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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.
I guess Spark didn't catch on fire.
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.
Not quite right. Google would completely bugger up the UI, cause it to display content in foreign languages and then kill it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Yep, I agree. Your best bet is to simply use whatever the professionals are using, since you generally know that will be supported for a reasonable length of time. For game developers, that means plain old C++ and DirectX targeted at the desktop (or native console APIs, if you're a console developer). It's easy enough to port to other platforms like Universal Windows Apps as required, but you definitely don't want all your eggs in just one new MS basket. And these days, it makes sense to make sure you're porting to at least Mac, if not Linux as well.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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.
Seems it was a killer app for the project, after all it's dead now. So why are you complaining?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You must be new here. That would require the editors to actually do something; which is against the editor code of conduct.
Hmm... last I checked... .NET is their core platform these days and works pretty nicely. Silverlight is more or less replaced by HTML 5 now, so while Microsoft still supports it, it's kinda on the way out... after all... with no plugin support in browsers, what's the alternative. Plays for sure was kind of a marketing thing with some DRM on top.
.NET are practically the only cross platform development toolkit with support. C and C++ for application development are basically dead. It's not that as languages they're bad, they're just not that good anymore. Almost every half decent C project out there is written by more or less by using an object model which almost precisely recreates C++ in structures. C++ was the best language for application development (especially cross platform) for like 20-30 years but that was more of "by default" since there weren't any other well supported languages on multiple platforms. Java just never really happened. The reason for this is that Sun kinda screwed everything up with AWT and 5 generations of shit before SWT happened which no one really caught onto. I addition, there's no real support for mobile devices.
.NET evolves and both adds and removes features. At this time C# is fully supported on all desktop operating systems with tools. In addition, it's supported on all phone platforms and I've even gotten it working on a TI DSP running SYSBIOS. So I'm pretty damn sure C# is not only here to stay but unless you're counting clock cycles, it's probably the most versatile compilable language.
So, I'm a little lost.
As for lock-in, these days, C# and
So, that leaves us with C#, Objective-C (and maybe soon Swift).
Objective-C was an amazing language due the the really awesome way it was possible to compile all function calls into MPI since the function declarations clearly spelled out everything needed to serialize data and there was this sort of implied async functional call interface to begin with. Add to that the NextSTEP libraries almost religious enforcement of MVC, lovely. The problem was programming Objective-C was that writing Objective-C code felt like flossing your teeth through your ass. It was just an infuriatingly ugly programming language. It was designed for the computer, not the programmer.
Then came Swift which says "Let's get all the goodies of Objective-C and make it usable" and then Apple released what might be one of the worst compilers I've ever encountered in my life to support it in the open source. The parser is so incredibly shitty that when warnings and errors are generated due to syntax, an error on line 1026 will report as being on line 1 since the compiler just failed and since it seems to be tokenizing the entire file before parsing it (feels that way, probably isn't) it has no idea which context it's in at the time and just pukes. The entire front end of Swift needs a rewrite by proper compiler engineers. And oh... Swift still grabs hold of "let the programmer manage the memory and processes" because they figured they couldn't get the purists to adopt it.
So, that leaves us with C# which just works... it's probably the prettiest language at the moment. Microsoft has a bit of feature sprawl, but they manage it nicely. Developer documentation is pretty good and covers all versions... unlike Java which no matter how bad the screw up is will never remove anything (no matter how bad it fucks up the whole Java architecture),
So.. in the end, I can't imagine what you're ranting about. I've never had a problem with support for Microsoft technologies (maybe FoxPro, but it was time for that to go).
> 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.