Firefly current progression

moderately ?

Pr have said that once it reaches a certain saturation level then we will port to others - so far the chances of that happening - very low - unless it somehow gains more followers

possibly android first with ios soon after.

I would think that porting over to F3 would be more important, no?

I don't wanna be mean, but the limited success of Firefly might just be caused, not by the product itself, but by the way you marketed it.
I mean, look, there are already plenty of 3d engines. Independent video games studios are not going to choose your product over Unity or Unreal Engine just because they would like to avoid a 5 to 10% commission --> They need performance, reliability, plugins and a large community. Firefly has none of it. Period.
So your core market can only be the casual developers, who just want to have fun making their own games, but most of them are not going to commercialize it. And this customer segment, don't care at all of royalties, because 5% of zero is $0. So you can't compete with the pricing of Unity. However, you could compete with something else. The casual developers are not specially looking for performance, or royalties, they want easiness. A quick and funny tool to make cools games. And they are willing to pay for that tool.
Now, look at firefly, honestly, it's neither easy nor intuitive to use. That's a very bad start.
Then, you don't even have a trial version. Honestly, it's 2017. We have freewares, opensource solutions everywhere, and you don't even provide a trial version? You're assuming your customers are thugs who are just going to hack your trial version to get your useless software for free... Common'! This is not serious. Nobody is willing to pay 80 bucks for a brand new/unknown software (probably full of bugs) with no trial version when dozens of free alternatives exist.
Finally, you've made another mistake. DOCUMENTATIONS! For God's sake! When I decide to use a library over an other, to use a tool over an other, I look at the community and the docs. We need clear docs with a lots of tutorials, and specially the casual developers (your goddamn core market!). You have 90's ish creepy video game examples (you could have made a mario like example), only one fake 3d game tutorial, and when your customers are asking you questions, you tell them to read the docs...
To recap, I think firefly could still be a success if you just fix the lack of docs/examples/tutorials, create a trial version, a maybe, make the interface of your plugin more intuitive.

ADS_3000 allow me to respond on some of your feedback...

DOCUMENTATION: There is PLENTY of documentation available. You have a entire section of Library.clickteam.com dedicated to Firefly. You have over 10 tutorials packed with it. And two complete walk-through files. Windybeard never having used it, was able to build the 3d version of Chocobreak in one sitting will live streaming.

COST: We put five years in to mapping 3d to something anyone can use that is familiar with Fusion. This is real 3d game development via the event editor. Its not a scripted language or a shell for some other method of programming. Its the Same system of Actions, Conditions and Expression we are used too. IF someone is ready and able to work more efficiently, faster and better in Unreal or Unity. Go for it! I would like to note that when Unreal and Unity launched they didn't start huge, they worked up to it. Maybe you can give us that same opportunity. We have never been a "Free" tool. Most people appreciate the profit mongering regulation we do, Our model has allowed our successful users keep the 5% to 15% they would have otherwise had to give up should they have used one of those other tools. Unity btw starts at 3,000 usd in gross receipts before expecting their share. Overall the cost of Fusion Standard and firefly is less then 200 bucks. That's three AAA console game titles. Everything in the world can't be free. If your not trying to pay your own way yet, you will understand when you are. If you are already paying your way. Then why should our work be worth zero dollars and not yours.

CUSTOMERS: Our initial customer base for Firefly is folks like you, Our user base. People familiar with the Event Editor. And guess what, most of us been working 2d this whole time. Including me, access to the world of 3d game development is new to us all. If you look at the examples on Clickstore you can see they are rapidly getting better, more detailed with high poly counts, etc. The last one Disaster at Firefly Station looks pretty good if you ask me, Certainly not something the N64 could have kept up with. Our next demo will be a FPS with zombies and a survival aspect. The best examples of what Fusion can do never come from Clickteam anyways they come from our awesome community. Triadian's next update should include shader support, normal maps and shadows. Again maybe you can give us some time after release to catch up.

In summary as I read your post for the fourth time, It kinda seems like you want a whole lot, but not have to pay anything for it. Clickteam doesn't ask for a lot. But what we do ask for our products is what keeps us making new stuff. If you like what we do we ask for your support in the form of purchasing said stuff. If you don't like it then hey that is how you roll and we wish you luck with how ever you move forward in your development career.

