Feb 11 2014, 9:16 pm
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Sir Lazarus
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I see a lot of pointless bickering. I hope my post doesn't go unnoticed because of this.
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A.T.H.K wrote:
Your point being? You got your requests answered and fulfilled that's ... Good I guess, it's a pretty nifty feature but I don't see why you got it done in a few days when there's more useful features sitting around without an answer.. I was actually contradicting your statement that these features weren't done in January. That was my point. No need to be rude about it. Anyway, have fun being angry about stuff. I'm sure it'll end in entirely positive results. | |
Rude yes, angry no.
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A.T.H.K wrote:
the BYOND community is more than capable of helping out on the project. BYOND has many talent people that know all sorts of languages, they would probably be more than happy to help with development for free.. I agree with this. I think there's a few people around here that could help as voluntary developers. Even a voluntary report guy who can write up posts to inform everyone what's happening would answer a lot of these questions, freeing time from Lummox & Tom (But not really since they would need to inform that one person, which could have just been put in to a post lol). | |
From personal experience I have to say that working with volunteers really sucks. They are rarely dependable, and for obvious reasons. Most of us hobbyists have started tons of little test projects but never really went all the way with something - because it's hard to keep yourself on track. After the initial excitement of "OMG IM MAKNIG GAEM" you lose momentum fast. Without someone paying you every week to continue, you still have to muster up that motivation somehow. And since you aren't getting paid, if you are an adult you probably need to work at least 40 hours a week, if not more. And then there's the rest of your life?
Tom and Lummox should not get more help until they are prepared to hire and pay for a real professional. Sir Lazarus wrote: while I'm developing things I have no idea if something rolls around the corner that could improve my work or render it moot So, you are reluctant to put time and effort into figuring out how to do something on your own, in the event that later it will be done for you? Exactly what features are you waiting for so eagerly? | |
Magicsofa wrote:
Sir Lazarus wrote: I'm supposed to build games with this toolkit, which could disappear overnight due to financial problems. This does not give me a good feeling, and while it will not deter me from trying anyway I can certainly see how people would avoid BYOND in a big part thanks to that uncertainty. Another quirk is the lack of updates on the development of this toolkit. I'm supposed to be encouraged to use it to develop games, but I'm not even remotely knowledgeable on its future. Maybe the HTML5 client will be released tomorrow, or maybe it will take 3 years before it finally sees the light of day. I'd like to use it, but I can't plan ahead nor cancel such plans because I don't know what's going to happen. Do I try to find a workaround or do I wait for the bug/feature to be fixed/implemented? I stand by the belief that it's the responsibility of BYOND Staff to keep their users aware of ongoing progress, so that we may plan for them and/or give input if desired; statistics on the user base, because it really helps if we knew how many users there are on the system with a 1024x768 resolution; and an insight in the financial situation, because even a history of the donations so far would be nice so we can spot trends. By "users" I'm referring to the developers who use the toolkit to write games, since those are the real users of the system. Anyone else is affiliated with a game, but the developers are the ones using the toolkit. That having been said I know it would be another drain on time to write status updates. But I think it would benefit everyone to read more about what BYOND Staff is up to and what has to be done just to keep this place running. Maybe it would even drive some people to donate. | |
BYOND won't become extinct in the sense that if we ever do stop working on it, all existing services will work. If we have to remove the hub etc, we'll ensure that people can easily transition to a keyless system and will probably open-source everything. So you don't have to worry about that.
My stance is that BYOND is largely a legacy product which isn't necessarily a bad thing; good games have been built with it and still can. If today's BYOND isn't good enough to do what you want, you shouldn't use it. Now this doesn't mean we're not trying to improve things-- because we are-- but I don't want people to rely on these improvements for future endeavors, because, like I said, it's mostly a legacy project. In other words, think of BYOND as 90% "done" and if you don't like it, then don't use it. I won't take offense to this. The financial situation is not that great. The goal was $5k/month and we've only hit that three times. We're doing about $3k/month normally, which, along with ad income and sub cuts is enough to keep things ticking. We'll try to push out a web client and hopefully that will help. I don't want to give timelines or updates because we never meet them anyway and, again, I don't want people thinking they absolutely need some future feature which may or may not happen. Make a game based on the product today. It's been around for almost 20 years and is pretty good for some things. | |
I think I can speak for a few people here .. We need developer updates or at least show us your plan for the next month or so..
