Jan 25 2012, 6:03 pm
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Hiro the Dragon King
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When I was experimenting with the Make EXE functions, I used WinRAR to make a self-extracting installer that did all of the placing of temporary files, save files, settings, and what not, just as transparently as Minecraft does.
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Tom wrote:
Also, we're working on a much better standalone system for games. We just have to make sure we don't get cut out of the equation entirely. No offense, Tom, but I would cut out your system in a heartbeat if it didn't show up the way I intended. That's not saying that I wouldn't give credit where credit is due, but I have a certain vision of perfectionism and I go to great lengths to achieve it sometimes. In my project, I would have the BYOND logo on the title screen, as well as an individual credit screen for BYOND, and I would adhere to your monetary commission for subscriptions, but I would not honestly accept forcible branding. | |
Airjoe wrote:
When was the last time you saw a game run out of a single executable? Game Maker is able to create one. Use the make exe functionality, the portable version of BYOND... As I said earlier, the Make EXE function is broken. In some cases when the user already has BYOND installed the game will not boot at all. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
Airjoe wrote: You didn't answer my question, and I don't see your point. Are you arguing that because some other game development tool has a capability to create a single executable, BYOND should invest the resources to have that same functionality? Because that doesn't sound like great justification to me. If you want a feature, demonstrate a need. Use the make exe functionality, the portable version of BYOND... So do something about it. In my admittedly limited attempts in using the provided functionality, I have never encountered this issue. | |
Airjoe wrote:
SuperAntx wrote: Sure it does! You always want to attempt to match features with competing platforms! | |
Airjoe wrote:
Are you arguing that because some other game development tool has a capability to create a single executable, BYOND should invest the resources to have that same functionality? Yes. BYOND now has a price tag associated with some of its most useful features. It's only natural to take a step back and compare BYOND to its competitors. | |
This was so hard...
All of BYOND's features are still free, by the way. My entire point is that the website is irrelevant here, and except in the case I just reported (something you could have done when you first identified this; it only took me 5 minutes), the BYOND packaging functionality is fine. You have yet to demonstrate any reasonable need to have a single file. | |
Airjoe wrote:
This was so hard... I've already mentioned the bug many times but I guess one more bug report from someone else wouldn't hurt. While the BYOND software is still technically free, the online functionality is behind a pay wall. That's BYOND's biggest selling point. You could build a game, publish it, and probably get a few players with minimal effort aside from actually making the game. Now if you want to do that for free you'll have to make your own website and server list. If you go that far, why use BYOND keys and pay the subscription tax when you could use your own account authentication and keep the money for yourself? At this point you're only adding another week or two of development time. If you were considering long-term goals you might ask why use BYOND in the first place when you would be doing all this work anyway with any other language. As for having a single executable, it's just a personal preference. I find having just one exe or jar file to be more slick than having an installer or zip full of files. | |
I agree with SAx.
We should be able to package up DreamSeeker and the game along with the pager into a single exe. | |
Yes, we are working on a system to handle this better. I even mentioned it in the novel I wrote last month. The concern on my end, again, is to make sure it doesn't cut us out of the equation completely (unless we want to make it a more expensive "pro" feature). You have to understand that this is a business for us.
