ENIGMA Value

[hpg678]

In a post by the user Fervi, it was mentioned that the developers were sad because of ENIGMA not being popular enough.  The user went on to state their reluctance to accept money using for their product. Though I admire that about them, being a realist, I could not in good conscience use their product to make money without making some kind of donation. I did it for GameMaker 5 and GameMaker 8, so I would not have a problem if having made money from selling one of games, I could not give back to the developers.

So what do you think?

[time-killer-games]

Penis is not an option. How am I supposed to vote on this poll with no penis flopping in it?

[Josh @ Dreamland]

ENIGMA's problem isn't really money, in the most basic sense. I'm happy to continue to cover ENIGMA's server costs (they amount to maybe $20/mo). ENIGMA needs more expert attention. I occasionally block off some time to fix one of ENIGMA's big issues, but there are a couple that are too big for me to just knock out one weekend. The last time I rewrote ENIGMA's compiler, I was 19, and it took over a month. What kept me motivated was the challenge, and that aspect has gone away.

As far as motivating really talented people, I'd say that is a money issue. I work full-time as a software engineer. That comes with a lot of money, and a lot of bullshit. The bullshit eats up all of my personal bullshit buffer, which I would need in order to work on ENIGMA for extended periods of time. The money is sufficiently good that I could never expect this community to pay one person competitively (be it me, or some arbitrary expert in this field).

So basically, the server costs are noise. I am happy to cover them for this project. The cost of hiring an engineer who could actually make a difference for this project is too high for this community to support.

That said, I understand that some of our contributors are still in college. I think they should weigh in on whether they find the prospect of accepting donations to be motivating. Maybe they are in a position where the ability to make money from working on ENIGMA would allow them to do so more often. If that's the case, I would be happy to set up a donation system that would go directly to contributors who need it.

So, thoughts, college attendees?

[time-killer-games]

@Josh - Goombert already expressed to me that he wouldn't mind being donated to, but all in all it isn't a big deal to him, and he said that most people here don't want to be paid either.

[hpg678]

Thanks for the response guys. Even moreso for Josh's words. I understand a little better now the situation and will double my efforts to support ENIGMA.

I'm learning C++ on my own as well as writing my own extensions for ENIGMA. I have also have a few scripts to share with the community as well as building my own small studio to do tutorial videos using ENIGMA.

So expect more from me in the near future.

By the way guys......what do you think of these...........

[Darkstar2]

Why not crowd fund it, like they did with FPS Creator OVERLOADED or some similar 3D game making project.......  I would gladly donate some money to support development of ENIGMA and more important the rewrite of LGM - Honestly I don't think ENIGMA is going anywhere - most of the developers have abandoned it for whatever reason and there doesn't seem to be interest.  Now with GMS 2 out and major improvements in that area, it is time for ENIGMA to branch into another project, cutting ties with legacy GM and building on its own whilst maintaining the easy of use and learning curve of GMS and similar feature set to GMS 2, etc, I've said it since day 1 I am willing to pay for software that is useful to me and competitive. Whilst GMS2 has made big improvements, they still lack in many areas.   ENIGMA has always made smaller compiles and allowed you to manually disable unused modules......Smaller footprint, support for non GML, etc, so there are lots of things ENIGMA or whatever name can work on ......  GMS development is extremely slow, even for over priced, overrated software, they are still bloody slow - their development speed certainly has not improved with the funding they received.  So I am a bit skeptic that ENIGMA can be revamped significantly, with so little resources ....