To the people who are capable of developing for MSX

If you aren't developing on a 'structured basis', why's that then?

- lack of time due real-life thingies
- lack of teammembers with the the ingredients you don't have (incl. 'managers')
- lack of motivation in general
- lack of development tools (gfx-editors, sprite-editors, map-editors, music-editors, script-editors, msx-'OS'es with memory-managers/music players/GUI etc. etc.)
- lack of $ .. (hardware developers for example)

And in case of the motivation thing, is it because of:
- lack of potential audience (either paying audience or freeware audience, think of niche-hardware for example, like tR, G9k etc.)
- lack of trust in your skills

I really have the idea many ppl who want do some development, and who *are* capable of development, aren't doing anything. Fairs in the last years became more a socializing-event rather than a place for newly released products. Sure, there are some new products each fair, but I'm sure there can be way more.

And what if I don't develop at all?

The reason I quit was the lack of potential audience, combined with less free time. The reason I don't develop on a regular basis in my spare time is coz the MSX can't handle what's in my head. Sorry if that sounds harsh.

big projects like games take a lot of time to create. (that's probably the reason most of the products in the 90s were demo's and musicdisks )

- it's hard to stay motivated because in the end it get's boring, especially coding all those details is boring. (maybe a C compiler + good libs is a solution afterall?)

- lack of time is also a big factor. it's hard to continue working on something after a break.

- lack of teammembers, especially gfx-artists

- I think also many developers are missing a good development environment and tools. Also a good bios (memory management, disk-management, music/sfx, interrupts, keyboard/joystick handling etc.) is important. This'll speed up the development a LOT!

- lack of feedback. Developers (at least I) like to read reviews and get opinions about the stuff you create. There are not many reviewers left. (yup, I do miss those (disk)-mags.)

Well, I am STILL developing for the MSX system and supporting other developers as well. And all that I produce is freeware, so forget the money element. Motivation is the key. I program games for MSX because I really love to. I would do it even if I were the last MSXer on the planet!

For me, having been involved in several ambitious projects that were not finished in the end (e.g. Final Future, Flying Bytes) made me quite reluctant to join a new team and put lots of time and efforts in creating music that fits with the end-product. I am about to join a new project though, as one of Europe's only MuSiCa composers ^_^.

I agree with Pitpan that you should not be developing for MSX if you are not motivated. You should develop for MSX because it's your hobby, because you love doing it. Whether or not you are going to make a tiny bit of money on it once it's finished or not, should not affect this whatsoever. As for the audience, I personally could not care less. If 5 people enjoy what I made, I would probably be just as pleased as when 500 people enjoy it (well, perhaps that's not entirely true... but... what's most important to me is that I enjoyed making it and that I'm satisfied about the end-product)

As for Chaos: with combined efforts of several MSX developers it should be possible to create an ASM or C library that fits most needs of the modern MSX developer. This, combined with better GFX-crossdevelopment tools (5tile, Polka, ... ?) should make it a lot easier to develop for MSX and thus boost activity quite a lot.

Still, just look at the amount of MSX software released in 2004. I'm more than satisfied with the quality and quantity of the MSX releases. We should not be too demanding, right?

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Still, just look at the amount of MSX software released in 2004. I'm more than satisfied with the quality and quantity of the MSX releases.

Partly .. ofcourse, the MRC challenges and MSXdev'04 brought a lot of new stuff.. but:
MRC challenges resulted in demos .. which is -compared to games- a smallscale production usually .. (even the 2-disk Sphere was relativily small). Within a week, or a few weeks one can do a demo..

MSX 1 games are more work than a demo usually, but they're not a lot of work compared to ambitious msx2(/+/tR) games, mainly ambitious in 'scale'. (ps. don't read this as: "msx 1 games suck" because I didn't mean that at all ). This 'lack of scale' is one of the reasons for the MSXdev organisers to keep the specs low ... which is understandable in a way ..

Bombaman isn't a real good example, it's a semi-large-scale msx2 game, but .. well, uh .. it didn't have to take 4 years orso, it just did

Anyway, I wonder what the main reasons are for the lack of large-scale activities ..

I think it's most important that people are having fun developing software for MSX. Creating a cool demo in a short timespan, getting quite some downloads anmd reactions and then moving on to a next project can be highly stimulating. I'd rather see a lot of demo's and small games than, what happened in the late 90s, many people working on way too ambitious projects, looking down at musicdisks and demo's. Most of those projects were not finished and many people dropped MSX, temporarily or not, because of the disappointments involved. Point is... if you are going to make a large scale MSX2/2+ production (or turboR, GFX9000, Moonsound, CF/CD-ROM, ...) you got to know what you're doing, you've got to work in a team of people you like and can trust to be as motivated as you... I think that developing small games and demo's can be an important first step in getting that motivation and trust. Kralizec could very well be a good example in this one.

