Interesting PIF. Im glad to see you read it.

OneFishDown wrote:

The Create New World Wizard

to make a game, people will have to be able to code (or find someone who can). that's an acceptable requirement. while its possible that some people could learn from the code generated by the wizard, the time spent by the people who would have to write this code and code generators would be better spent writing tutorials.

BYOND may never be a better (in terms of ease of use) RPG maker than RPGMaker, but it shouldn't be.

ignoring impracticalities and assuming this could be done well, i don't think that it would help. it would increase the quality of the low-end games. what would you rather say about BYOND: "look, the worst BYOND games aren't completely terrible!", or "look, the best BYOND games are pretty darn cool!"?

plenty of people have made icon libraries and coding tutorials, but BYOND still has bad games. you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. people will always use the same ripped icons and make bad games. its not a shortcoming of the platform, its inevitable.

Map Making Turf Joining

this can be done, just not automatically and not in the map editor. sure, it would be nice if you could make the map editor look more like what you'd see when you run the game, but the simple solution is to just run the game :-)

also, autojoining rules can get pretty complicated, and you may want to implement your own strange autojoining method. a better solution would be to allow some type of preprocessing to be done by the map editor so things like this could be seen while editing maps. it would still be up to the developer to write, BYOND wouldn't handle it all for you.

also, not all games have autojoining tiles. BYOND is for general purpose game development, so its outside the scope of it to handle this in the map editor for you. there may be other features you would like to have in the map editor that would not be very useful to any other project. you're welcome to make your own map editor with features to aid in map development for your particular project.

More Debugging Commands/ Administrative Commands

how do you debug network lag? while more stats about performance would be interesting, the profiling is sufficient.

many people have written libraries to handle administrative commands. these libraries are sufficient, no need for BYOND to implement lots of administrative features.

BYOND Key Reputation for Forums and Add/Subtract Rep Buttons

no. when BYOND game ranking was introduced, look at how accurately the rankings reflected the actual quality of the games. it wasn't close, so i have no reason to believe that these rankings would in any way reflect the reputations of BYOND members.

It sounds like your awfully pessimistic about any change though, BYONDs philosophy recently has been to basically increase its potential which is great. However if you look at the priorities of BYOND early on it was more towards letting almost anybody make their own online game. There are thousands of programming languages for advanced programming mavens, but this platform has a bad habit of getting stuck between being user friendly and being difficult blank page with no boundaries The truth is there is no damage done to the high quality games by providing a new world wizard, just like in Microsoft Access if you use the wizard it does work for you but not necessarily exactly how you want it. Then design view is used for more proficient users to take full creative control. BYOND should adopt this, the noobs can use the wizard and the example code and edit that. People like you and me who feel confident in making a game from scratch would not be effected by such options. However it would accomplish increasing our minimum standards around here. Alot. Libraries and tutorials have not, if you have not noticed, helped very much or had much of an impact on newcommers to byond. It helps once you get your foot in the door and get committed to the platform, however people who are not sold on making a game here yet are going to leave before they understand which libraries they can combine to get a starting point, or put tutorials into perspective.

If you keep ignoring the noobs, and you just say you know that byond should focus on people who know what they are doing.. Then theres going to be that bottleneck for newcommers, theres going to be this terribly pathetic stream of new talent comming in and youll have what you have now. Theres a pretty poor selection of quality games. Also im sure people said having transparancies on BYOND or having interfaces was impossible. However im sure Tom and Lummox could make an automatic turf joining feature, im fine with the fact that you can do your own turf joining (I do this, i compile maps through a DM environment), however there should be a way to do turf joining through a built in feature. Theres hundreds of wannabe game makers here.. Theres only a handful of people who could do turf joining.

Your right about ranking being non-representative. However reputation systems on Forums if implemented well tend to do a decent job. Obviously ill be owned and in the red instantly, however most people who dont have polarized reputations will probably have a relatively accurate reputation.