You should .. have some sort of project management where you have picked feature requests to be done? right? I (and a few others) want to know where you're heading, do I stop development now? if you're not going to add in features and just focus on bug fixes I'll probably have to... wasted effort really. Will there be a web client? do you have an eta? You say 90% done .. but have promised a flash client for over 4 years? is that the last 10%? You talk about money in pretty much each of your posts is it really that bad? I don't think so when you mention "all existing services will work" Your server costs wouldn't be that much I would estimate around 100 - 300 $ a month depending on the plan you have with http://www.softlayer.com/ Will you opensource the website/hub? with all content if you were to remove it? Why don't you hire volunteers instead of Lummox JR? (no offense) that'll bring costs down and that donation bar down to probably 2 - 3 K a month.. | |
A.T.H.K wrote:
instead of Lummox JR Kiss BYOND goodbye if Lummox bails. I think you seriously underestimate how difficult it is to work on a project that's changed hands even one time, especially when it's constructed with some really antiquated core code that largely was undocumented. As for the volunteers, there's probably only about four or five people on this forum with the know-how, and few have the time or inclination. As for people off the site? There's probably not much of an interest in "work for us for free" that also happens to coincide with the category of competent programmers. If it were six months ago, I'd throw my hat in to try and get the networking layer moved over to UDP, and possibly attempt to rewrite some portions of the VM to be a little more optimized, and make some kind of an attempt at a more event-oriented appearance update approach going, but the fact is, I don't have the time, and in all likelihood, I'd either wind up getting in Lummox/Tom's way if I was even able to decipher parts of the engine at all. It'd be about the same for almost every person that is available, and those that would actually take an offer to volunteer would probably not have the skill needed to do much. | |
Geez, it's like you read my post and decided to ignore everything. What I am telling you is very simple: if BYOND doesn't do what you want RIGHT NOW, then just don't use it! It's not that hard of a decision. We make bug fixes a priority and unfortunately each new feature addition (like the multi-threading) introduces many more bugs that are often hard to fix and delay other progress. Feature addition is actually very easy and takes about 10% of the time-- it's the inevitable bugs that eat up almost all development. That's why it is difficult to give timelines and why I don't do it anymore.
Softlayer expenses are a lot more than that because we have two machines and an archiver for data. Runs about $700/month. That's not a big deal though. The main issue with money is being able to pay people, currently Lummox (at a small salary) and myself (at basically nothing). I can't justify putting in a lot of hours on a project that doesn't pay any of my bills-- although I have for many, many years. So yeah, the money situation is bad. Saying that I could just replace a valuable full-time employee with volunteers shows how little you know about this industry. Also, it's a huge slap in the face to someone who has made this whole thing possible for you guys. I've already stated my opinions on volunteers based on my experiences with them over many years-- there are a lot of upsides but downsides as well. I am not going to continue this discussion. If you don't like the state of things here, honestly, just leave. | |
Tom wrote:
Geez, it's like you read my post and decided to ignore everything. What I am telling you is very simple: if BYOND doesn't do what you want RIGHT NOW, then just don't use it! It's not that hard of a decision. After a year of development .. not a hard decision? pfft. Saying that I could just replace a valuable full-time employee with volunteers shows how little you know about this industry. True .. Also, it's a huge slap in the face to someone who has made this whole thing possible for you guys. I'm sorry for that I hope it wasn't too hard of a slap... I've already stated my opinions on volunteers based on my experiences with them over many years-- there are a lot of upsides but downsides as well. You could always off load bug fixes or .. the easy 10% of feature requests to said volunteers I am not going to continue this discussion. If you don't like the state of things here, honestly, just leave. Why not Tom? what are you running from? Why did you skip around my flash client question? I'm not trying to pick on you .. I just want to know what's going on don't get all defensive over it please. | |
I don't understand some of you guys. At this point, I'd think that Tom has made it very clear over the past few years that if you can't make something good with DM as it is, you probably shouldn't stick around.
