I've bought pico-8 1 year ago but never really got around to do anything meaningful.
I've come back to it because my kids want to learn programming. After doing some research I came across TIC-80. I've found it in the Google-Playstore. I found out it is opensource. I love oss, I'm running Linux since ages and since 2 years I'm a devops at work supporting the RH-Servers.. anyway. Here are the bad things I've came across trying to install and use TIC-80
- I've googled on how to install TIC-80 on Linux and was presented: https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/wiki/build-instructions Which tells me to
sudo apt-get install git
git clone --recursive https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80
cd TIC-80
cmake .
make
Which ended with a
Building for target : Linux
CMake Error at 3rd-party/sdl2/CMakeLists.txt:2 (message):
Prevented in-tree built. Please create a build directory outside of the SDL source code and call cmake from there
As described in my issue here: https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/issues/914
I only later found that the readme.md here https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80 - I've installed the demos in the virtual-console. I am pretty unimpressed. A single game without sound. A benchmark and unplayable demos :-/
- The Games in the (chromium) browser have no sound at all as of this bug: https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/issues/590
- The TIC-80 snap is 2 years old and doesn't work - It immediately crashed after installing and running with a page-fault https://snapcraft.io/tic80
- On github the project lists 281 issues as of right now. Some are over a year old.
- And last but not least: There hasn't been a release since over a year I couldn't find out why that is and what is blocking the release. Good software is released early and often. What is wrong with the current state of the project that hinders a release? Where am I supossed to get that information?
I really like the idea of this beeing a opensource kind-of-pico-8 but I hate to invest time into a project that has a uncertain future. I have three kids who would like to learn some game programming... I hate the idea I have to switch to another application in the midst of teaching them because of the unstable state of this project.
Maybe I'm wrong and just had bad luck uncovering this in about 2 hours trying to find out about TIC-80. I would really like to give TIC-80 a chance, but as of right now I'm pretty unconvinced that TIC-80 has a workable base I'd like to build on.