And i dont know how you debug network lag, i really dont. However im sure Tom could come up with some more Debugging things, i think more is needed.

Byond should never be as easy as RPGMaker, i agree. However it should be closer. When i first came to byond i gave up on my first attempt, the only reason i came back and became a developer was because i got a hold of the Zeta source code. I dont like this silly black market way of being able to get your beggining here. Im merely petitioning for a more legitimate route for people who dont have as much experience as a handful of gurus here do.

OneFishDown wrote:

Masterdan wrote:

Theres hundreds of wannabe game makers here.. Theres only a handful of people who could do turf joining.

that's why tutorials like this one exist. if people don't know how to do it, they can learn how to do it.

some things should be the responsibility of BYOND, some things should be up to the users. to push a responsibility onto BYOND would take good reason.

the noobs can use the wizard and the example code and edit that.

i'm not convinced that this would really increase the minimum game quality. sure, people have these wizard-generated templates to work from, but wouldn't the easiest changes be to replace the template icons with DBZ/naruto icons and paste in some verbs found in DBZ/naruto games? there would still be a lot of cookie cutter games with the same icons, people would just have more cookie cutters.

its not that the wizard thing is a bad idea, but that it would take a lot of work and you haven't justified why it should be implemented directly as a part of BYOND. you can make a template for side scrolling games and people can take that and edit it as they would like. it may not be as user friendly as a wizard, but it would take a lot of work off of the BYOND developer's shoulders.

Because there really needs to be some sort of starting point for new players. Its not that BYOND will die off if its not done, but it will never grow at the rate i believe it deserves to if you dont start padding the learning curve.

I remember when i first came to BYOND and i went new world and i was greeted with a white page. How does that help somebody who is used to being greeted with all sorts of user friendly instructions from other platforms? Can you imagine how much more people could get into BYOND if they created a new world in Side battle RPG mode. Went into create map,had all sorts of turf options off the get go. They auto joined and they were able to draw up a really good looking map in 5-10 minutes. Click run and presto, they can share that with their friends. That person is going to get hooked, its like an addiction you have to give them a little taste and i guarantee they will start to want to replace parts of the functionality and they are going to want to make new turfs and icons and then you get a BYOND customer for life.

I like tutorials and everything, but i didnt find any of the good ones until years after getting into BYOND. Maybe there needs to be better tutorial presentation on the website as well.. Regardless, its really hard for a new player to fathom making their own save system, making there own title screen.. Im just saying if you provide that to them and they have the ability to read the code then they will learn.

It has pretty headings, but the grammar is bad and the suggestions don't fit well with BYOND's strong points. I'll address your points briefly.

Create New World Wizard - that's basically what BYOND is. The ability to prototype and produce worlds rapidly is already a strong point of BYOND, not something that needs to be improved. As pointed out by others (not only in this post, but in many others, if you've been around awhile), what we really need in this regard are excellent tutorials and screen casts that walk newbies through the beginnings of creating various types of games.

Map Making Turf Joining - once again, we're adding unnecessary restrictions to BYOND's core capability set. If you want a map builder that autojoins turfs, then create one as a helper project to BYOND and make it export the resulting maps in DMP format. BYOND's map maker is designed to allow rapid prototyping - that is BYOND's strong point. As a side note, the same goes for various suggestions as to improvements for BYOND's icon editor. There are other programs that create icons - BYOND's icon editor exists to allow easy creation of smily faces and various other prototype icons.

Fix the search functionality - BYOND is not a search engine. Search is not the developers' core competency.

Make an Interface listing, similar to Demos and Libraries - That's a good suggestion.

More Debugging Commands/ Administrative Commands - Once again, BYOND does not need to do anything to make their games more similar and restrictive. The facilities for administering games are already very easy to write, as evidenced by a multitude of available libraries with authors ranging from experienced developers to newbie.

BYOND Key Reputation for Forums and Add/Subtract Rep Buttons - BYOND is not a popularity contest, nor should it be. As others have pointed out, the Top Ranked Games listing was not a great boon to the BYOND community.

