On Tuesday, 24 May 2022 at 21:53:36 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

On the contrary, it says everything we need to hear. Open-source libraries matters most for D adoption. And that's about it. If you had written a bit of D code instead of a forum post for the last 10 years, we would have a better ecosystem.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 10:40:34 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

No, if I wrote yet another D game library, it would change nothing. This has already happened many times in the history of D. They all died. The current language + runtime is not in the top league for that purpose. This is why they dry up.

What has been said about Rust is spot on. You don’t fix this with producing more of what others have tried already.

You need to understand why you don’t retain those devs wanting to create games.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 10:55:46 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

https://code.dlang.org/packages/dagon updated 2 months ago. Seems hasty to pronounce it dead.

https://code.dlang.org/packages/godot-d Updated 5 months ago, but it does not really need to be updated commonly because it's a wrapper over Godot. I have played with godot a bit, it's an excellent engine and the D wrapper is practical to use.

Hmm, the paper said "open-source libraries, existing code and experience". It could be that we already have the libraries, but more people would have to end up involved in projects that use D, to get the existing code and experience parts on track. But that's just a guess.

FYI you're replying to an author of a D game over ten years old: https://www.auburnsounds.com/blog/2017-10-14_The-History-Of-Vibrant.html

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 10:40:34 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

While I wouldn't go as far to say that it's everything we have to know, it's still real research. Definitely much better than typical forum theorising. Thanks for bringing it up.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 12:19:13 UTC, Dukc wrote:

https://p0nce.github.io/d-idioms/

Ola makes the valid point that open-source is hard (especially nowadays), and create a sufficient momentum to have an open-source libraries that extends its founder (forkable by others if need be, documented, bring ressources to itself instead of support work etc..) is a real challenge.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 12:32:03 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

Yes, better to find underserved niches like DPlug does, and saw seeds in audio/dsp forums and blogs. One doesn’t need a high rate of adoption, but it is important to retain the skilled ones. How many does DPlug need to become independent of the original author? 20 dedicated hardcore users? So if you manage to pick up 6 and loose 2 every year it will take 5 years? A long term investment that makes sense if you intend to stay in that field for a long time, hobbyists seldom have long term goals measured in many years...

Also, the world has changed. Safari supports WebGL2 since last year, so browser games are good enough for many hobbyists now.

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 13:06:41 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Thinking too much about this nowadays :)

Realistically it take one well-selling product from someone else.

The best case scenario is a medium to large company to adopt and fork the open-source library, to eventually maintain it because it can't scale to their uses. Frameworks like this can be seen as asset by people with vertical ambitions (the sector tries concentrating). Good riddance :)

The worst case it, surprisingly, that more and more beginners would appear (or people posturing as beginners), taking an increasing amount of basic support until the maintainer resign. This is actually the number one risk, and one possible counter-measure is to make everyone pay and give them no access to the bugtracker, like JUCE does.

So there is a "debt vs asset" position to account for, it is that the current community must be able to create net-positive contributions.

I'm always on the look out for ways to incenticize sticking around, making contributions, and basing revenue streams on top of Dplug. It's not easy to explain this to well-meaning, but demanding users. It might mean showing people the door.

So currently, 5 developers that I know of use the framework to make products for themselves ; none came from the D community. These are only the uses I know about, some people don't want to engage with a community.

Even today, Dplug could be deleted and forks would appear, because revenue streams depend on it, but it probably doesn't yet cover the full cost of evolutive maintenance - it is about 6 man-month a year. So I'm not sure if it would last long, and that is a problem indeed. Revenue stream is the mechanical force that motivates for years. Now you must explain to users how to compete with you...

Dplug is a by-product of plugins that sell, it couldn't exist otherwise. If Vibrant had sold more than 200 copies :) perhaps it could have a framework too. But it was a bitter commercial failure and couldn't justify the maintenance, so everything about it is retired.

(To make a net-positive game framework, one would have to target game developers and the middleware market, which is a lot easier than the game market.)

Cost of making the by-product available in open-source is there, but you have unintended positive consequences too (more ecosystem, input, community, things happening).

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 13:57:30 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

Aren't you worried that by using DPlug they discover D and sue it to steal the market share that would have gone to Auburn Sounds if they had stayed with C++?

:D

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 14:14:28 UTC, Dukc wrote:

Meant use it.