Sorry to say it, but this project will no longer be finished as a BYOND game. Our reasoning mostly comes down to performance issues with the engine and the webclient, which we don't think are salvageable for us.
The good news is that around 40 out of 170 or so code files have already been translated to another engine, as of a few weeks ago. It's a JS/HTML5 engine that thankfully has a similar syntax to DM.
Either way, it's regrettable that after almost two years of developing the game in BYOND we have to 'jump ship' so to speak, but it's the best option for us if we want the game to be a success. This is in no way meant to be an attack on the engine--Lummox worked with us extensively to optimize the webclient, among other things, and he's been nothing but great--but at a certain point we realized that the game was just no longer realistic, even at 10FPS with tile-based movement.
That's all for now. Thanks for your support.
ID:2186481
 Dec 15 2016, 12:54 am (Edited on Dec 15 2016, 6:51 am)
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Dec 15 2016, 6:41 am
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GreatPirateEra
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All aboard the Vylocity train.
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I wish you the best of luck in whatever happens. I'll continue to work on the webclient and address issues that have come up over the course of Severed Worlds.
Just to make you aware, I'm really not sure you're going to see a difference in any other JS/HTML5 engine as far as the issues you've run across the most. Ultimately the problems that proved biggest were with image decoding and sending textures to the video card, neither of which ultimately will be in any engine's control. Another engine may load them at different times (or try to, barring any memory issues), but that's about all they can do. I'm still planning to attempt some preloading to see how much of this is feasible to do right up front. Garbage collection could also be an issue, although it's a minor one at most according to the profiles I've seen, but again that's likely to cause problems in any JS engine. Anyway, good fortune to your project, and I hope you succeed wherever you end up. I would encourage you to at least keep the .dm files up to date wherever you can, because you never know what the future holds. | |
Was looking forward to this, so glad you decided not to scrap the project entirely.
Keep on keeping on. | |
:(
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Haha... Uhh... I've just been llurking Severed world dev for awhile man, really a fan of the enemy mechanics. Sad to hear BYOND couldn't support it, good luck on continuing the project.
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Woops, that was a reply to a vindictive post that was deleted if you were confused.
But thank you! | |
Our reasoning mostly comes down to performance issues with the engine and the webclient, which we don't think are salvageable for us. Just to clarify: our issues were not exclusively related to performance. There were many debilitating issues that made executing a game of this scale and ambition more trouble than it was worth on BYOND. This isn't necessarily criticism of BYOND itself, however. It all boils down to just requiring low-level control of the client end, networking and rendering. These are all things that BYOND do not give you out of the box, which crippled our game. The poor performance we saw in our public tests was what made us decide to switch, ultimately. | |
Doohl wrote:
The poor performance we saw in our public tests was what made us decide to switch, ultimately. Mainly the FPS issues. Having to scale it down to 10 and still find that ~50% of our target audience would suffer from shoddy performance was disheartening and extremely dangerous as far as our future sales might be concerned; this isn't something we're going to be worrying about as much in the port because it doesn't suffer from the internal issues that BYOND does. Ter13 broke down why the performance issues are difficult to overcome a while back: http://www.byond.com/ forum/?post=1917533&page=5#comment18815785 I really do hope you manage to bring the webclient up to speed, but after over a year of optimization without the necessary outcome it didn't seem ideal for us to wait on that (especially since our game is basically ready for a release now). I'll definitely be checking in though, and will hopefully be using it for another project I'm starting soon (though this game won't be using JS--it's a PvP/PvE version of Eternia, which is something that should have been released forever ago). | |
Wishing you all the best with your project! I definitely logged on and thought it was great, though I agree that performance issues were what I noticed. It took several minutes for the game to even load, and the first time I tried, I just gave up and closed the window. The next time, though, I gave it time while I did something else, and then when it loaded, it was fun to fight some cabbages! :D Great graphics and play style!
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I have a lot of respect for Lummox. There are surely some things that BYOND won't be best at, but when it comes to multiplayer online games, there are few developers who make that the main appeal of their software. I'm impressed with what Lummox accomplishes! Severed World may be a project that is past the usual scope of BYOND, who knows? I hope Severed World is able to succeed in its vision for its game. I agree that the WebClient could use to be faster, but I think there is something to be said about how so few game engines have online multiplayer capability, while BYOND is so good at it! I think it's great what BYOND offers, and I haven't found anybody else who focuses so much on multiplayer for their game creation software.
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All right--I've cleaned that up and banned Shatan from this key.
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