You realize the whole problem is that its a Catch-22?
If BYOND improves, people will give it money
If BYOND is given money, BYOND improves
The ads dont work because they're so horribly obnoxious and badly targeted, it mostly pisses people off in SS13 because you have 90 seconds (even 60 on some servers) to set up and ready, which makes the super long ads rather obnoxious
It's not a catch 22 at all, it's just:
If BYOND is given money, BYOND improves BYOND is already worth money, and if the players of SS13 weren't too busy downgrading their service to avoid us getting ad revenue and were instead buying memberships, the service would be getting improved. | |
Rushnut wrote:
It's not a catch 22 at all, it's just: I think he means that BYOND isn't really improving even though it's reaching it's monthly goal. However I haven't read all the thread so maybe I'm mistaken. | |
They're not downgrading to avoid giving ad revenue, they're downgrading to avoid the super obnoxious ads, BYOND hasent done anything for SS13 players for years, the crashes (except for maybe one client crash I can think of, but I think that just had a workaround done), the limitations, and the problems are still the same
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BYOND may have improved a bit, but that doesnt change that SS13 players mainly see nothing of it, there were some refcounting bugs that were fixed off but thats all I can think about, and a workaround was made weeks before the official fix
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Not to mention, most people just see the BYOND developers as (quoted) "retarded monkeys", considering how basicaly insane a lot of the topology is, how buggy everything is and how much simple stuff is missing
It would have helped if they would have intervened that in like 2011, but the games playerbase has started to detoriate now so it would be much harder at this point | |
Could we please not derail this thread with yet another "BYOND vs. Space Station 13" argument?
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Most of us downgrade to avoid the ads because they make us miss round starts in ss13 to a horrible level. I personally don't care about any development on byond at all as someone who came to this a bit later as all their updates did was make the game experience worse with ads and seemingly more disconnects between rounds. The way I look at it is they should really only be running the server browser is all basically at this point. But then again I don't care about the other modes that run on byond in general.
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Reapter wrote:
Most of us downgrade to avoid the ads because they make us miss round starts in ss13 to a horrible level. I personally don't care about any development on byond at all as someone who came to this a bit later as all their updates did was make the game experience worse with ads and seemingly more disconnects between rounds. The way I look at it is they should really only be running the server browser is all basically at this point. But then again I don't care about the other modes that run on byond in general. If SS13 is so awesome how come nobody's managed to make it so i tdoesn't reboot when a round's over? It doesn't take more than a week to code something like that... and it's an open-source since many years ago.. | |
Eternal_Memories wrote:
Reapter wrote: That would be extremely bad, first off you'd need to either store a duplicate of the map (which would be rather big), or load it on the fly, which would be rather slow Plus, after the round restarts, everything is usually WRECKED, internally on the engine level too, even if you reset everything it would still be lagging to hell and back | |
Tobba wrote:
Eternal_Memories wrote: Well, I used to work on a game which was based on rounds (it was simple compared to SS13, obvs). But if a good programmer works hard on it I believe he can manage to find a way to make them restart; you don't need to duplicate the map at all, just repop it, and the rest of stuff.. Well, it does seem complex, but with effort somebody could do it. | |
Well, along this front, using my own round-based game as an example (though like Eternal mentions for his game; Murder Mansion is incredibly simple compared to the behemoth of SS13), I have simply given everything in the world a "RoundEnd()" proc that is called at (you guessed it!) the end of every round.
Each individual atom's RoundEnd() proc is tailored to reset that atom to whatever it's starting state should be. Lamps are turned off, curtains opened, items generated during the round (blood, water drops, footprints, weapons and other items, etc.) are all deleted, players are turned back into ghosts (the only persistent variables are some that store their chosen traits, like color, hair color, name, etc.; so these can be automatically populated at the start of the next round if the player chooses), and so on. Sure, this can cause a bit of a processing hit at round end (which in the case of SS13, might be a substantial hit), but I think that it could apply (and even if it locked the game up for a few seconds, that's still probably more elegant than a reboot) Obviously, it might be a rather large undertaking to list everything that needs to be reset, then write all of the procs to do it (of course, you might get away with just a large portion of resetting all variables to their initial() state), but it might be worth it. | |
I'm sorry that the game you play is traumatized by the ads. However, it is a must.
Before you come in saying what the BYOND developers should and shouldn't do, perhaps you should take the time to learn the situation and try to see why they are doing it. There are many features that could help BYOND (And some fixes as well), but the developers aren't receiving enough money to justify doing it. The ads help to produce the revenue they need, and you can even get rid of the ads by becoming a member. Of course no matter how much BYOND upgrades, your precious game will not. The only way SS13 will get better is if someone does something with the source to make it better. So in the end the only justification for you to become a member is to get rid of the ads and help BYOND upgrade, which may make some developers more motivated to try reworking the source code. | |
The source code is mostly fine now, have you ever actually seen it? (Mob count doesnt count, its actually being rewritten)
The reason that we cant use any proper round restarting is, as I said before, just keep a server from restarting after a full blown traitor round, theres gonna be holes in the station, sometimes there is no station anymore (this has happened), even though you can repop it, the amount of problems this causes is amazing, phantom objects eating memory, broken refcounting values, lag out of nowhere, and you would have to pay attention when writing round end code so no value are kept per-round Plus the server can barely go longer than a few hours before it just crashes, not to mention some servers update during the restart | |
We get it. SS13 wasn't built from the ground-up for a better system. It has certain design flaws that would require basically making the game from scratch in order to implement such a thing (not require, but any sane person wouldn't give any thought to trying without throwing it out completely.) Let's just stop talking about SS13 now.
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We thought we'd try adding ads, so we can start getting some revenue and adding those features for ya, don't you think that's a great idea?