My A7 is still doing fine for the type of games I make.

My A8 is doing fine as well, except that my games won't run on Mac or Linux. A structural overhaul would likely make other changes easier to implement, including OpenGL.

Whatever comes after KarBOOM won't use GS if we don't get Mac and Linux support (or at least Mac, but you might as well do Linux while you're at it).

Right now I'm trying to keep my game logic independent of the engine. So far coupling another engine on my project works fine, so long it implements the same interface.

That makes sense. Everything I've been doing lately in KarBOOM I've been trying to do in such a way that it's easily portable to standard C/C++ for my custom engine in case I want to do similar things with my next project and we don't get cross-platform support.

What other engine have you been using?

Take this forum for example. This place use to be hopping. It was hard to keep up with all the posts. Sure, there's still a decent amount of posting going on, but it is nowhere near what it used to be. For example, the most popular place for posts was in Morbius. The place would overflow with posts. I have gone a good part of a weekend (recently) and seen zero posts ... 1 post, etc. That's it. It used to never be like that.

This place was crawling with activity. The engine was being worked on with fairly consistent updates. Users were pumping out work of all kinds and at all levels. Feedback (both good and bad) was flying. There was even a consistent amount of work (paid and otherwise) to be found in the jobs forums.

Now? The place feels like an old town that most people are leaving behind. I used to love to come here and used to check posts frequently, hourly sometimes. Now? I can go days and know I have not really missed anything.

Part of the blame, in my opinion, is the lack of development of this fantastic game creation engine.

I guess I am just getting old and longing for the old days.

the religious people have left. all the fun creationism threads were half of the forum activity.

I would be really interested in the actual user quantity of 3dgs, and in the ratio of free users, hobbyists and serious/professional users. the latter seems to be really low based on this forum activity, and on known projects released. but the sum also can't be too high, if I check my 3dgs related webpage traffic, the highest was 40 visit a day when I uploaded some free stuff (skies, trees, terrains), second best is 34 when I released MapBuilder in Dec, and only 17 when my work was mentioned in AUM in Oct.

And that's part of my concern, sivan. Years ago this forum rocked. People were posting like crazy (and it wasn't all by religious people ). There was a grand sense of helping one another out. People were posting screen shots almost all the time (several people with several screen shots on a daily basis). Code snippets were flying here and there. The place was hopping with 3DGS activity.

And as far as projects, professional, hobbyist, good, bad, etc, ... they seemed to be everywhere. People were pushing the software, bugging issues, discussing the ins and outs of 3DGS, and attempting to push the software where it hadn't gone before.

Now? This place is relatively dead.

Personally, I think some of this has to do with the slower development of the software and less visibility by Conitec on the forum. This forum, as ugly as it is (and it's always been ugly, imo), was active with people who both used and did not use 3DGS. Many who did not use 3DGS bought the software as a result of the activity they saw going on in this forum.

Does anyone here remember when Caligari created GameSpace? They chose to support 3DGameStudio (and even GameStudio's outdated MED file file formats). Why? According to Caligari, GameStudio was the most used, most popular game engine out there available for indies. There's no way this could be the case now.

So why/how did Conitec drop the ball? Did they lose interest? Did the new management (wasn't Conitec sold at some point in the last few years) decide to move in another direction? Or are the other engines (Unity, etc) just simply drawing away many 3DGS and potential 3DGS users?

Speaking of Conitec and its interest in its user base, the employees of Conitec used to frequent these forums and get involved in many ways. Marco, Doug, JCL ... they were there frequently answering questions and even getting involved in the mayhem that occurred in various threads (even starting some of the mayhem from time to time). That really made people feel connected with the company and, thus, with the software they produced.

Doug and Marco are no longer with Conitec. I don't personally come here as often, but I don't even know who the other guys are. And JCL? I rarely see posts from him (in comparison to how often he used to post).

JCL should have invested in at least one programmer who was 100% focussed on Gamestudio. The fact that there isn`t any development speed at the moment (and to be honest I believe that Conitec hasn`t even seriously started working on a new WED and the Android/Linux/Mac port) snaps the engine`s neck in my eyes.
Yes, you can achieve nice things with Acknex. And Süpercan is a real project. Cool things are possible. But I`m sure that with Torque 3D or maybe Unity (I havn`t experience with Unity) many people could have achieved so much more on their current knowledge level.
The truth is: To make really great, modern things with Acknex on a professional level you need to be a both a professional programmer and designer. You must know how to efficiently program shaders, how to program your own collision system better than the one from Gamestudio, how to program your own MDL-exporters for your tools, pathfinding, physics plugin extensions, advanced user interface solutions, maybe some ingame editor functionalities, and other stuff while comparable engines come with a WYSIWYG editor, a shader editor, working direct model importers, a better collision system, a pathfinding solution, advanced physics plugins and much more. And they come with an open forecast list and things like editor stuff is widely discussed.

The sad thing about this is that we had many good community solutions for missing features. But Conitec isn`t interested in supporting them and/or making them official. Intense Pathfinding was a good and working pathfinding solution with user interface extension for WED. The project is dead.
Shade-C could have been so much more and comes with "make your shader" functionalities. Project is as good as discontinued.
The Newton-Wrapper used to be great, too.
The Blender exporter.
And there`s so much more.

Garage Games with the Torque engine for example activly supports user projects. Some of them even can be downloaded on the Torque homepage for some money and are officially supported.

I like Gamestudio. I really do. But if Conitec continues like this, I don`t see the old days coming back.