What's wrong with this forum. As a off/on user of Allegro 5.0 since 2012, the forum took a bad turn sometime the past couple years. I don't think ti's a mistake it's so quiet here. First time I came back and saw this new forum, I thought "What happened?" Looks like it got hit by a bus. It was hte most depressing feeling in the world, I wanted to leave and never come back. The only reason I'm here still is the work i put into understanding Allegro in 2011-12. That was like a spark and it made me work on it infrequently in the years after.

What's wrong with it? Well first off, if I click on any of these topics it looks empty. After a while I figure out to click on the "Showing recent threads..." to enter a date. Unfortunately, it only shows topics within 30 days. It still looks empty. So then I have to resort to clicking on "Search" at the top with a specific topic in mind. This is like going to the supermarket dragged behind a speeding truck on a gravel road. All the love of a cold killer.

This sends a message to everybody comes here. A bad one.

Get a better forum, please. It would help your community. I cannot fathom how anybody could support this. This is on the level of what Derek Smart would do. I've liked some of his games, and they get a lot of criticism for being poor, but the way he interacts with people online is far worse than any game he ever made. He loses way more customers that way.

Trying to help. I actually use Allegro. Not a random person. I can't be the only one feels this way. Again, "What happened?"

And btw I'm here because I was working on my ubuntu project, trying to get it working in windows. It's working now, but I'm having trouble when I press enter on a dialog (and hold it for even a split second), closing it, and afterward allegro is installed and still registers the keydown event from the enter key. This caused my allegro program to respond to the keydown. Since the keydown event happened inside the dialog, my reasoning is allegro should only be registering a onchar event for that key. That would prevent it from responding and make sense to me. At the moment, I'm figuring out how to resolve this. I don't expect an answer here, as I'm well aware a reasonable question should be accompanied by code.

I have to agree. I think the idea of killing off threads too soon, and then having them vanish totally is ridiculous. You're right, it isn't helping anyone.

Also, I think other libraries like SDL, GLFW, SFML etc... have gotten more press in recent years.

I also feel that Allegro 5, as good as it is, changed some things which made it more difficult to learn, though it is a good library, things like the sound system got worse in my opinion. Some items people seemed to forget that Allegro was intended to simplify things.

There are literally some things I can still do with Allegro 4 that I cannot do with 5. I have made full games with both, Deluxe Pacman 1 is an Allegro 4 game, and Deluxe Pacman 2 is an Allegro 5 game (in my signature for download links). But I needed to alter my sound in Deluxe Pacman 2 due to the sound system being much more complex. I could take the time to learn the new system but why?

Lately I have been learning SDL2 instead and can do what I want again. It's sad because this library is about as old as it gets, much older than SDL but I think newer changes made things worse. I think the focus should be on simplicity like Allegro 4 was, let other libs be more complicated and it would probably pick up in popularity again.

Earlier versions of Allegro 4 were also much easier to compile where as this has more dependencies which are hard to hunt down and very few people who make precompiled versions anymore. That's a biggie for me as I always compiled Allegro 4 myself, no problem. I have never compiled Allegro 5 myself, and I can't be bothered.

Also, online programming like Java and game engines have also taken people away, things like Unity, Gamemaker, Unreal Engine etc... etc... have all taken people away so that if you have a library, it better have something really good and unique.

Edit: Oh, and if you are critical at all in here, prepared to be attacked. That doesn't help.

I think this forum, software and presentation wise, is the best I've seen. It's so clean and simple -- unlike something like phpBB or even SimpleMachines.

The trouble is we don't have quite enough users to make it work at it's optimal, and I don't think that is the fault of the forum itself or any of the users. It's just hard to find this great place in the minutia of options out there, with everyone going more towards larger commercial options.

I cut my teeth on programming here but don't really use allegro as much as I once did Keep trying to convince myself to get back into it though.