Documentation: Yes, there's documentation, but, as an example for the many ways the documentation is rather lacking, name one good 3D platformer example in Firefly. That terrible 2.5D one included with Firefly doesn't count, especially since it uses the built-in platform movement, and especially since, well, as I've already implied, it wasn't very good. Compare to P3D, where I beta-tested it, and yet I was able to start work on Quadratic Attack 3D while there still was minimal documentation. And Quadratic Attack 3D was a platformer. In an engine that initially primarily supported a first-person perspective. (Fun fact: Quadratic Attack 3D was originally going to be a first-person run-and-gun platformer instead of a third-person one.) Also, the examples that were added later covered a decently large variety of 3D games (platformers, flight simulators, first-person shooters, and one example even had the option to switch to an isometric perspective), whereas Firefly doesn't really have any examples that show a practical use of 3D for anything other than graphics.

Oh, and creating a 2.5D game ain't the same thing as making a 3D game, which is more likely than not what most people bought Firefly to do. So far, the only truly 3D game that appears to have been made with it is Disaster at Firefly Station.

Cost: *shrugs*
I honestly don't think a free trial is the way to go. Better tech demos and such would help, though... I'd gladly make something myself if I could only figure out how to make a 3D platformer and/or I felt like it'd be worth my time to make whatever tech demo it is I'd make. Then again, I'm pretty close to finishing War for Robovania, so maybe I could see about doing something once that's done...

Now, all that being said, I do like the potential that Firefly has, and I'm certainly looking forwards to where it's going. However, there are also a few gripes of my own that are unrelated to those other ones...

1. No "overlaps another object" mode of collision. This may sound like a trivial thing, but trust me, it's not. Making any half-decent custom 3D movement pretty much relies on having that, and yet it's something Firefly simply does not have. The big problem is that, due to the kind of event that a normal collision is, it always runs before other events, which is not desirable behavior 9 times out of 10. As it stands, we basically may as well rip out the collision detection and 3D movement code from P3D and use that instead, since the way Firefly works right now basically requires that we not use any of the built-in movement and collision features anyways, and P3D's already done all the hard work. Uppernate's complained about this one quite a bit on the Clickteam Discord server admittedly, but honestly, this particular thing is definitely holding me back from wanting to work on a Firefly game of my own.
2. There's a move camera with gravity option, but no such option for non-camera objects. I mean, wut? Wouldn't more third-person games need that feature than first-person games? I'm... honestly confused about this one, it just doesn't make much sense to me that cameras would have gravity and non-camera objects wouldn't, I'm surprised it isn't the other way around, especially since a camera could just be rigged to perfectly follow a non-camera object. Again, this holds me back from wanting to make a game in Firefly at the moment.

Again, I like the potential Firefly has, and it sounds like there's already some progress being made in regards to making it better, but that being said, at the moment, I'm not really sure it's quite there yet.

P.S. Disaster at Firefly Station looks well beyond an N64 game. It does look like One Must Fall Battlegrounds, though, which was released more than a decade ago. Now, I'm not sure a PS2 could run it, but a PC of that era might be able to run something like that. Not that I'm complaining, I actually think One Must Fall Battlegrounds looks pretty good for the time it was released.

Thanks for the comments mrogers15. Sometimes we ask ourselves what the heck are we doing, why do it when reading some feedback. But then feedback like yours makes it worth it. We appreciate it!

Happygreenfrog I think our definition of 2.5D is completely different. I agree that Disaster at Firefly Station is over the top 3D in nature. But so are the other example games I have made myself. Dungeon Crawler and Neo Run Out have the level data generated from 2D initial coordinate information. But as in the instance of Neo Run out, I still have all three vectors of movement, things coming into you, the ability to move side to side, and the ability to use elevation to avoid objects. All rendered using 3D models in a 3D draw space. Seems fairly 3D to me.

To me a example of 2.5D is as you had mentioned the platformer in the Firefly Examples MFA, as per the wikipedia defination that is certainly 2.5D

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Heck look at some of the stuff Patrice as been doing like...

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I myself am close to publishing my next tutorial, on how to make a Minecraft game.

Well done! Love the muted color palette!

the problem was you didn't advertise the product correctly to the masses. Most bought this thinking it was a polished engine. I bought it immediately after you advertised it like this Please login to see this link.

Because I knew exactly what I was in for. People needed to be aware that this engine is REALLY early in development. On top of this you advertise the engine as being great for making FPS, RTS ect ect but the inbuilt systems aren't working properly. As such its not as easy as its made out to be because you're going to have to do most of that work yourself- as I have been doing.

As for pricing, I had no issue with it, but that's because I do this for a living and could just write off the expense. I totally understand where people are coming from, but $100 for a game dev software package is pretty normal. The issue was more paying that much for a package that was so early in development.

