The title is irony.

Recently we had the very first ever SnibbeTracker OHBs on BotB, and as usual I got excited about this new format for a moment. Until I actually tried it and got faced with huge disappointment. Some questions also came into my mind, mainly: Who approved this format? It has a miserable amount of flaws and bad design choices, including unconventional keyboard-only UI, loading/saving being an absolute clusterheck, and TOTAL lack of deeper than surface-level documentation. It doesn't even have undo, a must-have feature for any creative software that even a semi-competent programmer should be able to implement. This is obviously a half-assed tracker and the dev doesn't really care about developing the tool further, let alone fixing the existing issues to improve its usability (last update is from nearly 20 months ago - even MilkyTracker updates more frequently)

So finally it got me wondering:

Should we just find every single abandoned school project of a tracker software that exists on the interweb and make them all into individual BotB formats? Because if so, we should at least start from the ones considered relevant enough to make it to the modland archives.

In the end it's just another very limited fakechip tracker that has an uniquely abstruse keyboard layout, which is the only thing separating it from the hundred thousand other similiar hobbyist projects you can find on anyone's GitHub repo. When a new battle format gets added, it should first be reviewed to qualify as being generally meaningful and interesting format to battle with. Think of it this way: Is anybody ever going to get the gold medal badge, or will SnibbeTracker be forgotten forever? Again, I don't know if such "review process" officially exists already, or if admins just add whatever and whenever they feel like without researching much into it, feel free to correct me.

GBA format when

i kind of agree with you, lia, there is a weird collection of formats on here, but i think, every added format has its history and a reason why its on here, so i dont blame anyone for adding snibbe (and i have to say, now that i started with it, its actually fun to do stuff with it).

but i also agree, that stuff like GBA(for example, thanks razerek) (as in: relevant and real consoles) should be added with a higher priority (if there are good tools for it) instead of just-another-fakebit-tracker.

in the end, its pukes choice and i dont think its that bad right now. but as i said, i get your point.

The GBA is notorious for being incredibly annoying to make music for. That, combined with the fact there are sparse resources for it is probably enough to warrant it not being a format, even though I'd love it to be.

Anyways, there's a lot of formats/features of BotB that many find obsolete or useless. When was the last time you saw an fsound entry? [EDIT: ok I guess there was an OHB last year for fsound, but other than that it is not seen very often at all. at least snibbe has been in a major, lol]

Also, Snibbetracker gave us this entry (and I'm sure many more songs that are good) so I say it's a welcome addition, even if the UI is shit.

All I have to say is Puke Does What Puke Wants

lol i like snibbetracker a lot actually. it's quirky in its own unique way but it also has a texture i find really appealing. i agree it needs docs and is not a good ohc format but when you spend some proper time with it and give it a chance it's a solid program for majors. and i think thats good enough. not everything is about ohcs

also fsound died because nobody has the program anymore iirc lol

fsound is still available and i really want it as a format for the next winter chip lol

Funny. Everything Lia said about snibbetracker made it more appealing in my mind.

Too bad it's closed-source. Fuck that shit.

I should have that tool on backups.

Formats are added (or got added) when back in the day enough people had interest in a certain tool. Since everything it's a network, a couple of friends started to throw ideas regarding a tool/format in particular and asked puke7 for it.

Little by little formats were added up to what we have now.

you can program an mp3 player for gba iirc. that would b messed up for the format (thinks of what bytebeat has become)

^ I think there's actually a .mod to GBA converter? but it's kinda convoluted from what I remember (a lot of fidgeting with actual code), and might not even be accessible anymore since it's ~15 years old and the pages that hosted the files aren't even online anymore (MAYBE)

obscure, near-impossible to workflow with formats are part and parcel of the unique and esoteric experience d'botbe
if they werent there we'd have allgear and wildchip and nsf and also not me

"not me" sounds like an interesting format, will it be available next wc?

we still have pandatracker as a format, although that one was at least made by a botbr
formats get added for the heck of it

that being said, I'm still convinced that there are some formats that are never going to be used again because no one has the badge and no one on the admin team can be arsed to host it and no one's likely to enter anyway and it's never showing up in a major where there'd be more than a chance in hell of anyone interested actually seeing it

our mission is to revive unused formats!

make BotB great again!!!

digiboosterpro would make a cool format if it wasnt behind a paywall and basically a multichannel .mod with a built in 303 generator

The title doesn't feel like irony. Honestly, I thought it was going to be yet another example of how BotB Alerts look rather silly in some instances. Adding formats is not hard to do, but people need to show an interest. I know there's been a call for many formats that I haven't gotten around to yet (.669, GBA, Sharp X68k, etc...), but one of the biggest issues around new formats can be a lack of tools or documentation.

Snibbetracker meets the very basic requirements: free and available on the big 3 OSes. It was added for the last Spring Tracks.

"including unconventional keyboard-only UI" how many trackers have you used? :o

Also the majority of trackers in the list

are actually covered by BotB already; either by being a direct format or because they export appropriate file types attributed to console-based formats.

Basic rule of thumb -- if you're not adventurous then don't try new things and wait for the next OHB to come around.

null1024 I'm sure there are admins that would host unused formats given there are enough players. Heck, we have done that intentionally in the past: expose and explore unused formats I guess it's part of botb's dna. Badges are even the results of that.

I'm particularly busy *cries* sleeping 2-3 hours a day at most. I guess we could rearreange another wave of ohc'ing unused formats (sundays)

» Snibbetracker meets the very basic requirements: free and available on the big 3 OSes. It was added for the last Spring Tracks. »

Oh well, in that case I guess I should have checked all the majors since the creation of the lyceum article too, not only the OHBs. Because I thought the format had been there for longer than a year without any use, but at least it had been used once.

For me I just cannot find any good justification for not having mouse support. May have to do with the fact that I'm a new generation tracker user, but it's not like an actual compability issue or anything. It's running on SDL and targets modern systems. Trackers have already done it 30 years ago, and it has been a standard for the entire time. One bad excuse I can think of is laziness, but if you really are too lazy to include mouse support, at that point why not just make the whole thing command-line based or something?

Well that's enough of the SnibbeTracker criticism/hate. I am adventurous and like to try out new things, only in this case the new things happened to be trash.

I'll of course look forward to any new trackers/formats as long as they're not total crap. For example, klystracker (also recently had an OHB, and the format was apparently added around the same period as SnibbeTracker was) which turned out to be the polar opposite of SnibbeTracker in terms of usability and UI design, in a good way!

random info: there are 66 formats currently