I thought it would be interesting to have a bunch of people get together and talk about how they found BYOND. Me, personally, I found the "light" during my slump in internet gaming, about a year after I found the internet, I was on Neopets for maybe three months, 'till I realised how gay it was (Believe it or not, I used to be one of those "OMGLOL" people...Not proud of it too...) Well, I left afterwards and found RuneScape, played it for maybe three more months, give or take a few. After it got repetitive I moved on to Eternal-Lands, played 'till the player whipe. Then for a while I just sat around, couldn't find anything worth playing, then one of my uber-friends told me about BYOND and how you can make games, so I created a key named "Squirrel-Burn", it was a combination of both of our nick-names. After a while of exploring I began to learn programming, then became the Super Squirrel you all know and love. Now, it's your turn!
-Super Squirrel
ID:275952
 Feb 26 2005, 7:29 am
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When EverQuest was released, I got addicted to it as my first MMOG. Whenever I'm doing/playing/seeing something a lot, I end up wanting to create that thing.
In this case I wanted to create a MMOG-style game with a real quest engine, since I could easily think of much better quests than EQ had. So I searched around to find an engine and stumbled on DUNG (the original name for BYOND). Aside from having the same basic engine, DUNG looked very little like BYOND does today. It had separate programs for editing images and code, there was no tree view of your files, there was no library system, there was no browser integration or ability to pop up a standalone browser window, there was no client-side handling, there was no hub in the manner we see today. I don't believe we had savefiles yet, and when we got savefiles they didn't have automatic object saving; you had to save/load every bit of information yourself. What there was was one of the cleanest object-oriented languages I'd ever seen, incredibly easy built-in multi-player support, and a community of half a dozen or so developers and Tom and Dan, all very helpful. We must have been nuts, making multi-player games for a system with no players. I remember when we had a get-together in one of our games and were shocked when someone we didn't know popped in -- who the heck was that and how did he find us!? It was very humble beginnings for a game that now regularly reaches 1,000 players online. Some of the ways I'm proud to have influenced the system back then: Creating a Dictionary class, where you could store things by key/value, which probably inspired the addition of associated lists. Coming up with an approach to saving/loading classes in savefiles which ended up being the design for auto-saving objects. Suggesting that Dantom sell game-hosting services from the server. Now, my actual suggestion was a bust (it turned out it wasn't cost effective to handle the bandwidth/CPU needed for the games), but I believe that the work on this led to the creation of the hub system we have today, which is now a critical part of the system. And some other things along those lines. I might be wrong about whether what I did was influential, but I like to think so. The other, rather surprising, accomplishment was creating the CharacterHandling library. I did it mostly as an example to explain savefiles to people, and it was to my mind by no means my most interesting library. However, it turned out by leaps and bounds to be the most popular library I ever created, being downloaded over 20,000 times and ending up being used by an amazing number of games. Libraries I sweated much more over have barely been touched in comparison. It's been an interesting ride, and I hope we're just at the beginning. | |
The light I fount was dim and not bright at all. I journeyed he on a fast path to failure. My first game I fount on BYOND was one of those Zeta rips, "Dragon Ball Z: A new age" was the name of it.
I used to be into those chat RPG things. I'm not sure if you know the name for sure. Well, the name of the owner of the last RPG thing I was in was Coolice, his key was Coolice, he's long gone I guess. He was just advertising for people to come play with him on his "awesome new online game site" thing he fount ^_-. So I joined under the key "TotallyGohan"- a true DBZ fan at that. ('02) After about 1 and 1/2 years on being on BYOND, I decided my fate was not to be a DBZer for the rest of my life. "Ryne Rekab" was born. I blame Chatters for my key change, for the second I join I got pwnd by Mertek ^_^. After making my "Ryne Rekab" key, I decided to learn how to program in the DM language. ('04) I've been doing pretty good in the language, I guess ^_^. The begining of this year I decided I had to lose my rep I had with "Ryne Rekab" (racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, etc..). So this key was born on 2/14/05. Currently I am engaged in creating an RPG based game called "Fatal Adventure" with Valdox (a friend for school). -Angel 0=) | |
I have no idea how I found RPG Maker 95...But somehow I did and I moved on to Rpg Maker 2000..I did that for a while then while I was on some forums I saw a post about BYOND and how it could make online games..I had just gotten into MMO's and was interested in making one..So I came here, played a few games then started posting on the forums for help on making a game..Made my first game Magical Realm...A few years later and Im posting about it on the forums.
