See, the thing is, 95 % of the time "Stop using BGT" is the answer to the most-asked questions here. People aren't saying it just because... it's really the only way unless you want to do that thing but 200 times more difficult

I could say the same thing, make a rule saying no more discussions of BGT. Is it going to happen? No. DO yourself a favor and get a clue.

Blanket-banning all discussions relating to BGT would be a slap in the face for Phillip, even though he doesn't post here anymore. He tried to create something useful for the community, and I'll say it one more time, if BGT hadn't happened, a lot of really popular games wouldn't have, either. BGT is one of the reasons why you don#t have to pay $30 for a game like Troopanum anymore, because it enabled so many people to code games that we got higher quality stuff for less money, which made it all more accessible to more people. Phillip didn't stop maintaining BGT out of spite or anything, he stopped because he, quite frankly, had other important stuff to do. Lots of people are trying to learn Python, which is a lot easier since there's so much material out there you can use to teach yourself, and quite literally thousands of communities out there to help you if you get stuck. Those who know this naturally won#t touch BGT, and the rest can use it until it stops working or the fucking sun freazes over, for all I care.

But he also wants people to stop using BGT, how would it be a slap in the face?

@manamon_player
Go talk to other people who like it then.  I'm sure you could find some whatsapp or skype groups or something...
Because even though sometimes people do hate on BGT just out of habit, simply repeating what others have said without truly understanding it, most of the people telling you to stop using it are just trying to help you avoid the same mistakes and frustrations they have experienced.

Look at it this way Manamon Player.
Lets say you were learning how to type on the computer.  Your Grampa (who you respect) suggests only using two fingers to type because (it's how he and his friends always did it and he uses the computer just fine dammit!)
But then a bunch of your classmates tell you that using all of your fingers is actually better because you can type allot faster.
So the question is this.  Are you going to learn the technique which is harder to learn at first but gives much better results in the end and will make it easier for you to do things like writing and coding?  Or are you going to do the much easier to learn but also much slower technique which does work, but will make it way more difficult to do things like writing or coding in a reasonable amount of time.

Sure, people should have the choice to do things in a way they want without people always bullying them about it if it isn't really hurting anyone else.  But, at the same time, people should also have the right to say their opinion in a respectful way, and refuse to help you do something they think is just going to hurt you in the end.

I understand it's upsetting when people are rude about this, but to be fair, it's also really frustrating for them when you keep refusing to listen to their good reasons not to do it.  That's why I think you should go somewhere more friendly to BGT if you really insist on using it, so that everyone is happier including you.

Lol I already have to 2 finger type with the GPD micro. No thanks.

BGT's undocumented functions were actually just angelscript functions that Philip may not have even known about. There may even be more, depending on the version of angelscript used by BGT, probably extremely old at this point.

Things like screen_reader_braille were undocumented BGT functions. However yes, there are some things in Angelscript that you can do in BGT which are cool, e.g. mixins which I have actually never seen anybody in BGT make use of but which are very useful and should've been documented in the BGT docs alongside interfaces.

Okay so here are my official thoughts on this. This might sound whiny but I'm dealing with a lot of mixed emotions and frustration on this topic.

I sort of feel like I'm caught in the middle. I both love and hate BGT. Its manual in particular seems to go from trying to hold your hand to setting  you loose in abrupt ways sometimes. Maybe my brain is defective or something, but I feel like I'm not alone.

One of my weaknesses is that I find it a lot easier to understand an example setup than I am at truly understanding concepts I need to know. I'm getting better at concepts, slowly but surely, but I'm using examples probably way too much to learn those concepts.

To illustrate, a friend of mine who has dabbled in BGT for years sent me a little side scroller game to hopefully kick start me into coding. I don't think I understand every line of his code, but I certainly feel like I have a better handle on a lot of things which I didn't know before. I admit, if I was going to make a similar game, I'd have to yoink a fair bit of his code out and tweak it to my purposes, because a lot of the intricacies are lost on me, and that's something I'm kind of self-conscious about. What keeps me feeling good about this though is that the conceptual awareness is slowly coming. It's just taking an extraordinarily long time.

I'm  still at a stage though where me trying to write my own code feels like I'm awkwardly struggling through a second language. Again I'm getting better; a few years ago I never would have dreamed of making functions, loops and arrays, but now I at least am not scared of trying to use them for different purposes to see which setup I like best for a particular task. But as complexity of a project grows, it doesn't take long for a notion to set in that I'm doing everything all wrong and making things unnecessarily hard for myself.

I've already put a lot of stuff on hold because I convinced myself I was making too much of a mess, and I just couldn't get the motivation to start over, re-think it and hope the rewrite looks better. That said, on a couple of my oldest or simplest projects, I actually did take the trouble, and I felt like I was learning something. Whether I was learning objective facts or my subjective preferences is something I can't really say right now, but it did feel like I was gaining insight and it was quite nice. So I still have hope.

Still, I truly empathize for those who feel they must stick to BGT. It literally says "You thought programming games was hard? Well let's take all that abstract stuff you don't understand (setting up libraries/modules/dependencies and the rest of it), and just give you the stuff you really need to get on with making a game!" Simply put, it feels hard, but manageable and, to some folks, still quite powerful. You don't need to be a software engineer but you do need to know how you want your game to work, so in essance you do feel like a successful programmer, and the comparatively easy gratification never gets old.

I do understand to an   extent that I would be infinitely better off with something like python. It's mainstream, it has modules to do many many things, and it'd be ridiculously easy for me to ask any one of thousands of people how to do a particular task, and have a discussion about it. Also I don't doubt there are thousands of tutorials which all explain things in different ways (I should really write down the Python tutorials/books my friends have told me about). The only one I seriously looked at seemed to imply a certain level of knowledge already, and while I sort of figured out the basic structure, I was quite lost once we got to loops and such because everything started compounding on itself. It moved a lot faster than BGT ever did, so the meer thought of starting over with a very different language, where manuals exist which are written in a thousand different ways is just overwhelming to me. Then I see people in the dev room wanting to bash their heads into a brick wall because they're struggling with setup, modules and other stuff which are completely foreign to BGT users. Seeing that doesn't necessarily help with motivation.

And then there's the issue of speaking to programmers who know way more than me, who don't like BGT, who will say the BGT manual teaches you bad habbits and focuses too much on gratification etc. And that switching to python would be, well, hard but sooo worth it. I won't doubt for a second that they're right on all counts, but man it's truly difficult for me to believe. It's like a concert pianist claiming that a Chopin etude is really easy after you get the hang of what it's doing. Easy for you to say because you've done it and you have a talent for it. Hard to say if you feel lost and envy everyone who seems to know their way better than you do.

In closing, I fully admit to giving into unhealthy thoughts and very likely underestimating myself too. It's something I'm trying to work on but for various reasons it's quite tough. I guess I'll leave it at this: I, personally, would like to get off of BGT and AutoIt because they seem like easy gratification tuype things which may be good for some things, but may also be rife with issues. I'll admit to not having any personal issue with them now, but I accept that I may have many issues later if I continue this way. I don't want to be handheld through transition because that'll just lead to easy gratification/uncertainty syndrome all over again, but I don't think I'm capable of diving head first into a new language either. Not without some guidance in the right direction anyway. It's kind of a fragile, unsettling feeling, a feeling I know I could conquer if I actually stopped worrying and did something, but it's still scary because I have no idea where to start which is why I haven't tried full out yet.