I think I'm just going to throw in my $0.02. I haven't been active in a while now due to working 55+ hours a week while being a full-time Engineering student at the same time (and failing miserably about it), but I finally quit a job so I'm probably going to be able to be around a little bit more and I have a vested interest in seeing BYOND grow.
As a bit of a background to the vested interest part- I've been around BYOND since 2004 and like many others I, too, was encouraged to do even more programming through BYOND. I had already done some VB6 and C before coming to BYOND, but then I was introduced to My Life as a Spy and my life goal for a couple of years was to rebuild it. (Still want to)
After trying many times and failing to create a game with the look and feel of MLaaS because I simply wasn't that creative and my placeholder art is about as great as my GPA, I moved on to C and C++. BYOND helped me there in researching the various file formats found around BYOND (Savefile research with Bandock, some DMB research as well and writing an RSC extractor even though that format was already perfectly documented by the time I came around as well as writing a research proxy to study network traffic) and through that I increased proficiency in C++.
And through all of the years of effort and learning I've put into C++, I'm now technically a professional web developer for a state university thanks to BYOND forcing me to progress. (irony at some level?)
That concludes my backing of why I have a vested interest in seeing BYOND continue as an engine. Unfortunately, I'm not in a financial position to do anything about it at the moment because I am currently paying rent for two different places and I have a whole bunch of other financial obligations for another couple of months, but I can offer my aforementioned $0.02 on the matter.
The current goal for membership and donation based revenue is $5,000 a month. when this started, I believe it was at around $2,000 or so and since then has climbed to $3,600, due in no small part to a couple of rather generous users whose keys I will not mention. This is a great thing, but as mentioned what's required financially is more quantity. If you have a couple of people donating large amounts, they're either going to just burn out on it or be tapped out financially after a while of it. Either way, without a larger volume of people contributing we're not likely to hit the goal in future months.
Keeping that in mind, there's two ultimate outcomes:
1.) BYOND makes it
2.) BYOND doesn't make it
We'll look at the BYOND makes it scenario first, as I like to try to be optimistic when I can be. Assuming BYOND makes their monthly goal and continues to make their monthly goal, they're allowed to focus more on developing features and fixing bugs. This provides some renewed energy in the community as things are actively getting worked on again and it's clear that progress is being made, but then you have a question to ask yourself: How long can Tom and Lummox continue on the path they're on? Many of Tom's posts refer to BYOND as 'legacy software' and elsewhere vaguely as 'an excercise in frustration'. He also refers to this as 'a labor of love', but having worked on a couple of software projectives with all of the same descriptors- well, you can only do it for so long before your productivity starts to slip. Eventually, although much later than if BYOND doesn't make its monthly goals for much longer, we'll run into the other scenario.
Which brings us to the other scenario, BYOND doesn't make it. BYOND doesn't make its monthly goals now, or it ceases to make its monthly goals in the future. What likely happens is Tom opens up the software a bit to see what others can do with it, if anything. This is the point where we hit rock bottom and the currently mostly BYOND-centric community will dwindle and/or possibly split up depending on the results of opening up the software. This isn't a terrible thing, but it's obviously not ideal for Tom or Lummox. We love our Tummox. This all leads me into yet another section:
The ideal solution
The ideal solution would be a slight mixture of the two. In the past, Tom's brought in folks like Shadowdarke and co. to work on the website, FMod, OpenGL support, among other aspects. Although the OpenGL support ended up not being where one might hope (due to no fault of anyone's), these all ended up working out mostly because of the users selected to do so. The ideal solution and scenario for BYOND is that it continues to make its goals for at least a couple of months, and in the process Tom compromises (which seems to happen a lot, out of necessity) and brings in some help.
This help isn't like past help, though. In the past, people (to my knowledge) have been brought in pretty much for one specific purpose and they ended up fanning out and working on other things as well. What's needed at this point, though, is not someone to work on specific things but a person or two to do nothing but familiarize themselves with different areas of the codebase at a time and work on refactoring it to make it more maintainable. Picking people at random and having them actively try to work on current feature requests and bug fixes would obviously be a bad idea and not work out at all. That's like handing someone a broken toaster and asking them to fix it without allowing them to inspect the internals of it and get familiar with them first, you just expect them to know how it works internally and to learn as they go. If you instead hand them a toaster and ask them to change a circuit to use different resistor values or integrate with another board differently while maintaining functionality, they not only familiarize themselves with that one component but also how it interacts differently with everything else so they don't break anything. You might also give them a dummy toaster to practice on.
TL;DR Tom and Lummox are eventually going to burn themselves out working with legacy code no matter what happens, but they can't do the magnitude of refactoring that needs done (to my understanding, from past discussions with Tom) and maintain bug fixes and features to keep the community from dropping in support.
P.S. this post is likely to change in the next 12 hours, as I get to finally go to bed and wake up and re-read what I've written in a couple of hours to see if it still makes sense.
I make an effort to read every post, but good lord, TL;DR. I'm working on my excessively long post so I'm a bit busy GIMPing xD
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Well I read it and I don't have much of a response other than let's just hope the 5,000 mark isn't Required and is more of a high bar, where they can function with 3k.