Server Manager tools built into DreamDaemon - The dream host is built for Unix, and as such it should be treated as a Unix tool -- a small program that does its job well. As a Unix administrator, you should be using other Unix tools to do the sort of things that you are asking. The answer is not to load more functionality into DreamDaemon, as Unix already had a multitude of available tools for monitoring and restarting processes.

Conclusion: Thanks for writing your report and thinking about how to make BYOND better.

Some of these are actually good suggestions (I didn't take a look at the PDF, since it's a devil format). I'm secretly taking down notes and ideas from some posts I see around here for DMIDE. Better search functions? DMIDE already has better search functionality than Dream Maker, and as a bonus you could use regular expressions too! Autojoining turfs in the map maker? Would be a little more difficult to implement, and I haven't even started the map editor for DMIDE, but it'd be something I'd like to have. Did I hear better icon editor? Since that's what I'm currently working on, I'll let you in on a screeny of an early demo of the dmi editor: http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/606/dmidexr6.png . Hey, if you have any more suggestions, keep posting them. I'd be more than happy to use them myself. :)

Masterdan wrote:

Remember, if you want to write something in a language with high flexibility and no emphasis on low skill members then youd be better off using C or its variants. BYOND needs to play towards a demographic in which it would have less similar platforms. There are very few RPGMaker style but with online functionality platforms, BYOND would become a cash cow.

That's part of my point, though. I think you misunderstand BYOND's purpose somewhat -- the equivalent of a fairly simple BYOND game, written in C, is a large undertaking even for a fairly experienced programmer. BYOND is already incredibly newbie-friendly. It is alone in its class in that regard - no other system does what BYOND does. (There are others that come close, but the breadth of features and ease of use that BYOND offers is really umatched).

Taking what we have and making it even MORE user-friendly might make BYOND more popular, and I don't doubt that the BYOND system will see updates where it comes to ease of use. However, I firmly believe that embedding a bunch of default game wizards is not the right way to go.

My ultimate vision for BYOND is pretty wildly divergent from that of the BYOND's developers, too -- and in basically the opposite way that yours is. I would like to see BYOND's monolithic structure broken down into many smaller pieces, libraries, and modules that can be integrated with all sorts of projects. Fewer templates, more flexibility, more openness.

I suspect that the direction BYOND is taking will represent a somewhat happy medium between our individual visions. BYOND's developers are very possessive of their creation. :-)

not to beat a dead horse, but...

there really needs to be some sort of starting point for new players. Its not that BYOND will die off if its not done, but it will never grow at the rate i believe it deserves to if you dont start padding the learning curve.

i don't think this would help the learning curve, i think it would make there be two separate learning curves: one for people who use the wizards and one for people who use BYOND the way it is used now. without tutorials and other help, it would be *very* hard for people who are used to using wizards make the jump to not need wizards.

your proposal just changes where it is that users have to make this mental jump. as long as there is a jump that has to be made, its hard to justify why a lot of work should be done just to change where the jump occurs.

its really hard for a new player to fathom making their own save system, making there own title screen

this will cement the newbie's belief that these combat systems and title screens are all distinct and unrelated parts of a game when, in fact, these things are all just icons and code.

for example, its very tough for a newbie to answer the question, "how do you make a combat system?". but, if they can think about the code and what the commands for a combat system are actually doing, its easy to see that an attack is just a command that lowers someone else's health. there's no big secret here, you're just subtracting from a variable. if they are used to having wizards to generate things for them, it may be harder for them to get to the point where they can think about what they need their program to do.

I like tutorials and everything, but i didnt find any of the good ones until years after getting into BYOND.

i agree, BYOND could use better tutorials.

Sure there was, what about Dan's test world?
That's a great thing to tinker around with.

People just arn't looking hard enough.

Theres no reason why this should be built into the compiler.
If anything, it should be a player-made dmb scripting language. (Meaning, a world where it interpets the code)