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Microsoft Kills Its Game-Building Platform Spark (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes:"Starting 5/13/16, 'Project Spark' will no longer be available for download on the Xbox Marketplace or Windows Store," Microsoft wrote in a blog post, adding that it will go offline for good on August 12th. They thanked fans who have "gone above and beyond supporting 'Project Spark' by uploading hundreds of thousands of creations and dreaming up millions of objects, behaviors, and experiences..."
Ars Technica remembered Spark as the free multi-device, build-your-own game platform that you never knew existed. "Marketing teams never effectively sold the possibilities and power of Spark's make-your-own-game system," reports Ars Technica. "While short teaser videos hinted at the game enabling everything from kart racers to airborne battles, major demonstrations tended to revolve more around generic 3D platformers.
Ars Technica remembered Spark as the free multi-device, build-your-own game platform that you never knew existed. "Marketing teams never effectively sold the possibilities and power of Spark's make-your-own-game system," reports Ars Technica. "While short teaser videos hinted at the game enabling everything from kart racers to airborne battles, major demonstrations tended to revolve more around generic 3D platformers.
No wonder they killed it.
Note to self, don't start a long-term indie game project on whatever Microsoft's next game dev platform is.
I guess Spark didn't catch on fire.
Now it's lost some of that punch.
A lot of VB6 programmers got shafted. And now spark.
The ability of vendors to "end of life" development languages is a huge risk.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Recently every single Microsoft's project is a total FAILURE.
The direction is already known and inevitable.
The only question is how will it end:
acquired for patent portfolio (sooner) or bankrupt (later)?
OK, Microsoft, it is now time to put your pathetic mobile platform out of its misery.
The Spark has gone out.
Microsoft kills itself
We all know ISO fast-tracked the MS Word pile of sh*t as a standard, but can we at least stick to there standardized date format?
(Yes, I know 2005 didn't have a 13th month.)
Used lot of hours to play with this. Great game. Would think that it would have been great tool for Hololens app development.
OK, I have to ask now. Does VB6 still work under Win10? I've seen it on Win7, but I'd thought *that* was the one where MS said 'no further support in new OSes'...
It was inevitable since Microsoft bought Minecraft.
Minecraft is a pretty horrible basis for further expansion, but maybe they'll fold some of these ideas into a future non-Java MC.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can we add a "SPAM" moderation choice, that would send an email/something to the Slashdot admins to manually review and remove the posts in question?
SPAM abuse could be controlled by freezing the account of anyone who falsely flags three things as SPAM.
Another nothing product pulled out from under the handful of users who don't know Microsoft's history with this sort of thing. Go Linux!
oh no, a programmer is expected to learn more than one language now? oh wait, that happens about every couple of years.... seems like that person has bigger problems if they feel they got shafted by VB6 EOL.
A hundred man-years of VB6 code is no small investment.
First they removed the posts from the spammers, but I didn't speak out because I was not a spammer, etc.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I mean I downloaded Conker when it was free and basically found the game unplayable it was so bad. After that I just figured anything else on it would actually be worse since that was supposed to be a killer app for that project.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Some of us read comments at -1 because some moderators seem to think that an opinion different from theirs warrants a "-1, Troll" mod.
Some -1 posts, however, really are spam. By allowing us to flag things as SPAM, it would automatically request a slashdot editor to verify the post to see if it's really SPAM or not.
For what it was and what it could do, it was pretty damn cool. Reasonably easy to use and intuitive, yet surprisingly complex. I really liked the landscape/morphing/modelling tools.
I think the problem was that people had to buy assets to do anything beyond the initial core group of stuff. The business model today that seems to work is: make it all free and people will use it, and take a percentage if they make money from it.
I'd be against removing, but flagging it as Spam and giving the user the option to not see items flagged as Spam by the moderators, that's something I could definitely see as a "do want" item.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fuck, where does that "of" come from? I honestly don't get it, I'm not a native speaker, so maybe someone could clue me in, why do people write rubbish like "would of been"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ok, but you have to admit, they didn't get shafted by removing but by inventing that language.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, assuming you are asking if the IDE runs and compiles. It is not supported however.
Windows 10 supports running vb6 apps too. I believe they have said they will support vb6 runtime until 2024 (end of windows 8 support?), and is one of those deadlines that seems to keep being extended.
Unfortunately Microsoft has discontinued support on many of the controls they provided back in the day.
This is actually very simple. These people grew up hearing "would've" and never realized what was really being said.
Why not just kill itself? The world would be a better place without this filthy, criminal company around.
Genius, it's not about knowing the language, it's that it is not even remotely backward compatible and the last version was released in 1998. All legacy code had to be rewritten for .Net.
English uses contractions for some words. "would have" can be shortened to "would've", which sounds like "would of". people get confused by this.
yep, and given it still runs and is supported today even on windows 10 that is pretty impressive support history for a dead product.
VB6 runtime is still supported today even on windows 10. you do not need to rewrite it for compatibility, you SHOULD rewrite it for security, performance, technology reasons though.
You must be new here. That would require the editors to actually do something; which is against the editor code of conduct.
Your best bet is to simply use whatever the professionals are using
That depends on what the console maker chooses to make available to developers at any given time. During the Xbox 360 generation, developers in the Xbox Live Indie Games program were required to use a different API from what the established studios were using, namely the C# language and the XNA library. (In theory, any language generating verifiably type-safe CIL targeting the .NET Compact Framework could be used, but in practice, the only usable language was C# because the XNA environment lacked other languages' standard libraries.) The requirement of C# made it far more difficult for an indie to make a game work on both Xbox 360 and any non-Microsoft platform without rewriting it by hand, as C# at the time was tied fairly closely to Microsoft platforms.
