TI Community Armageddon [SEMI-FAKE HALLOWEEN NEWS]

[DJ Omnimaga]

It seems the TI community was finally armageddonizated. After 3 years of speculation about if the TI community is dying, it seems that today it is definitively dead for good, no real new program having been made for the past 3 weeks and 14 days. A youtube video was posted in attempt to bring a message to calculator programmers, in hope to bring back interest toward programming.

While for Omnimaga it may not be as much of a big blow to us because we also do music and PC games, it is an important matter for the entire community. Watch the video at the following URL and spread the TI community!

[{AP}]

"...oh, you are the WORST kind of person."

[Silver Shadow]

I think it's more because of the fact that ticalc.org has trouble with staff... ;P

[DJ Omnimaga]

Oh awesome, I finally remembered the text color I used for fake news on the old Omnimaga forums

but yeah ticalc definitively have load of trouble with them, because it has been this way for the past 2 years at least

[Ding_Programs]

lol though this may be fake news, in about a year or so, all the calc programs that will be made, will be made. I mean look at ticalcs quadratic solvers. They all do the same thing with bits of flair thrown in. So, DJ OMnimaga just told the future...

[DJ Omnimaga]

Well we said this 3 years ago and it still hasn't been done. I was planning a pseudo 3D FPS in BASIC using xLIB and grayscale  with possible 45° rotation and stairs and holes. I was also supposed to do a first xLIB grayscale RPG, there's an awesome 3D engine in the works on MaxCoderz that still isn't finished but when it will be revolutionary games will be made, but that still have yet to happen. More stuff will be possible afterward as well. THe thing is that there's no more loyality from members in the community. People join and they randomly vanish for months and when they come back they're hardly active anymore and during summer forums get empty because people lost interest about calcs during vacations so this causes the community to be less active.

However altough the news is fake, the last time I saw the community that inactive was during Summer 2001. Many things could be causing that. My first thought was that parents can no longer afford calculators for their kids due to the economic disaster that's occuring in USA and soon worldwide. Since parents know most schools lend the calcs in questions now they won't bother buying calcs so students get stuck with school calcs that comes with no link cable to connect it to the PC so even less people can get games from TI websites and they have less interest toward programming because they think they won't be able to share their games with enough people. This especially hurts ASM, because I don't think you can walk in the hallway in your school and ask a random student: "Hey could u send me SPASM with some z80 ASM tutorials I want to learn ASM for calculatorz". If it's alerady hard to find someone who cares about calc programming in the same school than you I can't imagine how hard it would be to find someone who does ASM too.

The incidents that occured on Cemetech in the past years with a member being hostile to people for stupid reasons, the ones between #tcpa and Omnimaga and the closing of Omnimaga and even more incidents occuring in #tcpa afterward didn't helped either I'm sure. At least I'm glad on this side things seems better but there was a huge decrease in activity after these incidents. At least if people who didn't liked Omnimaga just decided to not bother about us either this would not have happened or maybe the community would be more active by now. The other incidents unrelated to Omnimaga didn't helped either because a lot of people hate fights and hostility so they probably left because of them. In 2005 this happened and it nearly killed calcgames forums. It went from about 20 posts a day to 1 post a week

EDIT: Back in 2004 there was a calculator craze because the TI-84+/SE and TI-89t came out. In 2002 things started getting more active too at one point after the Voyage 200 came out. In the past 4 years no decently programmable calculators came out. The TI-Nspire, despite lot of improvements since its release, still can't do games from what I can notice. APparently you can't even use DRAW functions inside programs and I don't even know if there's an Input function. From what I see, even the TI-80 and TI-81 could do better games. I'm sure the lack of a decent new calc doesn't help either. I can't say the DS and PSP dragged activity down all alone, because the programming on these is C++, if I remember, and it's lower level than normal C++. Not everyone wants to program complicated language (people who find everything that isn't TI-BASIC complicated I mean)

[{AP}]

Oddly enough, it wasn't til 2007 that I knew there was a calculator programming community.
All I knew is that I was the only programmer in my school and am the best among the ones who started programming there by far.

Though, hopefully I can convert some friends to calc programming.
They enjoy the idea of programming, it's just sometimes they can be lazy... very lazy.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah the problem is that there's really a lack of dedication since the past 3 years. There used to be a time where people still continued coding calculator games during summertime. Also there was a time where most people stayed for at least one year. Now there's people who become inactive after a few months.

Oh and can I mention ticalc.org inactivity? Ticalc.org was the site where most news from the community were posted and now it's close to being dead. It must have an impact on the rest of the community. The death of TI-News didn't help either.