Who and What is The Phoenix Edition

[bplus]

Since QB64 Phoenix Edition is a newly created offshoot of QB64, people have had various questions about who we are, what we're doing, and what ties we have with QB64 -- and they want to know what's up with our new releases.  Let me address those things one at a time for everyone:


Since Fellippe just walked away from the QB64 Team, things turned into a mess almost overnight with the new CEO.  Issues arose on the Discord, and I'm not going into any details over those things here as it'd just be rehashing the same old news over and over by now.  In the end, QB64 as it existed previously was destroyed.  The old team was completely removed from the repo, with all rights to push, pull, merge, or do releases taken from them.  The forums were shut down.  The wiki was taken offline.  QB64 was burnt to the ground.

Until we stepped in.  The Phoenix Edition worked hard to get the first editable wiki back up on the internet, from an old off-line that had been preserved, so people could have a working reference for the QB64 commands.  We worked to get up a new set of forums so the community could regather and not fragment into a thousand broken pieces.  We've worked hard on gathering up and making all the old resources as available to the public as we possibly can, and hosting as much old information on our servers as we can possibly find and share such as the old Podcasts and transcripts from those.

Most importantly, we've cloned the old repo and have been working fairly fervently to update the source to bring QB64 once again up to a stable version.  If you look at our repo, we've already had 54 commits pushed into it, showing there's been a LOT of activity by the recent team working on things.  We're the new team working hard so that QB64 doesn't die, as the new CEO obviously intended for it to do!

---

Now, as to who we are, let me reassure the folks that are out there worrying -- we're not some random strangers who just popped up overnight and decided to steal QB64 for our own nefarious gains.  I've personally been with QB64 since about version 0.5, and I've been pushing code into the source and developing QB64 for about 10 years now.   For the folks who don't believe it (there's always a few naysayers out there), here's a simple test you can use to check the verity of my words:  Open the oldest version of QB64.bas that you can find, and simply do a search for "Steve".  Almost instantly you'll see multiple places like " '### STEVE EDIT FOR CONST EXPANSION 10/11/2013" in the source.

That goes all the way back and predates the "QB64 Team" by several years!

And I'm not the only member of The Phoenix Edition who has been working and pushing changes into QB64 since about forever!





As you can see from the above, it's a screenshot taken from the github commit history with Galleon (the original creator of QB64), me, and DSMan all working on pushing changes and enhancements into QB64.  DSMan (Matt) is now back and rejoined The Phoenix Edition, and is working to help us restore QB64 back to a fully stable, working version, once again.  Just like me, he's been around forever and ever, and he's always been one of the people most welcome to help develop the language.  

As for the rest of our team -- Spriggsy, Cobalt, and Maxine, they're a little newer on the QB64 development history than we are, but you'll find their contributions in the old team's source as well.  None of us are "new" to QB64, and all of us have deep ties to the old QB64 Team, and we've worked on the language for ages.

---

So if we were  part of the QB64 team, why aren't we now?  Why did we migrate over to become "The Phoenix Edition"?






As you can see from the two screenshots above, before RC Cola burned down all the old QB64 content -- the forums, wiki, twitter, youtube, podcasts, and all else he could destroy -- he made a point of kicking and removing everyone from the project.  With the old sites and repo no longer available for us, we had to move on to somewhere, and the domain name and such for qb64phoenix.com was available, so why not it?  QB64.com as a domain name was for sell for close to $2000.  qb64phoenix.com cost $15.00, or so.  Since we were trying to rise up out of the ashes that RC Cola had left us in, it seemed like a fitting new name for the project moving forward.

---

So, why didn't we just stick with the plain old "QB64" that everyone is used to and knew?  Several reasons.  

First -- to distance ourselves from that drama.  QB64 Team was burned to the ground and destroyed by its CEO.  Who wants to be associated with such an act, and actor?

Second -- so that people won't think they're supporting us if they donate to the "QB64 Team".  If you're sending money to their patreon, buying cups or mugs with the old logo on them, you're not supporting us one bit.  Several people have offered to help donate and pay to help get the new project up and going, but that's not neccessary.  We're hobbyists, and this is our hobby.  We do what we do out of love for the language, and for the fun of expanding upon a language we love, and we don't do it for money.  Nobody is earning a cent anywhere to work for us, and help develop the Phoenix Edition.  Our overhead costs are just what it costs us to host the server and such, and that's all covered here:  Forum Costs and Donations (qb64phoenix.com)

Third -- Even though RC Cola thoroughly kicked and destroyed the old team, he's still the CEO of "Team QB64".  Unlike Galleon, who walked away and passed over the reigns to a new team of developers with his blessing, RC Cola left things in as messy of a state as he possibly could.  His last post on the patreon ended with: 

We will keep the Github Repo up and if their is enough people wanting to keep it alive please keep developing and we may come back.

...we may come back.

 So there you have it!  What's the future on that?  MAY??  

If we were to just pick up and continue to develop under the plain QB64 banner as before, and RC Cola suddenly decides to come back with a new team in the year or two, where would we be left standing?  How much confusion would that generate for the public?

"Hey Frank, what version of QB64 did you compile your code under?"

"Version 2.7."

"2.7??  But I'm compiling under version 3.2!"

"OH..  You must have that other QB64..."

No thanks.  Not interested in even thinking about that type scenario. 

RC Cola hasn't passed on "QB64" to anyone, and in an attempt to prevent any issues before they could ever arise from that, we're calling ourselves "QB64 Phoenix Edition" or "QBPE" for short.

---

thank you for your work. is this version based on qb64 2.01?

To address this concern, let me say, "It absolutely is."  In fact, our version 0.5 picks directly up from the last version of the QB64 team and builds upon it from there.  We're not officially ready to say we're at a version 1.0 (which should tend to state it's a fully stable version), but we're working our way towards that end goal.  When we cloned the repo, we chose to continue work off the development branch, rather than the stable branch.  We didn't want to lose anyone's contributions to the language since v2.02, as the team was moving closer to a version 2.1 release later this year.  

Unfortunately though, some of the people who were developing for v2.1 have walked away from the project for good, like Fellippe.  Before we feel confident in saying everything is 100% stable and glitch free, we need some time to go over what those missing developers were attempting to work on and push into the language.  We need to hunt down anything that connects to the old site and remove dead links, html calls, and all that good stuff.  The QB64 source code has a LOT of lines to sort through, and we're not 100% confident that we've purged all those old, dead, references and such, and we're not 100% certain that all the old works in development are glitch free, so we're not confident about saying we're at version 1.0

IF we'd continued on as just QB64, our version number would probably now be version 2.0.5, but as things stand with the uncertainty about what RC Cola plans to do with the "Team QB64" which he now solely controls, we instead are calling this QB64 Phoenix Edition v0.5.  

You can think, in many ways, of "Phoenix Edition" being 2.0, if you like. 

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what's the simplest way to transition from the old tQB64 to the new  one? Will I need to move my "home-grown" files, or anything else, into a new directory?

Simplest way is the same as always -- just download and extract the new version from our github.  If you have your own files saved in a different directory, just be certain to check the option under "RUN" in the IDE for "Export EXE to source folder", so that your EXE will be placed in the proper folders of your choosing.  

---

Feel free to ask any and all questions and concerns that you guys might have, and I'll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability here for everyone.

You did good

Yeah!