I apologize, I did come off as aggressive and dickish and that wasnt my intention but I responded pretty carelessly. Thats on me, I do that sometimes. Sorry.

You're OK! A misunderstanding is what that was and I see now what you're saying, and seems you know what I am saying which means we are communicating.

The fact that you made that netcode yourself is cool, and I'm not criticizing you for doing it

Oh thank you very much! Very kind of you to say :)

I think I have a level of high frustration with people saying things like Roblox > BYOND, or Unity > BYOND. BYOND is its own thing and its SO much smaller with one developer. It should absolutely look to these big enterprises worth billions of dollars and look for inspiration - but BYOND cant compete and shouldnt compete directly with those projects. BYOND needs to focus on its own niche - and thank goodness it has one. Simple multiplayer games. So make sure at all turns BYOND is making things (1) easier and more approachable, (2) focused on multiplayer (3) encouraging game development. I have tinkered with Godot and Unity, I've made simple multiplayer prototypes. I didn't enjoy it because theres just more of a chore baked in to handling multiplayer on those platforms.

Oh yeah definitely. Dream Maker still has its perks that these engines still do not have. And Dream Maker is hands down the easiest network engine I had worked with. And it definitely is toxic that people say something is better than x. I wouldn't even condone that type of speech if they still did use dream maker because game engines are all different and have their own unique ways of building games. It's all preferences!

my preference was a 3D engine not 2D, otherwise I'd use BYOND for it's unique network engine,

I think we focus on what we want to improve more than enough - very rarely do people broadcast why they like it here

Oh yeah, I still like it here. The games are still great. I like seeing what people are posting and what their discussions are. And I love seeing the new features being present in the new games. They are looking more beautiful than ever.

I am not your friend Dan from Brazil, lol. I did make a Naruto fan game, but I'd bet money your Dan was working on my game's source code.

I see, haha.

That is a very good point.

Byond has two huge strengths over any other engine:

- massively simplified networking
- massively simplified programmatic approach to game dev which allows one person or a very small team to manage their game.

Those strengths need to be capitalized on, add some polish, lessen the barriers (pager/registration requirements), advertise, and this engine would be an absolute hit. The best possible thing lummox can do is bridge with the mobile community, allowing mobile ports. There's a ton of low quality games out there on mobile. Fan games aren't gonna change that. Devs are motivated by money. BYOND's slogan can easily attract devs on the mobile front.

Why not become a flappy bird millionaire off of a hobby and support byond at the same time?

Masterdan wrote:

(2) when a game is abandoned, open source the code so it isn't traded between only sketchy players - but gets into the hands of passionate developers.

This is probably a pipe dream. Though it might be more realistic to pressure people to open source stuff here, with a smaller community, compared to what people who make ROMhacks and host private servers have to go through. I don't think this should be enfourced, but more open source solutions is better than less.

Ter13 wrote:

We cannot bring new blood in with our own nostalgia.

You say that, but one of the few reasons why BYOND limps along is DBZ, Naruto and Bleach, and that even includes bringing in the rare newcomers. Though it mostly happens through Discord, so I see the point.

Masterdan wrote:

(2) forum sections that are so low activity it makes visitors think BYOND is dead.

They can also see the games section on the site and arrive to the same conclusion. Then download the pager and see that there's just one active RP game at the moment, and everything else has an average of 0.8 players. Then they go to the apparently active Discord, and what are they supposed to think, that BYOND is super active, outside of those minor things like videogames? Yeah, no need to de-emhpasize anything here, just make sure that this is the only BYOND-affiliated hangout.

Masterdan wrote:

Saying that "just about any game engine does networking" isn't really a helpful point. There is such a difference in engine approach in how BYOND makes multiplayer entirely simple and baked in to the engine, versus Godot/Unity which requires you to actually deal with the complexity of client side and server side netcode. In a game engine it isnt whether the box is checked for "has feature", its a huge question of how its implemented. BYOND as I mentioned before is a valuable niche - but trying to compare it to all game engines and all use cases is a waste of time and counterproductive.

Like I said before, the only thing BYOND is strictly superior at is baking the entire networking process in. You are plopped into an online-capable sandbox as soon as you make your first mob and map, and at that point you can already host it. And UE even has an equivalent of that with its ready made game kits that so many crypto scams used recently.

Saying that networking is not the same mystery it was 15 years ago is a helpful reminder. When a person I knew was struggling to make his 1-on-1 online game recently (Jesus, it's been 6 years already), I downloaded VisualStudio and screwed around with it to see what could be wrong for a bit, and, after a few days, I had a basic server system to mitigate double NAT issues (his version was peer-to-peer, which likely was his problem) for two players with its networking library, and even speedran the understanding of why so many developers forgo the piping system for local multiplayer, which C# also supported. Fuck if I know if I could make something that would support even 20 clients without it being a bloated mess, and it was obviously nowhere nearly as advanced and sophisticated as BYOND (this is not sarcasm), but the point is: it's relatively easy to do in what can probably be described as a barebones high-level programming language these days. It's even easier in a modern game engine. It's trivial. Whatever advantage BYOND has in this department is eroding so rapidly, I honestly don't understand why no big name company (except Roblox) has made an equivalent of its pager.

I'd say that bringing that up is productive when a somewhat frequent point brought up here is that BYOND can potentially compare to this or that game engine. Remove this unhelpful discussion of why BYOND is such a shitshow, and the only thing you have left is arguments about why everything should be moved to Discord.

Masterdan wrote:

Like: BYOND has adware. BYOND hasnt even had ads for 5 years. But thats an instant complaint.

Dream Seeker tells you to get a membership to remove ads. You wouldn't even know this unless you used BYOND to play a game. I have to assume that either BYOND is lying to me, and it's certified ad-free, or its ad service is broken somehow. And what long time BYOND user would ever arrive to that conclusion? For that matter, which option do you think somebody who is playing a BYOND game for the very first time in the year of our lord 2024 would pick?

And yet Ter, I think what this also emphasizes is that the membership beg player paid membership model does not work well for.. games that aren't SS13.

So this actually I believe is a good argument for why other licensing models should be evaluated. I believe fangames for instance would be far more profitable for BYOND with the financing model of game based licensing. Will we see a change in the business model while SS13 remains a concentrated revenue risk? Maybe not - but there are reasons that game remains an island of its own, there is no single owner or single game there. The shared hub for several different forks of the source code and communities is unique on BYOND. So perhaps different revenue models can be evaluated for the rest of the BYOND community, to not be so concentrated on one project.

All the anime games are using the same sources as they did back in 2008

Ter13 wrote:

The dominant reason the lights are still on is SS13. It's not even a contest. They provide more of a natural membership incentive than the rest of the platform combined four times over. The reason for that is clear; The membership beg creates an incentive to sub due to the round-based nature of SS13, and the relatively shorter bursts of gameplay and higher amount of engagement the experience provides.

You are right that money is incredibly important, but so is having a population, even if they are freeloaders AFKing and waiting for a bigger number. And, while I don't know any alternatives for Naruto sandboxes, aside from that one Roblox example, SS13 has a pretty well established alternative in SS14.

I wasn't talking about just the business model, since I'm not sure how to tackle it at all. Masterdan's idea about licensing might make sense, but it's too vague for me to understand it.