when I joined, I could write an engine better than most seen on MFGG within barely a year of using GM and get praised for it. Nowadays, a newcomer needs be on par with Psycho Waluigi or Midas Machine to even get a "Looks good" from our community that's used to everything. Meanwhile, the most simplistic experiences are praised to the heavens on casual mobile devices.
MFGG is, and hopefully will remain for a long time, that place where Mario fans and Mario fangamers can go to to work on and play Mario fangames. But it's an illusion to think we can keep up with the big players when absolutely no profit is possible to come out of what we do by definition and the competition within the field is so far ahead that newcomers are scared away.
So yeah, what will probably happen is that we keep trying to do our best, and add small things here and there where we can, and maybe get this MFGG3.0 finished sometime (I picked it up myself by now, and Kritter offered help too). But I wouldn't expect MFGG to be a pioneer in software development or web design anymore.
^It's easy to talk about modernizing all of this, but it's not as easy to do it as you claim it to be. Time is also a factor, and Char, with all his skill that he has, didn't have the time, which is the reason why he sneaked away in the dark with no one noticing. He never officially left, which is why most of us were under the impression that he'd come back. All he said was that he needs more time to finish his studies and get his life in order, and it implied he'd be away for a year and then come back. He didn't come back.
Also for still sticking around here and doing the best we can to keep the place as alive as it can be even with the limited time we have on our hands, you have nothing better to do than to call us "not normal"? With that thinking I have to wonder how you expect your vision of a modern MFGG to ever happen, if everyone is just supposed to "move on" and leave everything behind.
As you have said, times have changed. As fangames get more and more too complex to keep being made by one person to keep up the interest of players, likewise a website that has to keep up with those modern standards is not as easy to write with the same manpower anymore either. Especially so, if an already existing code base, that was never designed for current times, is supposed to be modified. It makes me wonder how much experience you yourself have with the things you claim to be so simple.
The database system of a phpBB board is very complex, and the original software is developed by quite a number of people, all with professional skills, working on this thing for years. If you think any one of us people here on MFGG can just casually hack their completely own code to support a phpBB database over night, and while we're at it unify its user database with the mainsite and the wiki, you greatly underestimate this complexity.
RII back then took 1 year to write the current main site. A new version of a mainsite would require the same features and more, would have to keep up to a lot higher security standards as well as design standards and on top of all that has to be backward compatible with our old and outdated software. Modern tools have allowed us to create web systems in less time, but complexity and quality standards grow faster than the tools.
Fangaming in itself is a shrinking hobby. We're not getting less members because we're not good or modern enough, it's because there's no point in picking this up for the average person, when the alternative of going indie exists, that didn't exist when MFGG was founded. With the same effort that goes into making a fangame, you can also create an iOS or Android game and profit from it. So naturally, new people who are into programming, will go with that, and even if they make fangames they can still upload them for example at YoYo Games or other sites with far more professional websites than we can ever dream of. Fangaming is if anything a spring board into getting into programming without worrying about resources and a medium to express your fandom for a franchise, but it isn't what it once was.
The price of entry is also increasing. Both Game Maker and MMF/TGF, the tools that have made MFGG as big as it is, are now way out of reach for the average 13 year old kid to just mess around and start making fangames. And there are no tools that are as accessible to replace them. If someone wanted to get into fangaming these days I wouldn't even know what to recommend to them on how to get started.
The people who have been around since the beginning are by now so great at doing what they do that newcomers have absolutely no chance to ever compete with them. Back when I joined, I could write an engine better than most seen on MFGG within barely a year of using GM and get praised for it. Nowadays, a newcomer needs be on par with Psycho Waluigi or Midas Machine to even get a "Looks good" from our community that's used to everything. Meanwhile, the most simplistic experiences are praised to the heavens on casual mobile devices.
MFGG is, and hopefully will remain for a long time, that place where Mario fans and Mario fangamers can go to to work on and play Mario fangames. But it's an illusion to think we can keep up with the big players when absolutely no profit is possible to come out of what we do by definition and the competition within the field is so far ahead that newcomers are scared away.
So yeah, what will probably happen is that we keep trying to do our best, and add small things here and there where we can, and maybe get this MFGG3.0 finished sometime (I picked it up myself by now, and Kritter offered help too). But I wouldn't expect MFGG to be a pioneer in software development or web design anymore.
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Guinea 2013 Reference (1) | 11 (1) | 10 (1) | 08/09 (1, 2) |
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