Negging on them ain't gonna help. I doubt Tom wants to reply to these kinds of thing. You should probably just... keep your thoughts to yourself, ATHK, because they're not contributing anything to the topic. You're trying to tell someone how to do things who has been running the show for over fifteen years, and in a condescending, passive aggressive way no less. | |
Writing A New One wrote:
I don't understand some of you guys. At this point, I'd think that Tom has made it very clear over the past few years that if you can't make something good with DM as it is, you probably shouldn't stick around. Like wise. | |
A.T.H.K wrote:
Writing A New One wrote: WANO is running one of the few actually profitable games on our site. He's contributed quite a bit, and not just in what he's made, but in helping Tom and Lummox debug things, and they've also helped shape development because of it. Tom and Lummox have both bent to their suggestions and complaints time and time again, because frankly, WANO and Doohl both have made something worth supporting. If you can't see that Tom and Lummox listen to what we ask, and what we say around you, you are blind. Sometimes, I could argue that they've listened to the community to their detriment. Thing is, Tom and Lummox have kicked in serious effort to making this community and the software better, and in a lot of cases, few if any people have taken advantage of the features they implemented. 3.5/4.0's interface updates are poorly utilized/understood at best, despite huge efforts from a handful of users to try and help you guys understand how to use them to your advantage. (Your exact attitude, generalized across community at large is why I'm done trying to help the forum community anymore, incidentally. I spent a year trying to show you guys that BYOND is a capable engine with tech demos, and interesting code snippets, and deconstructing bad code to show that the same behavior is possible with a fraction of the resource usage. Only to basically walk away from it in utter disgust at this community's dedication to their imagined limitations.) Blogs and guilds almost killed the community, and drove away almost all of our competent developers. Isometry and pixel movement? Nobody uses them because they are terrified of "lag". The FPS update? People seem to think increasing FPS alone leads to out of control CPU usage. Despite being proven wrong time and time again, the community still clings to the notion that Tom and Lummox are entirely to blame for how things are. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, we as a community asked for a lot of the features, and badgered Tom and Lummox to implement them, only to tell them it still wasn't enough. Fact is, the majority of the awesome stuff that Tom and Lummox have added have gone largely unused except by those of us who like to tinker. Now, to sum it up, these last few months have been huge for BYOND. Threading is going to pave the way to better, bigger servers. The DMM updates that came with 499/500 were substantial. 500's new graphical stuff is out of control phenomenal. The new Javascript hooks are flat-out amazing. The viewport communication optimizations are going to lead to much reduced bandwidth usage. And the upcoming HTML5 client? That's going to be flat-out the best thing BYOND's ever done for itself. Yeah, Tom's a little disheartened by the community, but the fact is, we all are more than a bit. Sure, there are things I wish they'd do that would make things (in my opinion anyway), a bit more obvious, and a bit better overall, but in the end, I can understand Tom's reluctance to do a lot of them given the track record of "Great, thanks for the new feature Tom, but are you done making BYOND 3D yet?". The way you are coming across is really, really arrogant, ATHK, and I'm not saying that to insult you, but to make you stop and think about what you are suggesting. I don't think you understand nearly enough about what you are talking about to make a valid judgement, and if you do, I think you are being more than a little bit unreasonable. | |
A.T.H.K, your attitude towards the developers bothers me. You constantly pester them as if they are hiding something from you. That just isn't the case. Tom and Lummox are doing the best that they can. Trying to fit new features onto a timeline would only create false hope, which isn't good for any of us. Software development cannot be easily measured in time, due to its inherent unpredictability. You just may not have the experience to understand this.
Volunteers would not help BYOND as much as you would like to believe. It would likely take years for any of us to become familiar enough with BYOND's source to make any significant changes to it. That said, I have to wonder if it would be possible to maintain this as a business if BYOND went open source. After all, it isn't the software that is being sold. What BYOND needs right now, a whole lot more than volunteers, is game developers. It shouldn't be hard to understand that fact. There is no limit to the amount that we can contribute without working on BYOND directly. Just look at the work done by Forum_account. Just by making our own libraries, frameworks, and engines within the engine, we could make BYOND a hundred times better and more powerful than it already is. Tom and Lummox could never have done this alone, but it isn't volunteers that we need, it's game developers. Specifically, we need real indie game developers who actually plan on pushing their projects outside of the BYOND community. If that doesn't happen, then BYOND will eventually fade away, just like the Dreamcast did when it didn't receive enough third-party support. You can think of BYOND as being entirely third-party supported. Tom and Lummox are not some huge company that can develop first-party games on the side. They have to maintain both DM, the language, and BYOND, the platform, which is already a whole lot of work. Can you imagine a company developing something like C++ and its own operating system simultaneously? That is similar to what the BYOND developers have managed to do for years now. While it would be nice if there were two separate teams to work on the language/engine and the platform/community, with the current state of things, that just isn't possible right now. The fact is, the whole fate of BYOND rests with its community of developers, and Tom and Lummox are doing everything they can to help, in hopes of things getting better, so pestering them for updates or information is not going to help anything; it only makes things worse. | |
I only see two real limits in BYOND. One is that it cannot do 3D, which if I cared about I would of switched to Unity long ago. The other is the community, which if I chose to pay too much attention to would of probably made me quit long ago. The community may bother me at times, but it does have a few gems in it that help brighten it up, and I do always hope it'll improve if BYOND gets enough new traffic someday.