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SuperAntx wrote:
Now if you want to do that for free you'll have to make your own website and server list. If you go that far, why use BYOND keys and pay the subscription tax when you could use your own account authentication and keep the money for yourself? At this point you're only adding another week or two of development time. Damn, an entire week. Maybe two. How long did it take you to make Decadence? How long do you think it took SilkWizard to make Nestalgia? Is an extra week, maybe two, really a large enough part of a project that it dissuades you from using this development tool, which besides the website and community already has a number of advantageous features over other tools? And even if it does, is that really a problem, that you're exploring options? Do those other options include free website advertising and a universal login system? If not, you would have to spend development time on those features *anyway*. Never mind that code for using your own website as a hub is already on the forums and someone will probably make a library for it in the near future. Or if this all really that big of a deal, just buy the membership? And really, how well has the hub worked out for you, anyway? Did Decadence magically get players because it was on the BYOND hub? Maybe at first, you got a bit of interest. Are people still randomly hearing about Decadence just because it's on the hub? I don't see many players. I also wonder how many of those initial players saw it from your post in the creations forum / blog (now forum), which could have been a link to your website instead of the hub. So, BYOND still has a community you can advertise to without having to pay a dime. As for having a single executable, it's just a personal preference. I find having just one exe or jar file to be more slick than having an installer or zip full of files. So we're down to personal preference now. Sounds like a great reason for BYOND to spend time on a new feature. You do know that jars (Java Archives) are effectively zip files that extract somewhere, whether that is a temp directory or a regular install directory... right? | |
@Tom: I don't know about everyone else, but I would LOVE to have advertising-free features for members (or even at additional costs) when the Flash and executable features come out. Things like that would really accomplish what you were trying to do with making hubs require you to buy a membership (ie, make memberships actually worth something). It'd also be really nice to be able to replace the BYOND splash screen with something custom (could also be a members-only feature), but I seem to remember someone saying that it would be impossible (or very difficult) in a feature tracker awhile back.
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I think we need to calm down. At the moment, it isn't very hard to make a professional looking, standalone exe using NSIS that can extract quietly to an off directory, and then run the game from there. You can even have a launcher layer to handle how the game starts (e.g. if the pager is running then kill it off). Basically the same thing as an SFX but with a lot more flexibility. I don't see what all the fuss is about atm. Take a look at metamorphman.dmb2installer , it's pretty easy to modify to what you want. We've talked about this before SAx, iirc the reason you didn't want to use NSIS is that dreamseeker probes the firewall every time either way. Maybe it should be that kind of issue they focus on instead.
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Airjoe wrote:
Is an extra week, maybe two, really a large enough part of a project that it dissuades you from using this development tool, which besides the website and community already has a number of advantageous features over other tools? And even if it does, is that really a problem, that you're exploring options? Yes, absolutely. I value my time and I must weigh how many hours it takes to complete a project against how much potential profit there is to be made. You mention the BYOND community and other "advantageous features" but have you ever seriously thought about how great those things actually are? With Decadence I made a very slim profit, just barely covering the cost of making the game. About 90% of those sales came from friends, the community at large did not want to part with their money. This was all while being right up there on the top of the games list. Where did NEStalgia's subscribers come from? Not BYOND, that's for sure. I can't speak for Silk but judging from how his player boom went I'd say the vast majority of his subscribers were people who heard about NEStalgia through friends or other websites, not its hub page. If he had made his own authentication he could have saved a lot of money by completely avoiding the BYOND subscription tax. While hub pages and BYOND accounts are great tools it makes more business sense to avoid them entirely. You save money by building your own website and using your own subscription system. Once you're this far it's only another hop, skip, and a jump before you cut BYOND out of the equation entirely and use something else. For BYOND's long-term sustainability this would be very bad. So we're down to personal preference now. Sounds like a great reason for BYOND to spend time on a new feature. What's wrong with personal preference? That's where many of my design decisions come from, why change that when contemplating a game's method of distribution? As Tom just said this is a business. It's not a sound business decision to alienate your developers by limiting their distribution channels while pushing your own brand onto their games. | |
You know what BYOND really needs? Tom needs to advertise BYOND itself outside of BYOND itself.
