D4RK3 54B3R wrote:

What would you have Kohl's do for the customers who paid the full $150 price?

Nothing. It might seem like it's unfair, but it's not.

I can buy a computer game for $20 today even though it cost $50 when it came out. The cost isn't the price of owning the game, it's the price of owning the game at the time you're buying it. The people who purchased the game when it came out were paying to get the game then. I'm paying to get it now.

The people who paid for your library were paying to get it at an earlier date. They could have used that to their advantage - they'd be able to use the library to create games before the library turned free and was available for everyone else to use.

In the case of a DM library, I think it's foolish for any user to pay for any library (nothing against your library, it's silly to pay for any of them), so I have no sympathy for people who would feel "screwed over" because they paid for a library.

D4RK3 54B3R wrote:

What would you have Kohl's do for the customers who paid the full $150 price?

Nothing, and I guarantee you if you were to contact them and say "Hey bro, I bought the coat back in February for $150, that ain't fair!", they wouldn't send you the $130 difference.

Right, but BYOND charges people in the form of Membership which is tied to murky hub listing regulations. I know it's not directly related to the software itself, but the hub is one of the main reasons people use BYOND in the first place.

You could probably charge for your libs and it wouldn't really make any difference besides making you a little extra money. The only people who've made any real use out of them are the kind of people who would be willing to hand over $5 in the first place.

What I want to point out is these just aren't ordinary libraries and demos. They aren't simple things like "how to have click movement" or "how to make a HUD." These are fully features pieces of middleware. Big game companies pay to use things like Havoc and PhysX all the time, this is no different. There's actually a fairly large chunk of talented BYOND developers who are great at making tiny little demos but can never turn them into actual games. If they had an incentive to polish up those demos and release them we'd see a lot more activity around here.

Really, I think the main issue here is the good libs and demos are still too damn hard to find. There isn't a decent noob-friendly listing and there isn't an "as seen in" section on hub pages like you would find on Newgrounds. You still have to know what SwapMaps is before you search for it and when you do search for something your results are a cluttered mess of articles, libs, and demos with only a tiny little text button to filter it.

SuperAntx wrote:

These are fully features pieces of middleware. Big game companies pay to use things like Havoc and PhysX all the time, this is no different.

There are examples of free middleware. OpenGL is free, dynamic lighting is only a small part of it, and it's higher quality than any of these libraries. Part of this is just me. I wouldn't feel comfortable charging money for a library even though I write software for a living. I'm not sure why, but there's something about selling DM code that doesn't sit right with me.

I think it breeds the wrong attitude. We don't need DM developers to work on hacking together toy demos to impress people in PopLava's resource center and con people out of their hard-earned 50 cents, but that's what'll happen if it becomes popular and accepted that you have to pay for developer resources.

Really, I think the main issue here is the good libs and demos are still too damn hard to find. There isn't a decent noob-friendly listing and there isn't an "as seen in" section on hub pages like you would find on Newgrounds. You still have to know what SwapMaps is before you search for it and when you do search for something your results are a cluttered mess of articles, libs, and demos with only a tiny little text button to filter it.

I agree, but I don't think this will ever be improved.

Searching always has the problem that you need to know what you're searching for. People can ask on the forums "how do I do ______?" and if there's a library to do it, someone who is aware of the library will say so. That's the only reliable way to make these developer resources known, but it does rely on having these more knowledgeable people who are aware of what resources exist.

The way you fix this is by integrating existing libraries with Dream Maker. Somebody could open DM, click "New Environment", select "Realtime Strategy" as the environment type, and get a new environment that has a bunch of libraries already added and a sample RTS game you can run. People wouldn't have to scour the website looking for resources that might help them make an RTS, BYOND would come packaged with these resources. I doubt this will ever happen.

Making the high-quality developer resources more well known might help with another problem.

You see a lot of low-quality resources because it's become a rite of passage. To show the BYOND community that you've progressed past the "complete noob" stage you make a tutorial, demo, or library. Even though the resource is low quality it fools most people because it's better than what they could make - they don't know what a high quality resource looks like. If everyone was aware of the high quality resources, nobody would be impressed by these low-quality creations and people might stop making them.

SuperAntx wrote:

That is a very good idea and echos something I mentioned awhile ago...

The problem is that we need to develop these ready-to-go engines and we need the BYOND staff to understand why this is a good idea and why it'd be worth their time to help out.

I was hoping the Sidescroller library would have turned into this type of project - a solid foundation that the community worked together to build so anyone can use it. People would make contributions towards the engine itself or provide demos and tutorials about using the library. Unfortunately, with the exception of some small snippets, I'm the sole contributor.

I get the feeling that DM developers might be too self-absorbed to handle this kind of undertaking. Everyone wants to work on their own project so they can say "I made that", rather than helping out and collaborating on a single project and saying "I helped to make that".