Now other than that, I see nothing, so I design my projects in BYOND, and I slowly inch them toward release as fast as I can manage with the time and energy that I have, all while hoping they will someday do well for me and BYOND both. My belief is that if more people took on that frame of mind, BYOND would be in far better shape than it is right now, and that lately it has made tremendous progress that should help push people to think more like that. Anyone who wants to disagree, go right ahead, and if you've got problems fine. You've got two choices. Leave, or deal with it, but stop the negativity. Feel it if you must, but don't share it, because all it does is irritate others. There shouldn't be a third option. There should not be any staying and being negative on the forum while you hope for this or that, because that does not help anyone or anything. Just enjoy things as they are and/or start trying to push out some good game(s) that benefit you and BYOND both. That's all there is to it. If you can't do any of the above, then you shouldn't be staying no matter how loyal you are to BYOND. Negativity is much more detrimental than loyalty is valuable. TL;DR Everyone bottle up your negativity, or pour it down a sink; either way just chill out and stop splashing it all over the forum. It doesn't help anyone or anything. It is far more detrimental than loyalty is valuable. I'm not targeting anyone specific with this post, just saying in general. I believe BYOND has made a great deal of progress lately, and while there are many things I still hope to see added and done with it; I am extremely happy with how everything is going except the income. I really hope it starts reaching the goal much more often, and I also hope to be able to eventually release something that helps it do that like some other developers have done before the goal was even visible. That's definitely what BYOND needs most right now, in my honest opinion. | |
Tom wrote:
My stance is that BYOND is largely a legacy product which isn't necessarily a bad thing ... it's mostly a legacy project. In other words, think of BYOND as 90% "done" Couldn't this be apart of the problem? What I mean is by seeing the developers talk like they're just about finished doesn't really put out a good vibe in my eyes. The same with making the financial status public. Shouldn't all that stuff be kept behind the curtain? New developers would see that and think "This isn't going to be worth my time, they're struggling to even keep the engine afloat." **Leaves** Which is a massive problem since new developers are what could bring this place back to life. I like the idea of showing how much people are donating, because it makes me want to get in the big all time 30 list, but showing everyone (including new people) that 5 grand isn't being made doesn't seem like a good thing. If my dream land version of life comes true where I win the lottery I'll destroy first place on that list and put enough cash there to hire another developer ha! Of course it is understandable why you guys are doing these things. Also as many others have pointed out, we could benefit from a new flashy homescreen. Once I get a better computer that can handle video editing I might design one and present it to the forum to see if we can all work together to design a new kickass home screen that will bring in new visitors. Cheers, Howey | |
Howey wrote:
The same with making the financial status public. Shouldn't all that stuff be kept behind the curtain? New developers would see that and think "This isn't going to be worth my time, they're struggling to even keep the engine afloat." **Leaves** The reason the financial situation was made public was because engine development was essentially going to die unless users started to contribute financially. It was the only option left other than Tom/Lummox parting from the project. | |
Writing A New One wrote:
Howey wrote: I'm aware, that's why I stated it was understandable. I wasn't throwing a dig in for them to remove it, I was simply giving my input. I'm all up for anything Tom/Lummox do with BYOND, if it wasn't for this site, I'd of not given computers a second look, I owe this site tons. It got me away from the wrong group of people, I want them to succeed in reviving this place. | |
So I've been gone for a couple months (since June of last year) because of the horror that is University. What have I missed? How is the community doing? How is BYOND overall doing? I see some of the comments on here, but am confused about the argument that is currently going (I am also a bit too tired and lazy to go 30 pages of comment reading right now). Hopefully all is well!
-Chiwy8/Tresov/E. | |