Your advice applies better nowadays because Mono is more feature complete (including the MonoGame reimplementation of XNA), and the multi-platform Unity 3D engine is popular, and essentially anyone with a Windows Store publisher account can make Xbox One games, even in C++, so long as they're ported to UWP.
Then spend one man-year writing a transpiler that turns VB6 code into something modern.
slashdot already censors articles. just go back and read any old articles from the past few weeks and you will notice huge amounts of comments have been removed. entire thread cease to exist leaving only the top 100 comments to read. fuck this site.
slashdot stealth censors already. they've been doing to for awhile. you just haven't noticed.
Did you try scrolling to the bottom and clicking "Load More Comments"?
"editor code of conduct" - LMAO, this site has been censoring comments for a very long time. just go back and look at any old post. at most you will see 100 comments and all of them are hand picked by the ethical coders of this site.
...How much time to DirectX?
vb6 was pretty much married to COM. It was the embodiment of the whole thing. That cluster fuck was an amazing PITA to deal with in any other language. The VARIANT type was an amazing catchall glue structure that VB6 hid from everyone. But in any other language it was front and center and showed off why COM sucked. If you used vb6 it was pretty much hidden and not that big of a deal.
The problem is all the 'cool' stuff was in COM. As MS promised 2 generations of programmers that it 'was the way'. Right up until they came out with .net and assemblies. Suddenly win32, COM, DLLS, and vb6 were all second class. Thousands of years of man work tossed. The IDE which was starting to actually be somewhat decent was thrown away and re-written. VS2002 was hot garbage compared to VS6. They have finally worked out most of the kinks. It only took them until VS2010 to fix it and actually produce the promise they made in 2001. VS2015 is actually looking interesting again.
My point? You probably could resurrect vb6 apps. But it would act 'oddly' for a long time. Eventually you would get it to work. The problem is you would be basically resurrecting a 15 year old language no one really messes with anymore. You would be trying to get something people abandoned 15 years ago. Good luck getting any support on those old COM controls. Could you get it to translate into .net equivalents with decent QA? Maybe you could do it. But 1 year? I think you might be undershooting your timeframe a bit.
> at most you will see 100 comments
Unless you are capable of finding the 'Load All Comments' button at the top of the page, or the 'Get more comments' at the bottom of the page.
Wow, the captcha is 'sawdust' which is what your head must be filled with.
In this case, though, "of" is the correct word.
... many hours of computer user's lives by having a shitty spyware OS.
Go look up your hexadecimal error codes and time it.
... what date is that then, the fifth of Octember?
While I have never written "Would of" instead of "Would have". Certainly, I would have never written "Would've"... as it seems just sloppy.
But my use of the "Would of" in spoken language is definitely clear and excessive. I believe I'll make a genuine effort to correct this in the future. I am an American living in another country and regularly make conscience efforts to refine my speech in order to both improve clarity as well as set a good example for those around me, especially my children's friends.
At some point, I should attempt to find a list of "Stupid abuses of the English language that confuse foreigners". I can honestly say that there are many dialects of English that have evolved to borderline stupidity. "Queen's English" is so full of crap and nonsense now it's nearly as bad as Cajun. The language itself is doomed when the Queen herself can't be bothered to say "Football" but instead uses the term "Fudty" with a very special and specific pronunciation of U as well as the DT which sounds wrong and uncomfortably unless a coal miner with no teeth say it.
Over the past few decades a clear decline of the "Queens English" occurred as all words had to either end with a "y" or just be cute. Instead of sausages, there's bangers, instead of "mashed potatoes", there is simple "mash". It's become a language for people to abuse primarily through "cutsiness" and laziness.
The many other dialects of English around the world are equally bad. But as there's a specific dialect which is even named, it's far easier to focus on its shortcomings.
Every recent Microsoft project is a failure?
Exaggerate much?
They are just re-purposing all of sparks code for Minecraft 2.0.
> failure
-- Hundreds of thousands of creations
-- Millions of objects and components
Someone is a failure here, Microsoft.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
See the tiny little gray flag in the lower-right corner of every post? You won't believe why it's there! Spammers HATE it!
Required reading for internet skeptics
Now it's lost some of that punch.
I'm not seeing the problem here. It looks correct to me. In this case, the 'of' indicates that the 'some' belongs to or originates from 'that punch'.
We can eliminate the 'of' in most cases, but we often lose some meaning: "Now, he's lost some of his tools." -> "Now, he's lost some tools" (The owner of the tools is lost.) Though, in this case, the meaning can be preserved by writing "Now it's lost some punch."
Required reading for internet skeptics
Why oh why would you give an AC who is threatening to leave a reason to stay!?!?
IMO a more fitting response: BYE! Don't let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya!
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
It is correct. The whole thread is founded on a misreading.
Oh, for the love of Cthulhu; read the title of the post!
That's where the error was being propagated, which Opportunist corrected IN ALL CAPS and somehow you still missed it!
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
The verb that indicates belonging is 'have'. You would not 'of' because you can not 'of'. 'Of' is not a verb!
Compare:
"I have gone to Mexico." vs: "I of gone to Mexico."
"I would have gone to Mexico" vs: "I would of gone to Mexico."
Nope. You would not 'of' something because you can not 'of' anything. 'Of' is not a verb!
Sorry, I replied in the wrong place.