I don't know if the 5k is a required monthly thing or not, if so then yeah we are in a bind. One route you didn't mention is Byond could receive a few hefty game projects that have been in the works for a past few years and that could drag in some consumers, not users. Consumers implies they spend money and if the games are well designed this will happen. | |
AERProductions wrote:
One route you didn't mention is Byond could receive a few hefty game projects that have been in the works for a past few years and that could drag in some consumers, not users. Consumers implies they spend money and if the games are well designed this will happen. It wasn't mentioned because that's irrelevant, the eventual outcome is still one of the two I mentioned for the reason I mentioned: You can only work on a 'legacy project' for so long without getting burned out. That would be the 'BYOND makes it' path, though. | |
Well there is no reason to burden with arbitrary stipulations, nature doesn't draw straight lines and plans tend to never work as planned.
Let's just keep the flow of the river without damming it. | |
Nice post, Auduero.
What I want to get across here is that this isn't meant to be "doom & gloom". I didn't set the $5K/month as an arbitrary value intended to motivate. I just weighed the time & expense of this project and decided that this is about the minimum we need to shift BYOND's direction towards more active development. To be honest, I'm not sure if that is realistic either but it would be a start. We've spent far too much time trying to work on ways for BYOND to be profitable and that ate into time we could have used for some of the features & fixes people have requested. In a perfect world, we could just have been working on features the whole time (this is what we did until about 2008) but there is simply no correlation between the improvement in the software and the money this project earns-- and as it takes a lot of time, we need money. So I've just set the bar and if we can consistently meet it, it means we can get some things done. If we don't, then it's OK-- it just means BYOND probably will stay about where it's at, with slow progress and/or a migration to an open-source. But both Lummox & myself have to do other things to survive. That's all. I don't think people really understand what it's like dealing with a project with a community of this moderate size. It's one thing to have a game that has 100 players, but when you have 50K, there's so little room for error. Both of us were up most of last night investigating a very obscure bug that crippled the hub, due to a weird instance involving the state of one of the users. Now this should never happen with a proper infrastructure, but it's not a perfect world and things do go wrong-- and when you have a lot of users, those things happen daily. That's why a company like Facebook needs thousands of employees even though, at face value, their site isn't really changing all that much. | |
Tom wrote:
That's why a company like Facebook needs thousands of employees even though, at face value, their site isn't really changing all that much. Heh, Facebook's biggest problem is actually their addiction to change. Never for the better. When we make a change, half the community hates it and the other half loves it; when Facebook makes a change, everyone hates it, because it's always stupid. | |
Speak for yourself and not others, Facebooks changes are always good adding features everyday is an issue for you? Could be why BYOND is failing.
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A.T.H.K wrote:
Speak for yourself and not others, Facebooks changes are always good adding features everyday is an issue for you? News feed: Defaults to sorting by top stories News feed: Keeps changing back to top stories regardless of user preference News feed: Shows game stories even when game stories are explicitly hidden from the user in question (a bug, but one they have no interest in fixing) News feed: Shows grouped game stories from said users News feed: Can't hide "suggested games" and other cruft Privacy: Every single change they make screws this up TIMELINE The prosecution rests. | |
That's your opinion not mine.
BYOND Doesn't change anything has to ask for donations, loses developers due to features not being added and has a feature list that just grows with nothing from it implemented :) Facebook is large I know but still if you put the effort in years ago instead of focusing on the failed flash client and more on features to expand the compiler you probably would have that money making games Tom always dreamed of. But yea I get where you're coming from. | |
Lummox JR wrote:
A.T.H.K wrote: *Bows* | |
Tom wrote:
It's one thing to have a game that has 100 players, but when you have 50K, there's so little room for error. Both of us were up most of last night investigating a very obscure bug that crippled the hub, due to a weird instance involving the state of one of the users. Who was it? | |
Oh yea what happened to the flash client? I honestly couldn't care less about it, I mean what with the standalone installer options these days. If BYOND could go to iOS and the App[le] Store that would be something. I wonder however, how the integration would work. But that is for me to not give two hoots about eh?
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SilencedWhisper wrote:
Oh yea what happened to the flash client? I honestly couldn't care less about it, I mean what with the standalone installer options these days. If BYOND could go to iOS and the App[le] Store that would be something. I wonder however, how the integration would work. But that is for me to not give two hoots about eh? That is all I am really wondering about, I wouldn't mind attracting consumers from the mobile products ~ they have money too (and those smart phones/plans/etc are expensive, so they have a lot more then I do, that is for sure.). | |
The flash client is more than just the flash client. The flash client is the opening of the client protocol, which means, you'll be able to write your own client, which means... iOS byond game clients in the app store (I think... as long as its not possible to edit code or some strange rule like that).
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FIREking wrote:
The flash client is more than just the flash client. The flash client is the opening of the client protocol, which means, you'll be able to write your own client, which means... iOS byond game clients in the app store (I think... as long as its not possible to edit code or some strange rule like that). And that is the only really benefit in my view, cross-platform ability attracts a larger user and consumer base. The flash itself doesn't mean much to me. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
Being able to run BYOND games in a web browser is a huge deal. Especially when you consider that this ORPG was made with HTML5 http://browserquest.mozilla.org/ | |
FIREking wrote:
SuperAntx wrote: Exactly, if byond can't continue beyond (no comment) then most would probably switch to html5 as it can make cross platform games and it is fairly easy to learn, although like most things takes time to produce anything worthwhile. | |
It would find a way.