Jittai wrote:

What if on top of current system you could tag certain games as "sponsored" by BYOND and all this does is list them in a special section or gives them a special symbol?

This reminds me of the "featured games" feature we had before the website updated. If I recall correctly, only five or so games ever made it on that list. I can't say how hectic it was for ACWraith, but I'd imagine it was just as bad when we had a listing standard for games.

Assuming we do go for it, I'm certain it'll lead back to people complaining about the standards being too high ( they usually aren't ), some moderators investing a lot of time in pointless back and forth with the user, and then Tom getting spammed with complaints.

If it really is that important to be showcased, I'd recommend you make a feature request and provide exactly why it's important/beneficial. If it's added, I'll dedicated time to that section.

I think it would be more effective to improve the compensation for advertising BYOND. I personally love the current system, but it does take 60 days for any money to show up in your wallet, and it is a pretty old system with old advertisement image options.

There needs to be some sort of way to detect whether an invited member sticks around besides them buying a membership, most likely. Hm, maybe something else to encourage not only inviting people, but working hard to keep them around too. A bonus to this would be if it got people commenting, tweeting, and such about BYOND in a more positive or at least less negative manner.

LILMESSI18 wrote:

LILMESSI18 wrote:

People don't make good games in byond cause they don't want to put up with it, and if it ever got really popular and they wanted to expand byond is to weak for one of those 1000+ type of servers.dont get me wrong great games could be made but people are about money and progress. All you need is to have a cult base of users and supporters that is all your looking for or should be. You all need to get byond being some super popular language out of your heads, I like byond cause its unique and mine. Keep it that way aslong as it gets then financial support its needs and regular purposeful updates.

No game in the history of ever has supported 1,000 players on a single machine hosted on some 15 year old's laptop hooked up to wifi in his mom's basement.

There is no need to support 1000+ players to a single machine, because even professional solutions do not do this. I'd go into explaining how MMORPG "servers" are actually a cluster of dozens of individual servers, but I'm sure it'd be completely pointless.

Back in 2001, hardware sucked, even by that dates standards, they were doing something badly wrong

You took that from what i said...

Even tom agreed with me on my main point. even though you didn't mention it at all.

Topkasa wrote:

No game in history, even professionally, has come close to that on a single machine. It takes a huge amount of processing power to handle a large number of players.

This isn't true. The multi-player mod for Just Cause 2 ran beta tests with 1800 players on a single server. Not only did the tests perform well, but they said that they didn't make it anywhere near maxing out the hardware.

Can you guess what their hardware setup was?
JC2MP wrote:

We have previously measured that the server, with 1000 players [sic (This is all I could find.)] concurrently playing, used 2 CPU cores (2.93 GHz), 90 MB of RAM, 5 MB of disk space and 35 mbit per second.

We are working on improving the CPU usage and try to further optimize the bandwidth usage to make sure they are reasonable.

Yeah, the issue with BYOND in such a scenario is it's thin-client, essentially, so the server most of the legwork. That is pretty much the price you pay for the ease of use of the language, the lack of server-client distinction and so on.

In a more bespoke solution, you get to make the design decisions on what needs to be server-side, what can be client-side, how to compensate for clock-skew, latency, jitter etc. For such scenarios, you then can get a lot more bang for your buck out of any multiplayer server solution.

It's probably worth noting, that a lot of professional games we tend to take as our benchmarks for through-put are either very dated in technical design (like earlier MMOs) or your CS:S variety, where the design ethic planned for double-digit players, with optimistic network assumptions. Things like the CS:S dedicated server for example are largely re-purposed bits from CS:S''s existing network architecture, in order to meet the client's design assumptions. You're obviously never going to fit 1000+ player scenarios into a system like that.

The Just Cause 2 multi-player mod though, I assume they got to start from pretty much a clean-slate in their design of how it'd all network together?

Makes sense, and not the worst solution in the world. Presumably the server itself then uses asynch I/O patterns to get that through-put, NodeJS style, given their actual "code" code as it were is probably just very basic "send this to everyone else" stuff?

Here we go, I've finally started making my mark on BYOND benefactorage (new word)! Got my main account up to $60, and the account for my gaming group up to third highest donating this month!

LILMESSI18 wrote:

Jittai wrote:

People don't realize that it is close to impossible to get something "insanely" popular made on BYOND, at least on global standards - but there's nothing wrong with that. All you need is to have a cult base of users and supporters. DM will never be some widely used language by game developers, it's for hobbyists by hobbyists (arguably), it is unique and "mine". Just as a game on BYOND need a core fan base eager to support so does BYOND to get really useful updates.

my exact point, which tom also agreed on. im not the only one jeez.

I just copy pasted your reply and changed some stuff around lol.