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SuperAntx wrote:
Where did NEStalgia's subscribers come from? Not BYOND, that's for sure. I can't speak for Silk but judging from how his player boom went I'd say the vast majority of his subscribers were people who heard about NEStalgia through friends or other websites, not its hub page. If he had made his own authentication he could have saved a lot of money by completely avoiding the BYOND subscription tax. While hub pages and BYOND accounts are great tools it makes more business sense to avoid them entirely. You save money by building your own website and using your own subscription system. You're preaching to the choir, this is what I've been saying. You are the one who said: BYOND now has a price tag associated with some of its most useful features. So make up your mind. Are the key, hub, and subscription systems some of BYOND's most useful features, or does it make sense to skip them entirely? Once you're this far it's only another hop, skip, and a jump before you cut BYOND out of the equation entirely and use something else. Not really. We're talking about two drastically different parts of making a game: the actual "make it" part, for which BYOND is great, and the market it part, for which it does not make sense to use BYOND. I fail to see how cutting out the key/hub/subscriptions means you should use an entirely different development platform, especially when most of those platforms don't provide that functionality anyway. So we're down to personal preference now. Sounds like a great reason for BYOND to spend time on a new feature. What's wrong with personal preference is that it's personal. If the two developers of BYOND need to cater to every developer's personal preference to not "alienate" them, this project is doomed to fail. BYOND should be implementing features that objectively make sense, not ones that make you feel warm and fuzzy. | |
It's true that people can gain subscribers by advertising off BYOND-- and I've been telling people to do that from day 1. However, that doesn't mean that the hub isn't worth something. IMO, there's a lot of value in being able to put up a game and get some feedback without having to do the legwork. Whether that value is worth $24/year or whatever is your decision.
I have chosen to go in the direction of not limiting the software because I wanted BYOND to always be usable in a way a standard programming language is. So, for instance, we let you accept guest keys-- completely taking us out of the equation of you want. That could have been a "pro" feature, but I didn't want to do that because it would make your games always, to some degree, dependent on us. My hope-- and perhaps this is naive-- is that developers will appreciate the freedom we've given them and purchase Memberships in large part as a way of giving back. In SilkWizard's case, yes, he certainly could (and still can) distance himself from the hub core, and I've even had discussions with him over that topic because, frankly, it saves us work by putting more of the infrastructure in his hands. But he hasn't done that in part because it's a little more convenient to have us taking care of authentication & subscriptions, but more so because this way he's established a relationship with us, where we have done some testing and have set some goals in working with his games. I believe that this will pay off far more than the 10-20% we're taking as "tax", especially once we can enable better distribution of his game through the production of an off-site web client. If we can't make money through Memberships, we'll have to look to other ways to sustain ourselves. The web/Flash client presents opportunities of doing so (for instance, we could charge a fee for offsite distribution of games, or enforce a sub cut for such things). In my mind, I'd prefer to give developers and players as much as possible and not have to put these kinds of restrictions in-- but that model only works if we can get a certain volume of users contributing the bare minimum (what I'd call a BYOND Membership) to keep us going. | |
I agree with everything you're saying, Tom. Personally, if I were to make a game (and let's face it, I'm not), I would completely cut out BYOND from my end users, save for probably something in the credits/about. This is largely due to the fact that the BYOND community is embarrassing and when a game is released, developer's shouldn't have to do damage control against comments like this and this (followed by confirmation) and this and this and this on day one!
That said, the only reason I initially brought this up is because some people don't think that what you are charging $24 for is worth $24. I do, because even if I did cut off BYOND entirely, it's still beneficial to have a hub on this site, and $2 a month for advertising is freaking cheap. However, the beauty of BYOND is that, if I don't think it's worth the required membership, I can still make my game as I please and advertise it elsewhere! In no way does the membership requirement for creating a hub page limit a game developer on BYOND. | |
Well, for what it's worth, the primary motivation of this site update is to help improve our community by better organizing the content and better managing the discussions. We have a lot of good users here, and they, not the trolls, need to be the focus. That will in turn encourage more good users to join up, and hopefully we'll evolve to a community that you'll be proud to advertise. In other words, more like the community we had back in the "fond days of yesteryear", except with more than 100 users :)
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If I could make another suggestion, it would be to change the Community forum slightly; instead of having the topic icon, have it display the BYOND member image (if applicable) similar to the way the Gaming forum displays game icons. One of the things I miss from the old Community page is that I can't easily scan member images and see who posted what.
Obviously I can always just look at the post author, but for me at least, images process faster than text. | |