I'd honestly rather let it die than occupy five more years of my life.
Well... This is awkward.
Tom wrote:
Well... This is awkward. | |
No refunds, buddy. It's in the TOS.
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Tom wrote:
No refunds, buddy. It's in the TOS. Lol. I assume it's already been transformed into Ramen. | |
So much negativity even from the Byond developers, makes me wonder should we even bother with Byond anymore?
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BYOND at this point in it's life has reached strictly a maintenance phase. There are other engines that are in active development that are more powerful. BYOND itself is still a project that was created, at it's core, in 1998.
Don't get me wrong, Tom has made some great updates to the engine since then (new sound engine, DirectX, interfaces, Matrix transformation, WebClient), it's base technology is still rooted in 1998. | |
Are future Byond projects doomed? Will the website and the web back-end continue running? Will Tom and Lummox start a new journey together in which we can all follow?
I'm going to feel very lonely and lost if I have to move away from DM, especially if I'm doing it alone. Q_Q. We should all fly in the same direction like a flock of birds, regardless of what happens. Sway, sway in the wind little dove! | |
What negativity? Pop was just suggesting something and honestly I agree. I can understand why Tom feels the way he does but then again I look at the choices that have been made and can understand why a lot of people completely disagree with them.
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I can see new projects popping up soon. Though, I have been more busy away from DM programming, it might attract some newcomers who are still interested. :D
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Maybe this is the wrong thread to post this, but I wanted to vent a bit.
I am sorry that my response comes across as negativity. Although my enthusiasm for this project has waned a great deal over the years, I am still actively working on it and am am actually pretty optimistic about the prospects of this web-client, assuming we can get it into a stable state. I don't think that declaring that a project is "legacy" or in "maintenance mode" is, in itself, a bad thing-- every dog has its day!-- although it isn't really fair to say that about BYOND seeing as we've just released probably the most ambitious update yet. Also, as far as I know, Lummox JR is still excited about BYOND development and that puts things in good hands because he is a very bright dude who, frankly, deserves better. I do get very defensive when people make posts that, essentially amount to "here's what you need to do to save BYOND" aka "BYOND is shit" and then propose some huge sweeping change that has no chance in hell of happening. And to propose that on a day when we release a major update is sort of rubbing salt in the wound, but whatever! In the course of testing the webclient the other day, I played a bunch of old games (stuff by Leftley & Dramstud) with Flick. They actually worked pretty well in the browser (some issues of course), but it also reminded me how fun these games are. And this was stuff written in the early 2000s, back when DS was just a fixed browser window with a few UI elements. In retrospect, I wish we had just stuck with that model and worked on the engine, because 4.0 was a big disaster that we're probably going to abandon if/when the webclient takes off, but live and learn I guess! The point is that BYOND has always been capable of allowing amateur developers to make playable games, probably better than any other system before & since. While the software is far from perfect, I really don't think that is what is holding development back. That really falls on the community. The community was at its peak back in the early 2000s when these games Flick & I played, and the reason was that we had a handful of users in their mid-20s who mentored the younger kids. I don't believe these users moved on to other gaming platforms-- I think they simply moved on, period. That may have been in part due to the direction BYOND was going with all of the Anime games and such, or it may have just been people growing up and moving on with their lives. Guys like Mike H., dramstud, and Bootyboy were all good developers who are IRL friends of mine and I can tell you that they just had real lives to lead and no time for this anymore. The problem is that we didn't get many mature developers to replace that crowd and that got more difficult over time as BYOND got the reputation of being an Anime engine. It was my fault not addressing this at an earlier stage, but I didn't want to tell some kid what he could or couldn't make-- I wanted BYOND to be for everyone. Like I said, I am very proud of this project. A kid who may not have ever programmed, but has some passion and smarts, can actually make a playable game. That is something I would have killed for when I was 12 or 13 (the only games I could make were little "Zork" clones for you oldbies.. do you know how hard it was to render graphics on a C64?) I think as a technology it is in a difficult spot because it relies on so much old code, and, if I had the enthusiasm, I would move in the direction of a full rewrite over trying to patch in new features. But that is a big project that I just don't want to do-- and I don't think admitting that is giving up, because BYOND still has a lot to offer even if it's not the perfect tool that people rightfully demand. Also, I should note that there is absolutely no reason that someone with an idea to make a better gaming platform with newer standards can't go out and do it themselves. I know that Aaiko has one in the works, and I fully support it. I think it's great to see passionate people try to improve on existing things. If someone here makes a gaming platform that becomes what BYOND strove for, I will be happy, because I'll know that I and all of the developers here had something to do with its success. | |
Ah yes, I remember the good old fashioned interfaces. I even remember quite some games during the mid 2000s. That around the time I did quite a lot of experimentation. Heck, not too long after the mid 2000s leading to 2006, marked my first attempt at onscreen input (which was clunky and awkward at the time).
