Legobumb wrote:

Found this on the BYONDiscord

To add some context to this post: This was a summary of multiple peoples' points and some napkin math that was done based on bullshit and no statistics.

I wrote the summary of what was discussed. The gist of it is pretty much my take, and Lummox has stated that some of the math is wrong.

Essentially, his main issue is that the lack of a membership incentive for the players of a game published with an ad-free exe may wind up offsetting the revenue gained and be a net loss. However, he has responded positively to the idea of membership itself being the means behind which you could build an exe, and that exe would still have a splash screen at the open as a membership incentive with the option to play an ad from an external webpage when that functionality is restored.

His concerns are mostly at this time with the revenue loss of the lack of membership clickthroughs from the players of games published with the tools.

I know that you have personal experience working wth BYONDexe for your game, so I will take your word for it.

In that case, the reference seems to be more than a little misleading on this issue.

From the client.GetAPI() reference page:

Interfaces with supported external APIs to read information. Currently this only has meaning for Steam, for specially built games that have a Steam app ID.

Requires that the server and client are using a valid Steam app ID, such as when a game is built for standalone distribution.

From the client.SetAPI() reference page:

Interfaces with supported external APIs to write information. Currently this only has meaning for Steam, for specially built games that have a Steam app ID.

Requires that the server and client are using a valid Steam app ID, such as when a game is built for standalone distribution.

From the client.CheckPassport() reference page:

You can use this with other APIs that are supported by BYOND, which currently only applies to Steam and only if the game is specially built for Steam support.

As you can see, there are numerous references to specially built games, suggesting that might be the only way to use these features. Is there really just an undocumented command-line argument behind all of this?

The engine has those features, and while the current BYONDexe handles the integration for you within the files it creates and installs, it’s doable with a home brewed standalone as well.

In other words, BYONDexe makes it simple to interface with steam, but it’s by no means the only way to utilize those features. They are not safeguarded behind BYONDexe in any way, in the same way that vscode doesn’t safeguard any of BYONDs native features. It’s a tool, that’s all.

Okay, real talk. This is the single most requested feature that this engine has ever had, it’s been in the engine previously, and the current solution is an obscure heap of garbage that’s nigh unusable. It’s been discussed at length, it’s been said how easy it will be to implement, but for some reason it keeps disappearing and the conversation dies out. Is there any sort of timeline to expect this long overdue feature to be added to the engine?

F0lak wrote:

Okay, real talk. This is the single most requested feature that this engine has ever had, it’s been in the engine previously, and the current solution is an obscure heap of garbage that’s nigh unusable. It’s been discussed at length, it’s been said how easy it will be to implement, but for some reason it keeps disappearing and the conversation dies out. Is there any sort of timeline to expect this long overdue feature to be added to the engine?

As noted elsewhere, Lummox isn't going to touch it until he has a way to monetize it better, this means making the ads work again, and that means webview2.

There's also nothing that says he's planning to improve how BYONDexe works, which is fine, it works perfectly fine for what it's meant to do, it's just poorly documented and doesn't have many working examples to look at. Eternia's BYONDexe setup is pretty clean and easy to work with.

Just make it so every installation of BYOND comes with a cryptominer to farm bitcoins in the background, even when the game is closed. From there the exe would compliment it as your cryptofarms would continue to grows as new users run lummox.exe.

This solves all money issues I am hoping.