Lemma Soft Forums

Also, what are people here for?

I’ve been a registered member for a while, and I lurked for a while before that. I don’t post as often. As I used to, but I still check the forums every day.

So what am I here for? I’m not here for Introduction posts or for seeming activity. I’m not here for chatting. I’m here for the same reason that brought me to register in the beginning. Getting and then giving advice on how to code in Renpy, learning, about new projects, and finding people to commission. The things I need Lemma for still seem to me to be as active as ever. Every day there are questions asked and answered in the Questions board.

I don’t answer as often anymore because I answered a question with “you need to declare your variables with default” a LOT. If there is a particularly intriguing question, I’ll still jump in to answer, or something that has gone without an answer for a few days. But for the most part newer forum members are answering some of the questions I used to spend lots of time answering.

trooper6 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2019 5:11 pm Also, what are people here for?

I’ve been a registered member for a while, and I lurked for a while before that. I don’t post as often. As I used to, but I still check the forums every day.

So what am I here for? I’m not here for Introduction posts or for seeming activity. I’m not here for chatting. I’m here for the same reason that brought me to register in the beginning. Getting and then giving advice on how to code in Renpy, learning, about new projects, and finding people to commission. The things I need Lemma for still seem to me to be as active as ever. Every day there are questions asked and answered in the Questions board.

I don’t answer as often anymore because I answered a question with “you need to declare your variables with default” a LOT. If there is a particularly intriguing question, I’ll still jump in to answer, or something that has gone without an answer for a few days. But for the most part newer forum members are answering some of the questions I used to spend lots of time answering.

Same for me. I still enjoy talking to members I've known a long time (I've been registered for over a decade now and I lurked for probably 1-2 years before that). Lemmasoft has definitely become a comfortable habit for me to stop in on from time to time.

Like you, I don't answer some questions now, as I've answered them many times before. The latest question about game resolution was a bit surreal for me, as I found when I went to quote myself, I had already quoted myself in THAT thread, from discussions several years older. It's like archaeology, but for advice.

I still visit but I only dip in and out, and half-heartedly answer questions only because I see them being completely ignored otherwise.

Basically I drop in a little to see what projects people are working on, but the spambot problem seems fairly bad on this forum lately.

Yes, it is.

Donmai wrote: ↑Thu Sep 15, 2022 7:03 pmYes, it is.

(Nah, it's just kids these days use Discord, so the forums are dying off :'D Sadly I can't adapt to Discord because the prospect of my comments being lost in time to the ether fills me with existential dread, sapping all my motivation to post. whereas my posts on forums feel like they have some longevity XD)

That's what I meant. As a discussion board, it's nearly dead.

Note that the numbers don't really back this up too much. Last week, we had about the same number of users here as this time last year. (This may be due to the Twitter drama.)

Twitter drama? Why wasn't I invited? I used to be a Troll God back in the days (25 years or so ago) when I set comp.lang.c ablaze with my posts to bring peace between Assembly programmers and C/C++ programmers which only turned up the heat to armageddon levels... as was my true design behind those posts... hehehe For I was an Assembly Fanatic! I was a GOD among those snot nosed worms who needed a compiler to crank out the code for them.

Ah! Those were the days...

But years went on and Technocrate turned into mild-mannered Fuseblower.

And where am I today? Here I am using a framework! A framework mind you! A framework written in PYTHON! That's like... worse than Java! That's for people who can't grasp the basic concept of pointers or data types and are too undisciplined or to dumb to do their own memory allocation! No wonder Python is so popular! Anyone with a mere two brain cells to rub together can pretend to be a programmer with it! Of course the pointers are smart! They have to be because the programmer is a dumb ass! Python is the perfect language for today's purple haired, commie marxist, woke, entitled, participation award, privileged youth! And the icing on the cake for me is that the heretic who dreamed up this "programming language" with training wheels is a Dutchman, like me.

But... where was I?

Ah, yes, Twitter Drama. Perhaps it's better I wasn't there. It might have been good a couple of decades ago but I'm much calmer and more tolerant nowadays...

Hrmph, no flame war? I must be losing my touch....

Well, I tried but I'm old by now and don't know how to incite the fury of the young ones to create beauty yet unimagined. So much has changed... I guess everybody is on discord by now. Don't wanna have my low pitched rumbling, Dutch accent destroy the image of a cute WoW Gnomette, so I won't join (F that!).

Don't worry Tom (AS IF!!1!). I won't hold your choice of programming language against you, no matter how lame it is (it IS lame, I hope you have discerned that by now).

I have nothing but respect for you even though you should have done it in Ansi C (or some other Ansi or IEEE thing) instead of a training-wheels-language like Python (what are you, a f-ing toddler?). I tried, and failed as, I assume, have countless others.

Of course I'm drunk right now! (Tullamore Whiskey, Whoopi!)

Dude! F-ing New Year!

Even though activity is down, I feel like the forum won't die for years to come. It's a great resource. I've been a big lurker, but I've been trying to be more active in the community since I've started solo deving.

