To the devs: Thank you

[Zacqary Adam Xeper]

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since I was active here, and also a while since I've been working on any Turbulenz projects. I put my most recent game on hold after my artist had to quit, and a few other things happened, which altogether kind of sapped my motivation to work on it.

I'm a little bit upset that I've stopped working on the project, because part of what was driving me to work on it was the immense amount of gratitude I feel towards the amazing work of the Turbulenz developers. The Turbulenz engine is an amazing piece of open source code, and the help and support the developers have given me on this forum has been above and beyond anything I've ever experienced. So, part of what I wanted to do was to make a really amazing game that could be a big hit for Ga.me and Turbulenz, just as a way of giving back. Like, you guys have been so great that I actually want to increase the revenue of your for-profit company out of sheer altruism. How does that even happen?

In the past couple days, a few things happened that reminded me just how thankful I am that Turbulenz is a thing that exists. I landed a web development job at Fast Company — entry level and starting out part-time, but I've never had any kind of job in development before so it's still huge for me — pretty much solely based on the fact that I made Apathy last year. They thought it was so impressive that I could do such a thing with pure Javascript that I got hired before even coming in for an interview. So, that's one amazing thing Turbulenz helped me get.

Then today, I started reading up on Node.js, since that's most of what I'm going to be working in. I'd done some hacking around with Node for an otherwise PHP-powered project, but only as a simple cron script, none of the real server logic of a true Node app. So, here I am going over the Node tutorials, and I see myself getting annoyed as they say at various points, "Node.js uses non-blocking operations and an event loop, let's stop the tutorial now to go on for five paragraphs how mind-blowing and confusing this is if you've only ever worked with PHP or Ruby before." This was annoying because I'm reading over it going, "Yeah? Okay? I get it. You give everything a callback function. What's the big deal? Just tell me how to load an HTML file already."

Then it hit me why non-blocking operations weren't such a mind-blowing, unfamiliar concept to me. Node's event loop is basically just TurbulenzEngine.setInterval(). I had already been training myself to write complex non-blocking Javascript applications for a year and a half.

So it's probably not going to be very long till I advance in this new job, and I owe that to everyone at Turbulenz who've helped me. I hope I can find some time and inspiration to get back into game development, because I really enjoy doing it and I want to show the world more examples of what this engine can do. But either way, Turbulenz has had a really great impact on my life and opened up I don't know how many opportunities for me. And I can't help but feel immense gratitude towards everyone who made this possible for me. Thank you all so very much.

[James Austin]

Hey.

Thanks for the lovely message - it's really appreciated.

All the best with your new job - hopefully you'll be able to introduce them to the Turbulenz Engine at some point!!

- James.

[Ian Ballantyne]

Zac,

That's fantastic to hear. I'm really pleased it worked out for you and that we were able to assist you in your journey in some small way.

Thank you for being a great user and supporter of the technology and I look forward to hearing about what you get up to in the future.

Thanks for your support!

Ian