"A BYOND account is completely free. It provides your default name and gender in the games."
Hello. I have a few questions:
1. Are games built on this engine browser games? are they standalone games? I am looking for standalone game. Also, which version of DirectX is supported?
2. Do you have to be online, I mean, connected to BYOND platform in order to develop? For starters I tried to load "Your First World" but that also opened BYOND platform. :S Don't misunderstand me, I like the community feeling but I am hoping it is optional and I can just download a few code examples and develop offline? Now I know I can't open "Your first World" without the rest, and that makes me wonder about privacy. Is my content/project private?
3. What do I owe to BYOND for helping me to make a game? are there any rules or limitations?
ID:1793766
 Feb 25 2015, 5:49 am
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I'm not entirely sure about the status of the standalone, but the webclient is a "beta" feature that is being worked on as the primary focus.
You're free to download project files and work offline, only part that needs an connection is multiplayer. If you open two copies of the same source code, only one will display the entire source. You content is only shared with whomever you wish to share it with. You can make your own in-house subscription system and won't have to b.s. pay BYOND anything, but using their subscription system(credits per-game), you automatically pay them a cut and they give you the majority. Ads are a thing when players connect to your games, though. | |
I'm not sure I like how the system works. I feel pressured to make accounts and login in many places just to access the basic stuff or try a game someone else made. And even if I finish a game my future users would have only two options: a) laggy as always webclient b) a standalone where they find a lot of games and totally forget about mine just by doing two clicks.
Besides the fact (If I've understood things correctly) that I will depend on BYOND servers. But I'll ask it this way just to make sure I understood it: If BYOND company disappeared tomorrow could I keep developing and running the server of my game&updating it???? | |
The games here are all run on your computer (or a remote server) via the DreamDaemon program. Players connect either through DreamSeeker (software client) or the experimental webclient. The byond.exe iis a middleman to launch DreamSeeker. We also have a standalone solution that does the same thing through a custom exe, which is probably what you have in mind. A few games such as NEStalgia and Feed have used this-- you can google them to see.
The standalone is currently not publicly available because we are planning on doing something better with the new webclient protocol, but you can always contact us when your game is ready (so long as it is original content). The standalone just embeds DreamSeeker, which is windows-only requires DX9 (or better) for graphics. As the process to create the standalone is complicated, we'd like to move to something cleaner and more versatile, and I believe a Chrome-embedded solution auto-generated via DreamMaker will work well, once the webclient performance is on par with DreamSeeker's. You can make and play games without an account, as long as you create your own account system (in the case of multiplayer). We have a "guest" login system that provides the server with a unique id for each client. Developing games is done completely offline. It may not appear that way when downloading demos, because the client used to do the downloading is the same byond.exe used to play games, but all it is doing is connecting to the central server to grab the location of the demo. I think this is a little clunky and I think we can set it up to be more transparent. Once it launches the DreamMaker iDE, you are working entirely offline. BYOND subscriptions are all optional although we desperately need them to move forward with these kinds of developments. The last section of the latest announcement addresses the "doomsday" scenario: ID:1784423 | |
You desperately need subscriptions? I just watched a fking car commercial for no reason while I was trying to open a game. The data of the game (62.2mb) took 4 minutes to download in MY 100MB SYMMETRICAL OPTIC FIBER CONNECTION. So then after waiting 10 minutes and becoming very angry I spectate a space game which looks and lags like shit even for the java standards of 1994. This is not DirectX game, maybe you use DirectX to show the ads but I've tried two games already and the game boy I bought in 1989 felt more fluid and polished.
So currently if byond disappears then so does all the games, because yes, i'm sure there is a custom standalone, the classic CLIENT -> HOST thing. I'M SURE WATCHING THE WORD BYOND 2K TIMES, 10 HIGH VOLUME TV COMMERCIALS AND HAVING THE LIST OF GAMES SO THEY CAN TRY OTHERS ALSO SO YOU ALWAYS MAKE A PROFIT IS MORE CLEANER AND VERSATILE. Thanks a lot for the time wasted you shit-brained, fuck-faced, ball breaking, duck fucking, pain in the ass engine. Anyway. Thank you for your explanation and forgive my disrespects but this is not what I expected AND I BELIEVE YOU HAVE TO BE NUTS TO USE THIS ENGINE, that's why I wont. 0/10 | |
Well that escalated. Best of luck.
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2.No you do not have to have internet to develop (it just uses the BYOND client when you download resources). Your actions aren't recorded or anything.
3. I believe If you use the subscription service to handle player transactions you owe BYOND a small royalty. Otherwise - Nothing. You can generally make commercial games without any legal hassle.