Just ask. The only reason Lummox doesn't make it freely available is because it gets around the pager ads.
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I have "just asked" only to be hit with, "Sure, if you give me 100$."
Also what he's selling isn't a true EXE. (Which was never made clear to me prior to actually purchasing it) It's a website integrated option that you still have to configure and have the technical know how to set up. (also never made clear prior to purchasing) | |
Avid's kind of right, kind of wrong about BYONDexe. It is basically a portable installer that more or less comes with a barebones DreamSeeker and integrated pager behavior.
You have the option to configure it in such a way that it doesn't use keys, doesn't contact the hub for updating and connectivity, etc. I've configured BYONDexe twice (both times all support given to me by the developers free of charge. Speculate on the reasons for that.) for single player games and once for multiplayer games. One of them with steam integration. Gonna be honest, configuring it all is really a little bit of a headache, but once you've read the included information and figured out how it works internally, it's actually pretty easy to modify the hell out of it: This is what I managed to do to BYOND's executable launcher for Kumorii when he asked me to tool around in BYONDexe for a private beta. A little bit of Javascript, some custom sprite work, and a little photoshop was really all it took: Click for video of launcher in action.  The fact that people would bitch about having to pay $100 to be free of ads served on their content, and whine about having to know HTML and JS in order to work with the tools that were provided to do that is just another layer of cherries on the shit sundae that is the bitching about the tools. If you wanna monetize fangames, ain't nobody gonna stop you. Quit whining about what other people let you do and just do it, or stop acting like you aren't lazily trying to use other peoples' content and expecting people to treat you like yee for it. Look at Dragon Universe. They kept going after multiple C&Ds. They pulled it off for years. But realistically, if you think that Dragon Universe was a popular game you are kidding yourself. Fact is 100 people online on average is not popular. None of these fangames ever marketed themselves or tried to attract an audience from anywhere but other BYOND fangames. You don't have to use BYOND's website to promote your product. Nobody is forcing you to use the hub. Put simply, if you want to do what you are doing, you should do it off site. Lummox cannot stop you from using his tools without being connected to his hub, and the tools are more than capable of being used entirely without half of the services Lummox provides. You don't even need BYONDexe to cut the umbilical cord. The EULA is very clear that you are allowed to redistribute the whole BYOND suite without modifications alongside your project. There's literally no need for you to use the hub, but I really don't think that the majority of you even understand the components of the BYOND ecosystem as individual elements well enough to even realize that this is possible --and it's because y'all don't know shit about the software you are using. And as for a certain someone saying "anime-themed", you are poisoning the well by deliberately confusing people into thinking that you aren't infringing peoples' trademarks in order to turn a quick buck. When you say that there is discrimination against "anime-themed" games in this community, it's just absurd to a laughable degree. There is no discrimination: It's just legally perilous for the community to keep getting hit by C&Ds and tying its fortunes through direct partnerships with knuckleheads that don't even understand basic concepts like the difference between imitating genre tropes and lifting wholesale someone else's IP. | |
That's a neat little launcher you got there.
..It's true that I don't really understand much about the "exe/souped up application converter" thing that already exists. But I do know that it sucks not being able to redistribute your game in a standard way. It's fine if your players are just friends or something, but it feels bad handing a paying customer a engine/pager thing alongside your game w/ instructions because that's the only way you can get the game to run. I can't rely on having the exe either - information on it is ambiguous at best. There's no official documentation on how to get it/use it that I know of. So for me anyway, it basically didn't exist while I was still developing with the software - which deterred me from pursuing single player projects and publishing them on other sites such as itch. **And don't get me wrong, I was interested in pushing my games to other sites. However, it seemed difficult to distribute them without p***ing off users because of the extra software install. When the web client dropped, that changed a bit. However, when I tried getting a game working on another site I ran into three problems. A) It was slower than dream seeker. B) It had to connect to a server to function. Any downtime resulted in them not being able to play = no viable singleplayer web games. C) It was buggier than hell. I'm not going to say it was the only reason I stopped using dream maker, but few/poor options to distribute my projects was definitely one of my top 4 or 5. | |
The official documentation is included with the BYONDexe.
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At the end of the day BYOND is either suitable for your needs, or its not. I don't hate BYOND, I'm just ready to move onto new things.
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Crazah wrote:
The official documentation is included with the BYONDexe. to get it. If you don't have access to the documentation and terms of access beforehand you cannot possibly rely on it's features while planning a project. | |
Orange55 wrote:
Crazah wrote: You're not wrong. | |
At the end of the day, BYOND is what it is. Lummox is doing his own thing and that's his prerogative.
I've found better options for when / if I get back into game development. I can still appreciate BYOND for what it is though. I think a lot of us are still here because deep down we do appreciate what BYOND has given us over the years. EDIT: I am still disappointed though. I really feel like the web client was a huge waste of time. | |
Lavenblade wrote:
EDIT: I am still disappointed though. I really feel like the web client was a huge waste of time. You mean the flash client? | |
From what I understand there are even secret versions of the BYONDExe so, who's to say he's not giving people he dislikes a different version?
