Once again it's an early news week, and now that March is out nature has decided to remind us who's boss by sending a crapload of snow.
I've spent most of the week wrestling with a vicious gliding sync bug. To say the gliding code in BYOND is rusty would be a massive understatement, because the code is some of the oldest in the engine and if anything the many grafts I've built on it have only made things worse. Rather than rip the guts out of that system completely, however, I wanted to find a compromise for now where the server could at least give the client just enough information to adapt. And after a lot of work, I'm... well, most of the way there, but I think something still looks a bit off. But the jitter is gone.
And hopefully that will be the last time I have to touch that code without crowdsourced help, because I've made a decision and will be taking steps in that direction over the coming months. Plenty of users have asked over the years for BYOND to go open source. Realistically I don't see a complete opening of the source, but giving more users pieces like this to chew on can only help things along. I feel the code is too dense to handle any other way. Look for a new repository of snippets to appear on Github over the next few weeks.
Finally, I know a lot of users will be excited to learn that Dream Seeker is being ported to Linux. OpenGL is required for the rendering engine, so I've revived some old code for that but I have little doubt a lot of it will have to be updated when I update the Windows renderer as well. Of course I could just do OpenGL for both, which is still an option, but we'll see how that goes. Linux development is not my thing, but I think most of the UI tools have grown up a lot and should make this process less painful. So in a way I guess this ties into the open source concept as well, and I'm sure I can count on a lot of Linux devs for help with that transition.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to BYOND in March to keep this wonderful crazy project going. In all sincerity, I'm grateful for all of you.
Want to know what's more fun than getting up super early? Having to clean a ton of wet snow off your car! Boy I hope we get a spring this year. Shame the zoo won't be doable no matter what the weather brings, though. If any of you have suggestions on how to enjoy the good weather whenever it comes, shoot them my way. In the meantime, Easter is nearly here so if you have a holiday break, make the most of it!
ID:2668833
 Apr 1 2021, 11:19 am
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Apr 1 2021, 12:19 pm
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Xkeeper
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i wish this was real
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i am ascending to a higher plane, slowly disintegrating into cheese spread
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The tl;dr of this April Fools joke is "Hey guys what if BYOND was better".
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Play SS14
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check the date
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You know what my favorite april fools thing is? "hey guys, we're doing the most requested thing literally everyone has been asking for :)"
:) :) :) :) | |
Lummox is any part of this post true
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Can't wait for next version's dual-mouse support.
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And to remember that so many great developers have offered their support in either monetary value (what more can we do any way) or their value in code..
I think BYOND could still really get an uplift from bringing in more than 1 programming dude, but hey, what do I know! | |
During the time I've been here, I've seen maybe 5 people that could maybe offer good programming to the engine. So you might enlighten us on who else can uplift byond, thats not busy with something else.
Being an engine that offers "make a game with little to nil programming skills", guess what - it attracts people with less programming skills. that said, nice april 1st. | |
Hmkw wrote:
During the time I've been here, I've seen maybe 5 people that could maybe offer good programming to the engine. So you might enlighten us on who else can uplift byond, thats not busy with something else. Yeah and your account is 3 years old at best, so this "time you've been here" is close to nothing. But already saw 5 people that according to you could help? Then what is your point in going against it? Whenever the people that have repeatedly made suggestions or requests to assist are still around, dead or whatever isn't much of my concern either. I am just stating there is plenty of people to help out if he would allow them. You think this business model is sustainable? A one-man army is going to crunch out big updates in a sensible amount of time? Who will pick up the slack when people stop dropping in money and he will have to work to make ends meet? What if he dies tomorrow? And I'm not even sure what to do with your last sentence.. It attracts people of either side of the skill level, so best speak for yourself. | |
In all seriousness, releasing some limited API access has been on my to-do list for ages and I really want to get to it. It would be great if users had access to the map editing stuff for instance, or icon stuff.
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I wonder what the future of byond is. It's sad that despite the recent horde of players that came to it, about a year ago it's still a little low in players. I think it's a great learning tool for younger people as well, who knows how many it inspired to get into game development.
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CocaColaTastesBetterWithMyName wrote:
I wonder what the future of byond is. It's sad that despite the recent horde of players that came to it, about a year ago it's still a little low in players. I think it's a great learning tool for younger people as well, who knows how many it inspired to get into game development. My judgement of how well BYOND is doing is mostly only retained to Space Station 13... Which is literally booming and continues to do so every so often. Although most of these come to play just that game, and nothing else. So it is hard to call them BYOND users per-se. But I still love the ease of coding anything using DM, its simple, and doesn't take much effort to figure out how to use. BUT. SS13 will very very slowly start its shift to SS14, which is basically the same game but rewritten into the Unity Engine. Which, if successful, people will flock to play rather than this version. The reasons should be clear to most.. More functionality, better performance (for sure, performance was and still is a problem with BYOND) and just easier to get into. I hope BYOND survives for the sake of being BYOND, it was my stepping stone to programming and has given me a solid base of programming knowledge, which has only been made easier by this. | |
Laser50 wrote:
BUT. SS13 will very very slowly start its shift to SS14, which is basically the same game but rewritten into the Unity Engine. Which, if successful, people will flock to play rather than this version. Unfortunately the performance of BYOND will always be bottlenecked by latency, at least to some degree. | |