Done the survey now. Reducing the number of templates you have to maintain sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Just a couple of thoughts on this.
First off, have you considered providing the templates with a system like CMake so that project files are automatically generated? This would reduce the overhead on you to maintain all these templates, and would also make it easier for us Tier 2 users to setup our games on multiple platforms. For my current game, I've had to make significant changes to the templates so that they can all reference the same source files, rather than having to keep copy-pasting source files between different directories, and I still have to manually update some like the XCode projects.
Second, whilst I'm definitely keen to see a 64 bit build, a lot of the advantages that interest me about more recent versions of Visual Studio are not to do with the IDE but to do with the improved language support for more modern C++ standards like C++11 and 14. However at the moment, we can't use many features, even from C++11, because AppGameKit has been built without support for them on other platforms. For example, on OS X and iOS, AppGameKit is linked with the libstdc++ library, which lacks C++11 support. If you're looking into upgrading the Windows template to Visual Studio 2017, is there any chance you could start upgrading the other platforms too, for example by linking with libc++ on OS X and iOS, so that we can start using more modern language features in Tier 2? As far as I'm aware, the only platform AppGameKit Tier 2 targets that doesn't support C++11 is the Blackberry Playbook, and I'm not even sure if that's still officially maintained. All the other platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android) have good C++11 support now, so setting up the templates so we can make use of this should at least be possible.
Anyhow just a couple of ideas. Glad to see AppGameKit is still moving forwards!