Been looking back at those days and I have thought about working on a MUD-styled game at one point. Not too long ago (about over a month ago), the BYOND version of Text City Simulator (Version 1 that is) was released 10 years ago. Code was based on the BASIC version I made back in November 2003 (technically just before I joined BYOND). When it comes to BYOND 4.0, I did make use of the new skin features and tried to bring forth an upgraded ByMail Client. That was never finished and eventually became obsolete (which is why I retired it and made the webserver code publicly available). Thinking about publicly available code, I might eventually make Classic Tron BYOND Edition's code available to the public. Not sure if it'll be the original code or the current code as the former has been preserved somewhat (though with a now broken ByMail Library support). One great experience I have had with BYOND was dealing with reverse engineering (which I did along with Hiead, Audeuro, and various others). Taught me more on how to reverse engineer some other file formats as well as actually possibly build my own formats. Studying the DMB format, I can say it is flexible in the way it is designed. Reason why I say this is because I can see new things being added without doing any real damage to BYOND itself. That was what led me to devise my own variation of a feature request for UTF-16/UTF-32 (which is of course one of the duplicate requests, but with a possible way of actually implementing it into the DMB format). Now, it is true I joined BYOND because of Dragonball Z (to play Dragonball Zeta at the time). However, I started delving into DM just a few weeks to over a month. I already gathered some experience with BASIC beforehand. This was before I even acquired skills in C++, Java, Assembly, etc. I have been more busy lately due to the fact I have been working on building other programming skills I have been meaning to acquire for years. Almost complete with my first successful attempt at an emulator (a CHIP-8 emulator that is). Also managed to work on my first working compiler of some form. Been quite a busy year for programming all sorts of things. Did add a few new things to the SByIo Library (though it may eventually become obsolete at one point). Overall, I have had great experience with BYOND and I do plan to stay around longer. :D | |
I would just like to say that BYOND was absolutely formative for me. My first programming-related screwing-around was making the Amstrad at after-school care print my name out a whole bunch, then fiddling around with the graphics calculator I had in high school. But the first actual usable programming environment I found that was easy to learn and easy to do something interesting and immediately visible with, was DM. My dad found it at some point on the internet and showed it to me, back when it was still DUNG I think. I recall a little example game, too. The goal was to defeat a witch, which you could do by pouring a potion of the right kind on her, and there was a puzzly section where there were coloured barriers and you needed to drink a potion of the right colour to get through them, and a talking mouth that wouldn't let you through until you fed it a rat... it was actually a really neat way to showcase what you could do.
I was absolutely awful with the whole thing at first, of course, and the evidence is probably still available on these forums. But I did learn, and when I went to uni what I'd learned made my degree much easier to get. I found the way DM handles types and block structure really intuitive, and associative lists (and the list as a fundamental data type) are quite nice. I would honestly recommend DM to students looking to learn to program - Python does some similarly nice things, but is way harder to get running on your system and doesn't have the immediately-visible and interesting output you can get in DM. That saiiiiiid.... I do think you'd gain something by making some more code available. You probably won't get any significant contributions, but I'm not sure you'd lose anything either, and there'll almost certainly be something there. Obviously it's entirely your decision and I'm not going to quibble, it'd just be nice. | |
Jp wrote:
I recall a little example game, too. The goal was to defeat a witch, which you could do by pouring a potion of the right kind on her, and there was a puzzly section where there were coloured barriers and you needed to drink a potion of the right colour to get through them, and a talking mouth that wouldn't let you through until you fed it a rat... it was actually a really neat way to showcase what you could do. Step BYOND? http://www.byond.com/developer/Deadron/StepBYOND | |
Doohl wrote:
Jp wrote: Yes, that's it. Although the graphics and things have been overhauled, I see. | |
This Thread = It was a nice run guys.
*salutes* | |
Zecronious wrote:
This Thread = It was a nice run guys. Thought it was only me who noticed | |
LILMESSI18 wrote:
Zecronious wrote:Yep, two pages and only you noticed. | |
Tom wrote:
BYOND still has a lot to offer even if it's not the perfect tool that people rightfully demand. No tool is perfect, nor any person. Perfection is impossible by definition. BYOND is simply the best game-maker I have used. Maybe someday I'll get off my ass and learn a "real" programming language. But I can only ask myself, why spend so much extra time just re-learning how to program, when I have a tool (really a set of tools) that makes it all possible right now? Obviously the answer would be "BYOND is too old" but I don't think that's true just yet. Although, I used to be really involved with the still-alive DOOM community which started in 1993 so I guess I am just a retro kinda guy? | |
I've always loved BYOND as a platform. It makes it ridiculously easy to develop on, and with a little creativity most challenges are a lot more surmountable than they appear.
Do I think the bytecode system could be better? Sure. But I don't see the bytecode as the problem - As I understand it, BYOND is still running on an interpreter instead of a JIT. Now, obviously there's a pretty good reason for that (makes it a lot easier to port stuff around), but for all the 'DM is slow! DM is bad!" posts I see, it seems more like DM was actually pretty well-designed, and for an interpreted bytecode it's damn well-handled. Not to mention, you don't usually see interpreted code running nearly this fast. Future BYOND projects aren't doomed. Hell, with the webclient out, their marketability just skyrocketed. The same goes for every BYOND game ever made, excepting a few small games here and there that used controls that weren't compatible, and bugs that are still being fixed. There will always be extra little things here and there, and sometimes larger ones, that BYOND could add or improve on. What matters is that Tom and Lummox are very obviously doing what they can, and the webclient shows that off wonderfully. | |
Tom wrote:
While the software is far from perfect, I really don't think that is what is holding development back. That really falls on the community. ^^^ People, amirite? I can't imagine BYOND not being around in five years. This isn't about being competitive, cutting-edge, or even perfect. Pac-Man was made on an imperfect system, with imperfect code. Who's going to say it was not successful? Who's got the cojones to tell us we're not? BYOND makes game makers, not games. Wasn't that the point? Isn't it still? I think it is. | |
What I don't want to do is keep developing this project forever, even if that's the only way to "save" it. I'd honestly rather let it die than occupy five more years of my life. That's why I suggested someone else doing what you want. Your proposal is so grandiose that it has very little to do with DM or BYOND. It would be much wiser to just build a new engine from scratch. You don't want to do that because it doesn't interest you? Well, neither do I.
Best of luck.