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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.
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.
Don't start a project on anything Microsoft's touting as "next-gen" anything.
Back in the bad old days, DDE was the best way to do IPC in Windows. Then it was OLE, and COM, with ActiveX thrown in the mix too. For storing data, we had application-specific files, then system-level INI files, then the registry, and now we have a weird mess under the "AppData" tree.
Of course, DirectX was supposed to be everything game devs needed, until it was neutered to handle just video and audio. XNA was then supposed to handle all of the game-centric functionality under the .NET framework, until it died a quiet death.
Microsoft's the most indecisive software company I've ever seen, so I'd strongly recommend against taking any of their decisions at face value. Only adopt a Microsoft technology after others have vetted it and raised sufficient complaints about the broken parts.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
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."
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.