I feel like the forum feel, while to people who grew up with it is a comfortable and practical way of communicating, newer, younger devs are preferring other social media platforms (Specifically Discord in this case).

On discord, it's a lot easier to just casually chat, and you may feel like you are getting answers to a question quicker. I personally prefer the forums, as even though I myself am pretty young (20 in a few months), I was always on forums when I was younger. But I definitely see the appeal of discord. For younger people, (Teens) it's more comfortable for them, as that's what they grew up with/are currently interacting with. I personally started messing with renpy back in 2018 (I was 14-15), and I feel like for a lot of people, they were also around that age when they started messing with the engine. So when New devs are coming in currently in their early or late teens, they see the discord, and hang out there, seeing no need for the forum.

But there will always be a need for the forum, as even though new post are slowing down, older post answering questions that everyone has had, it is a HUGE archive. The documentation is great, but for some can be confusing, especially if they have never coded in their life before. Having this forum were people have dumbed it down and made it easier to understand, with real world code is a great resource. I have asked questions here before, but I actually find that I am typically able to just google search it and find an answer on this forum.

So in conclusion, yes, newer post are slow, but the community at large is not as dead as it seems, and the forums are a great resource regardless. I know I rehashed what a lot of people said, so sorry if this just seemed repetitive

Threads like this make me feel old... but anyway... as someone who was very active in the beginning and then wasn't very active for like a decade, I feel things have changed quite a lot. And there is one aspect that no one talks about but that I feel does play a role and that's the "H" stuff. When I first saw this forum I was surprised that there was no "adult" content on here at all and that adult content was looked down upon and even discouraged and ridiculed, even in the "official" demo game that was packaged with Ren'Py, not to mention the forum itself. About the only naughty content there was, was looking at Lemma's panties in Tales of Lemma and even that was frowned upon and was basically the bad route.

So I found this forum to be too prude, but I don't really mind either way. But now I am the "prude" in the "prude's category" (is it still called that?) cause I don't want to get overwhelmed with all the adult content. On here it's not even that bad, cause on Itch it's much worse. It's nice that every day there are hundreds of new Visual Novels on there, but the vast majority are pornographic and extremely crude at that. So it's very hard to stick out with any kind of project or game that isn't pornographic, there is almost no market for it anymore at all and it reached the point where people see a "Ren'Py game as synonymous with "adult game". I actually had a bunch of people complaining to me that my Ren'Py games have no sexual content, cause all the other Ren'py games they played on Itch did, so they came to expect that.

Actually even most ISP's and all public Wi-Fi in my country have banned Lemma Soft and renai.us and you can't access it (basically on any connection that restricts pornography - so basically if you can't access Porn Hub, you can't access Lemmasoft or renai.us).

Oh, and also all forums independent of Big Tech are dying in general, but that has already been discussed.

I just registered this week and I see many posts that doesn't have any replies for months.

So I think yes, it's dying. Fortunately the Questions & Announcements still seems to be active, relatively, which helps many people including me a lot.

I would like to help people there with their problems, but the topics are still too complex for me, haha.

I'm fond of forums in general but it does seem that people are largely steering away from them and toward other sites/apps, these days. I'm still glad to use forums from time to time, though, and I understand having nostalgia. And, as Riz said, people here are helpful when I have technical issues...! But I suppose this is just the passage of time. Though, I don't know - forums may continue to have a place even well into the future. Forums feel more like an archive where you can look things up and search through things more easily. On places like Discord - while there can be some organization and there are search features - things get lost so easily. (Plus, some chats can be so fast that it just gives me anxiety. People might start to learn that faster isn't always better.) On a forum, I feel like I can make a few long posts. On Discord, things are more fast paced, and I feel like people might not care so much about reading a lengthy post, and quickly bury comments with small-talk.

Edit: I guess each form of communication has its pros and cons, really. : )

I believe the traffic in certain subforums of lemmasoft started to decrease when the discord channel was introduced but I don't know if that's the real reason. I've never visited the discord channel so I can't tell if all the artists and writers disappeared to that place (for those new here : we used to have a lot of them).

Who knows? That discord channel might be thriving.

Lemmasoft is still popular but only as a "technical support platform", a kind of stackoverflow for Renpy

I honestly miss the activity of the forum. Forums I think is easier to hold well thought out discussions. Discord has its place, but then you have the eternal scroll and can miss a lot and searching it is a nightmare lol (just backsearching stuff said between me and my friend's own DM is a nightmare hahaha). It's easier to make a nice project post, get feedback, and all that. Forums is just nicer and cleaner in my opinion and a slower pace, whilst I think Discord can create impatience since, at its core, is still IM'ing and chatroom. Threads you don't expect (usually) to get an instant reply. But anyway... I did try the Ren'Py server and it was personally... eh... for me, plus from what I remember, there really wasn't a place to advertise your new release or talk about what you're working on, which is the biggest thing with the Ren'Py forum. I dunno... the only way we'll see the forums active again is if those of us who like this experience start being active again as well, start new threads, etc. get people talking again. I still default to the forums for coding help because I'll actually get a response I can find since it's a thread I started lol