BYONDscape subscriptions may now be purchased on a monthly basis: 10 BYONDimes = 1 month's access. Enjoy!
ID:137273
 Jan 4 2002, 4:51 am
|
|
What can i do as a member? BYONDscape members get access to all the "subscription content", including articles, libraries, games (or special features within games, or game demos, or whatever), and some other neat stuff. I love it!!! I'm glad to hear it! | |
Air _King wrote:
What can i do as a member? Also Deadron where is your Library? I haven't added libraries yet...ShadowDarke's text library is the only one so far that I'm aware of. I'll get to it soon! | |
Air _King wrote:
1 more thing, Do I get to post Librarys and stuff i make? If you want to contribute something to BYONDscape, you talk to the editor guy, who in fact happens to be Guy... | |
1 more thing, Do I get to post Librarys and stuff i make? Everything that goes up on BYONDscape will have to pass the Ordeal of the Thirty Onyx Gates. Which is to say: we'll take submissions, but we'll also be somewhat picky about what we accept! On the other hand, if a submission is promising but not quite ready, we might accept it conditionally (enhance it in such-and-such a way, and we'll take it). Sooner or later we'll probably create a Policy (ugh) about all this, but for now BYONDscape is new enough that we'll deal with submissions on a case-by-case basis. | |
Deadron wrote:
Air _King wrote: I plan on releasing my realt time strategy engine and text mud engine to BYONDScape too. | |
I sense that Byond will no longer be a free community...
That's good for anti-dbzness (kinda), but it's going to hurt anyone who needs those libraries to make something different (as in, people starting out, who haven't made any money yet because they haven't made a game and they aren't willing to cash in! (Like me!)) Actually, I think I'll be one of those people who waits for a while, cashes in 10 dimes, and downloads everything on the site to my harddrive. | |
i agree with foomer. BYOND not being a free community will be bad, but on the plus side with the new release to my game shortly i will have the dimes to stay aboard.
| |
i agree with foomer. BYOND not being a free community will be bad, but on the plus side with the new release to my game shortly i will have the dimes to stay aboard. Yikes! This "no longer a free community" stuff is a little apocalyptic for my tastes. BYONDscape is essentially just an e-zine. There's nothing stopping anyone else from making their own. (Heck, if someone did a good enough job of it, I'd probably try to sucker them into taking the Editor job off my hands.) Dan and Tom have said before -- and will no doubt say again -- that the BYOND package was, is, and will be free. Unless they've had a radical change of heart lately, that's still their intention. | |
Byond itself is free, but to get your hands on any good coding help you have to dish out money, instead of just looking to the links over there...
In the long run, that could mean more junk games, since builders can only get their hands on junk-code to help them. | |
Byond itself is free, but to get your hands on any good coding help you have to dish out money, instead of just looking to the links over there... As far as I know, the links will still be there, and seasoned coders will still help people out in the forums. Maybe I'm still missing your point, but I really don't think that the existence of BYONDscape is going to be a severe blow to people who don't subscribe to it. | |
Gughunter wrote:
As far as I know, the links will still be there, and seasoned coders will still help people out in the forums. Maybe I'm still missing your point, but I really don't think that the existence of BYONDscape is going to be a severe blow to people who don't subscribe to it. I agree. Besides, I think BYONDscape is pretty cheap considering you don't even need pay for a whole year. I mean common, just pay a dollar and then get all the stuff. Keep doing that everytime they get a bunch of new stuff. LOL, it's actually raping the system but I guess that's being encouraged. Hehehehe. I think the money from BYONDscape should go to Dantom though. I can understand their position on wanting the developers to succeed though. If Developers are successful at BYOND, it will attract more people. | |
Gughunter wrote:
Byond itself is free, but to get your hands on any good coding help you have to dish out money, instead of just looking to the links over there... Yes. On the contrary, it is a benefit to those who do -- anyone else who does not simply learns at the same rate that everyone already learns. In other words, BYONDscape increases programming ability for subscribers. Everyone else will notice no change. BYONDscape, as I can see it, promotes high-end programming and stuff. I.e. the libraries you find on BYONDscape are ultra-powerful libraries that give you an edge. The newbie material on BYONDscape is often going to be free. Plus, there is nothing stopping someone from submitting things to the links on the left either. | |
Foomer wrote:
I sense that Byond will no longer be a free community... I'd hate to see anything about this hurt people making future games...so here is a rambling tumble of thoughts on the whole think, which I'm admittedly still working through in my mind: I'll give you odds that thanks to BYONDscape there will be MORE free content that helps newbies rather than less. I certainly am going to devote a larger percentage of my time to writing up free articles than I was going to otherwise. On the question of libraries, I'm still musing about it...but look at it this way: Some libraries that a lot of new people like to use, like CharacterHandling, are going to become subscription-based. However, because it's becoming subscription-based I'm going to spend a chunk of my weekend considerably enhancing the demos and library. Then anyone can get it for a $1 one-time charge... But I'm still musing on the whole thing...I don't want to make it harder for new people to save their characters (perhaps for many the problem the library solves is indeed "essential functionality"), but I want to help out the BYOND community by encouraging people to subscribe to this worthy project... I may well end up coming up with some compromise, but I don't know what it is yet. Perhaps the library will remain free, but the extensive sample code will be subscription-only. Or maybe I can get smart and turn the demo code into a plug-and-play added value library on top of CharacterHandling... CharacterHandling is a bit of a tough one, but let's look at a couple of other libraries: PathFinding and Calendar. In both of these cases I've done research and have (especially for PathFinding) a year+ of experience and bug-fixing built into something that is completely added-value. You don't have to have the PathFinding library to get your mobs to move around, but if you do use the library it solves a number of problems for you. Since it's all added value and you can certainly choose to forego it (as most people do!), then I don't think there's a negative impact to making it part of the BYONDscape subscription. Calendar is sort of a unique case at this point...it's no longer essential thanks to the relatively new BYOND date function. I don't use it in any games, because it was originally designed for MUD games to create their own game calendars, and I'm not currently working on a MUD. However I've revised it a couple of times and added features, purely to help other people with their games -- and I need to do that again to support B.C. and negative time dates. Any effort I put into that is completely for other people without (at this point anyway) also improving my own games. If there were no BYOND date function I would consider it essential and wouldn't make it subscription-based. But that's not the case. So again I think it's reasonable to make it subscription-based. But here is my real thinking about the whole question of BYONDscape subscriptions: In reality this doesn't have much to do with BYONDscape. The real thing we're working through here is how to get money flowing through this system. Because, ultimately, money must flow or eventually this will become some form of dead or half-dead project, since Dantom has to stop eating their shoelaces for dinner. We're working through how to do that with BYONDscape, because the developers are the current BYOND audience that we understand...but developers aren't ultimately the real audience. I've proposed that some games tie their subscriptions to BYONDscape, and I think that is the start of the real outcome of this: A player-based subscription system. Players will have access to dozens/hundreds of games through BYOND, and perhaps we'll end up with a "BYOND Season Ticket" thing where you can buy one subscription and get the extra features and access of dozens of games at once. That may well solve the question of how smaller games that don't engender cult audiences can help get money flowing through the system, and how everyone can benefit. So this is a practice run, and the questions of what is valuable and what is not, and what impact subscriptions have on the system, are good ones to bring up because they are exactly what we all need to work through now that BYOND is finally truly "going public"... | |
Some libraries that a lot of new people like to use, like CharacterHandling, are going to become subscription-based. However, because it's becoming subscription-based I'm going to spend a chunk of my weekend considerably enhancing the demos and library. Then anyone can get it for a $1 one-time charge... Now that I think of it, it's probably more important that any information that will help people to learn DM be free, but libraries, since they aren't a necessity and can always be rebuilt with effort, could be charged for. I'd hate to see anyone charging for articles to improve their coding though, that just seems like a shame. | |
Foomer wrote:
I'd hate to see anyone charging for articles to improve their coding though, that just seems like a shame. I understand the sentiment and think that we should certainly think three times about coding articles that are subscription-based... But people do pay for Perl magazines and C++ magazines and Game Developer magazine... | |
Foomer wrote:
Now that I think of it, it's probably more important that any information that will help people to learn DM be free, but libraries, since they aren't a necessity and can always be rebuilt with effort, could be charged for. I agree, these libraries should remain free due to the fact that they help in the learning stages of DM, libraries that would be add-ons to games (such as Shadowdarke's) can remain subscription based, the more libraries like Character handling that become subscription based would increase the questions asked here by alot, and you couldn't just point out some library, most newbies don't even know what a BYONDime is. | |
Deadron wrote:
Foomer wrote: Good point, but most Perl and C++ libraries are free to use. | |
[EDIT]
What can i do as a member? Also Deadron where is your Library?
I love it!!!
[/EDIT]