(I know this for a fact btw.) People coming in would have no clue, which is by design. It's social engineering designed to funnel people into paying for things, the reality is, when you pay for that EXE you are essentially tying it to a community that has very little worth at this point. This makes the chances of your game actually doing well very slim. This is also why most people don't even bother to use said EXE that we are talking about. The final point is, its not an EXE. It's a launcher. It was called an EXE in order to keep people from asking about a real exe. Exe allows you to run your program from any computer without the need to download BYOND suite files. What the BYONDExe is, is a portal for directing people to the hosted sessions of your game that are already running, via a web page interface. (Essentially its a portable hub page). It has nothing to do with an EXE (even tho it generates one of those files) because you STILL need to download byond pager/daemon/seeker, etc in order to use it which defeats the purpose to begin with. What's more, the documentation is not user-friendly at all, nor is it "step by step". It's vague and worded in such a way that if you have no idea bout the elements its speaking on, you can't put it together for your project. It's done that way by design, so that basically means even if you did get your hands on it, without paying for it, you'd still be at a loss and need to ask someone else to help or fix it for you. Unnecessary unless you want to keep control of something you've already given or had someone pay for. Lummox has made programs in DM that function as an actual EXE (f:ex his Font maker libs), So he has the capability to do this if he 'wanted' to. I made the mistake of paying 100$ for it on 2 separate occasions. I know better now, because if I am going to pay that much, I'd rather just pay to have a custom solution made that allows me to do whatever I want independent of this site. | |
Uh, what? You don't need to download BYOND to join a game from BYONDexe, it runs a special version of the suite internally without the need to install anything.
You've obviously never used it properly, and have no idea how it works. It requires no secondary download, just downloading the game's package and running the launcher, it supports single-player worlds just fine too. As for there being multiple versions of it, sure, Lummox updates it which means there's old and new versions. There aren't multiple variations on what he gives people though. | |
As another point, BYONDexe doesn't require you to use the hub at all, you're free to use your own account system and method for launching the game from there. The server list is just a standard default that most users of BYONDexe prefer to use for their multiplayer worlds.
It doesn't mean you have to use it that way. There are single-player games using BYONDexe that act no different than a game made with another engine. You download an installer, install the game, run the exe and it's running, no account stuff, no BYOND installing. Hell, a good 90% of the people who play Spires of Agartha don't know BYOND exists. | |
And ANOTHER point, Lummox's exe programs weren't made in DM, they were made in C++, DMIFonts wouldn't be possible to make in DM outright.
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Lavenblade wrote:
I think a lot of us are still here because deep down we do appreciate what BYOND has given us over the years. I agree with this. I know I've complained quite a bit over the years with moans and groans, but at the end of the day it's because I really liked BYOND and the people I met here. It's always going to be my first game engine to me, despite my gripes. So I guess what I'm saying is, despite not actively participating here anymore - I'd still like to see BYOND succeed. | |
Actually, thats not totally accurate. Fallacy came back to say the same exact thing and point out how he wrote his own version of the BYONDExe , from scratch, right around the time it dropped.
The version you have may have those capabilities, but the one I paid for didn't. And since it isn't made public knowledge where you can get or update any of those files, that's a moot point. Btw: It's great to get a reply from a respected member of the community. However, it's a bit disheartening to only get one when they feel the need to correct or zing you. Did you miss the post where I essentially spelled out, step for step, how to get byond out of its financial crisis? If so it would be great if you could pass it on. It's a proven system. | |
Also, I'm not mistaken.
The point of an EXE file is to make it easy to port all the files you need to run the game in a simple manner. The version * I got * does not fulfill that requirement. Simply copying /packaging the EXE / dlls then porting it to another computer doesn't allow you to run BYONDExe to connect to any games. *At least in my experience*, but even then as I mentioned up above, the instructions aren't user-friendly anyway. So it is, totally possible that I didn't set it up correctly. (But i doubt that, because I tested it as I worked to set it up.) | |
Yeah, I doubt you have a different version of it than I do. I'm more likely to believe you simply have no idea how it works.
The only .exe BYOND has ever generated that required installing BYOND was the ancient Build EXE option that Dream Maker had, which effectively just generated an exe that installed BYOND for you. That's not how BYONDexe has ever worked. No version of it. BYONDexe generates an .exe for your game and a set of .dll files (no different than any other program that requires external library usage). You can choose to also generate an NSIS installer which will install those files where the user wants, create a start menu category, uninstaller, etc. No part of that process installs BYOND itself. When you run the exe you're presented with what the developer setup, which for most online games is a launcher that lists live servers, lets you make a BYOND account, login to an existing account etc. When you click a live game from the launcher it launches the game using calls to those .dll files, which effectively allow for a Dream Seeker-type window to be created to connect to the game. Still no BYOND installed, the only BYOND files you have at this point are things in Documents/BYOND, things like cache files and the sort. The launcher is an optional step, you can make it launch the game locally without ever loading a launcher, this is for single player games and works the same as if you opened a dmb file in Dream Seeker, except Dream Seeker is just the result of the .exe making library calls. At no point in this process are you required to make an account or even access the hub, this is up to the developer. They can entirely skip the account and launcher and have their own stuff for that inside of the game. I'll say it again as well, at no point has it worked different from this, the only changes over time BYONDexe has had are bug fixes and improvements/additions. There are no "special" versions that Lummox gives out to people he doesn't like. | |
As for moving the files from one computer to another, I've never had any issue there either, I've worked on multiple games' BYONDexe setup and helped quite a few people set them up themselves.
I just tried moving the files for Spires of Agartha and NEStalgia straight over to a different machine and it started up fine. | |
^ Gotta admit, this does suck. Not being able to distribute a single player game (properly) with the software is one of the big reasons I don't make stuff here anymore.
It might be a contributing reason that less titles are coming out nowadays for the platform. Unhappy devs = less games.