The biggest issue with the consumer is that they're comparing the engine to competing AAA engines.. when they should be comparing it to all attempts clickteam has done in the past at 3D. Firefly is by far the best one so far. I've used all of them. JaMagic, P3D, Raycaster and OpenGL. Firefly is better than those by a long mile. It works faster than those and the tri counts are massive. The implementation time for the engine is fast, you can get an art asset into engine, fully textured within seconds without any prep work.

Is firefly a game creation kit. Not really. Is it a rendering package.. YEP. If you need 3D meshes displayed, and done fast with some limited dynamic lighting, then this is a great product.
Clickteam is getting better and better with 3D all the time, and despite all the failures they still keep coming back. Firefly is exactly what I was hoping JaMagic was going to be.
The problem at this point is that some of the objects we're reliant on to work the engine are buggy. I'm certain tri will eventually patch these out in time. And when it finally is, expect development speed to increase and you'll see the potential the engine has. The problem with the workflow is that it takes time, 3D art takes longer to produce than 2D which is why I've opted for a hybrid approach to speed things up.

Lastly the main reason I bought firefly was because I needed something to do whilst I waited for Fusion 3 lol. Because of my work with Firefly I've discovered my new workflow that I'll use for Fusion 3 eventually.

Kisguri,
Look, people were wondering why Firefly is not a success, I gave you, according to me, the reasons why.
You know, when a customer give you some feedback about a failing product, it's useless to question the feedback itself and trying to explain how great your product is. It isn't. Or at least, it doesn't seem to be.

I'm the kind of guy who has never hacked any software, because, as a developer, I respect the work of other developers. Paying has never been a problem for me, if the software worth it. I've been a customer of Clickteam for at least a decade. I've bought MMF 1.5, Jamagic 2d/3d, MMF2 , Fusion 2.5 Dev, the iOS exporter, and the Android Exporter.
So you know what? Stop implying I don't wanna buy anything. That's disgraceful! I'm not greedy and insulting me the way you're doing is absolutely not the appropriate answer. It's very unpleasant and unprofessional.

Before I give you 80 bucks for Firefly, I just wanna be able to see how your software is working. What can be done with it. How it is used. As I told you, EASINESS has always been the key to success of Clickteam's products. However, that doesn't SEEM -I may be wrong- to be currently the case. Period.

You have to trial version. Period. That's not good, but this is not a deal-breaker. Period.

The average users (including me) need examples, tutorials, videos, BEFORE we buy the product. What games have you done with this engine? How do you code? Can you show screenshots or videos on the way firefly works? I mean like CODING? There are just simple super short videos on youtube. And the games look just bad. And it doesn't show the code.
Can you understand, people need to see your product before wanting to buy it? You have no trial version, fair enough! But at least, could you show tutorials or detailed examples of firefly before we buy it? Is it so difficult to get? Just make one mario 64 like level, and SHOW THE CODE. And please, for God's sake, no more choco freaking break tutorial. Real 3d please.

The example you gave of something that someone easily made with Firefly was Chocobreak 3D (which is also 2.5D), hence the comment about 2.5D not being a good demonstration of how easy it is to use Firefly. I know that there are indeed plenty of decent 3D examples being made in Firefly, I'm just concerned that there isn't any evidence that it's anywhere near easy to make a proper 3D game, and all evidence points towards Platformers in particular being near-impossible, which is unfortunately one of the genres that would probably be easier for me to get working in 3D from a game design standpoint and thus one I'd rather use to get a feel for Firefly.

Now, that being said, there is one game idea I've had that might be easy enough to make with Firefly, so maybe when I have the time, I can truly give it a whirl and give a better impression on it than simply mentioning that signs point to it being not as easy to use as, say, P3D.

P.S. Looking forwards to the Minecraft tutorial... who knows? Maybe it'll give me an idea on how I can make a platformer in Firefly, seeing as how Minecraft had jumping and all that...

P.P.S. I'm admittedly a bit biased towards P3D since I beta-tested it, but aside from the fact that it's software-rendered and therefore slow, I don't really get what's so bad about it. Honestly, I kind of want to see about maybe using the collision code and such from P3D and using it in a game rendered with Firefly to see if it can maybe make life easier in that regard, since the 3D collision detection in P3D is surprisingly solid.

P.P.P.S. Take it from the guy who made a full game in P3D, I really want to see Firefly reach anywhere near its full potential, and I honestly want to try my hand at making a game in it already. But since I'm caught up in other projects, that combined with the fact that Firefly is clearly far from finished make it a lower priority than finishing a few of my existing games.

The Chocobreak 3D tutorial moves purely on a 2D axis. If you're referring to something else, I'm all ears.