Another positive side of creating small demo's is that you can increase your quality and expertise step by step, preventing you make a commonly made mistake: getting in way over your head

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- lack of time due real-life thingies - lack of teammembers with the the ingredients you don't have (incl. 'managers') - lack of development tools (gfx-editors, sprite-editors, map-editors, music-editors, script-editors, msx-'OS'es with memory-managers/music players/GUI etc. etc.)

That's it. Working on a game though, but not in a very structural fashion.

- lack of time due real-life thingies.
- Difficulty to get help in the GFX department. Could get a lot more done if I was able to put 2 pixels together myself, alas I simply can't figure that out.
- No motivation to work on large scale projects ("they never end anyway so why bother" is my impression).

Perhaps it would be good to publish a GFX section on the MRC where GFX people could show what they're able and willing to do. Also a section with public domain GFX libraries would be nice, I'm sure there are tons of GFX made for games that have never been used that could be recycled somehow.

Quote:

- lack of time due real-life thingies - lack of teammembers with the the ingredients you don't have (incl. 'managers') - lack of motivation in general - lack of development tools (gfx-editors, sprite-editors, map-editors, music-editors, script-editors, msx-'OS'es with memory-managers/music players/GUI etc. etc.) - lack of potential audience (either paying audience or freeware audience, think of niche-hardware for example, like tR, G9k etc.)

My response on each of those items:
-Its mostly lack of time. I believe that most MSX'ers are thirty-something now, and have a spouse,kids, a house to build/renovate,a full time job and more of those time consuming activities.
-The fact that I don't now a 'fa' from a 'sol' is a great setback if you want to make an overall nice demo/game also :-)
And it is rather hard to find somebody around here who evens knows what an MSX is, let alone find someone to cooperate with. And to have a nice co-operation you need, on a regular base, time to communicate and progress with your part of the game/demo/...
but as stated above in the first point, most people have a cronical lack of time.
-Lack of development tools is bogus IMHO, I think most people now a days will use their other computers as developping aids using cross compilers to speed things up (although I prefer Compass in an unthrottled openMSX turbo-r session), use emulators for testing and all kind of other convertions tools (Maggoo's sprite tool is rather nice, as is bmp2msx :-)
-lack of potential audience: I think this is why most stuff is MSX2 based and you'll find so little "turbo-r + GFX9000 + moonsound + 4 meg ram + ..." minimal spec games
Now a days this hardware is being (slowly) incorporated into modern emulators so that you can develop for this specs knowing that most people will at least be able to emulate it, if they don't have the actual hardware itself.

Mostly lack of time: aside from being a full-time second grade student about Computer Science at the University of Twente, I'm putting much effort on sports. I do jiu-jitsu training (mostly 2 to 3 times per week), Latin-American dancing (about equal) and runnings (twice a week). Apart from that, I'm webmaster here at MRC, which basically means translating newsposts from English to Dutch. Of course I've got to spam the forums as well . Furthermore I'm active in a small Dutch group called Bitwise of which it seems I'm the only member at the moment. Doing the whole website plus maintenance as well. Recently we (read: I) imported Bomb Jack, now for sale in The Netherlands (basically everyone which makes his/her order at Bitwise's ). To top it all off, I'm more or less involved in several projects, of which you will see the results in due time.

I also have no spare-time job because of all this
hehehe...

lack of time. period.

In your case it's more lack of skill Ro


/me runs and hides.

lucky 4u I don't lack any sence of humour haha.. shame on you rm.

For me is just lack of time... I've been working like crazy, almost no time for MSX unfortunaly. One of the things that really helps me is programming in MSXPad, having pre-made routines (in ASM ) to speed things up when needed is really a time saver, and allows me to experiment on ideas very fast.

If I think the idea is "doable" (is that even a word? hehehe) then I go all the way for it... and besides what people might think, it's not that hard to finish a game (at least for me) due to lack of motivation... seeing the game done and people playing it is all the reward I allways wanted

Of course, some projects could be much better (I'm not a great musician), but fortunaly I can code and draw some gfx which helps a lot

But for me is just that, lack of time - if I could earn a living doing msx games, I would be the heppiest guy around... but since this isnt like to happen anytime soon, I just keep adding new ideas on my to-do list hehehe