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I found BYOND in one of these two ways( I can't remember which, but both happened around the same time )-
1) I found the game Drugwars, and for some reason( I forget ) I did a search on it, and found the BYOND version. 2) My friend got me into playing Zeta rips( I never liked them... but he did >_> ) with him. I can't remember if my friend or me found BYOND first... So I either owe great thanks to my friend( whom I'll never be able to thank, seeing as he hasn't been on yahoo messanger for over 6+ months... no goodbyes or anything... ) or to Kunark. Since thanking my friend is useless, I'll just thank Kunark. Thanks a lot Kunark! <_< <EDIT> I think it was 2). I just did a key search, and found that my friend's key( Silent_Thief ) was made 14 days after mine. I guess that it was Kunark! Thanks again. | |
I started off with Runescape, got bored and googled for some MMORPG games. I found onRPG and after being a part of that community for a few months I found BYOND (I am no longer part of that community(can't even remember my password, and I no longer have the same e-mail adress), even though I will return every once in a while to see whats up.)
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Through someone on gamefaqs talking about Gekisan. I got addicted to it so badly
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I was a lurker at the GameFAQs board for RPG Maker. Someone posted a link to BYOND, and now I'm up in everyone's bussiness at the BYOND forums. =)
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My quest to byond was a shirt but sweet one. I owe it all to coolboyman. For those of you who don't know him, he is a cool dude (as the name suggests). He was making a hacked rom for a gameboy game. I decided to go to his site after finding said rom. Well, I joined the forum, said hey, made a few more posts, then disappeared. Well, I came back about 2 months later and saw that it had compleatly changed. There was nolonger any info on his rom, and the letters "DWO" where all over the place. I had no idea what this ment, but I jumped over to the forums again and started asking questions. Well, come to find out, somebody had created a great game called Dragon Warrior Online, and that mans name was silkwizard. Coolboyman made a fansite after it, which was cool. I started playing around with DM code not to much later.
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I first found BYOND when my friend said 'I bet you couldn't make an online multiplayer game' and I said 'OK. I'll give it a go'. What followed was about a week fruitlessly searching for a component for 'The Games Factory' that would allow OM play.
I found one. Unfortunatley, it allowed only 4 players at a time. So I began a new search: to find a decent system for OM game creation. I found one. I liked it, and programmed my first 'proper' game in it (though I didn't really ever finish the game). The system was BYOND. | |
It all started with my intrest for AIM RPGs. Using one of my trusty search engines, I looked all over for extra sites. Then I ran into DBEO's webpage. I spent alot of that time on a guest key until I figured out how to make my own, then found a smaller community (Morte or Tara'ka: Carpe Noctem) wich kept me with BYOND.
My intrest in programming came right before that small frightful wave of Dragon Ball GT Genisis rips. I was a regular player before that happened. | |
Well, for as long as I can remember I have been making games. The first ones were just simple levels to a luigi game I had in my head at age 6 (mario got too much credit and I liked the color green) My first grade teacher asked us to wear the uniform of the job we wanted to be when we grew up to class one day, I got away with normal clothes because, hey its what we wear (when we even take the time to go that far).
Then I found d&d, good old pen and paper gaming. I love it. You get to let your brain run wild, and be really mean to your friends as the dm. That reminds me (Runs off and draws up a wicked dungeon) About 3 years ago I decided to get serious with myself and learn how to code. Figured I'd start simple and recreate the first dragon warrioir game. At the time I didn't have any clue about byond or anything like it. Not even the rpgmakers or rpg toolkits. So I took the (il)logical first step of joinging an alegro (not sure about that) C++ comunity. But that stuff was way complicated. I had no problem devoting years to learning, but the forumites seemed to have a problem with a lowly pesant such as myself attempting to learn. They just laughed at my inexperince and told me to go back to school. Undaunted I forged onward. During a search for dragon warrior games I stumbled across silkwizards DWO (I think that man has singlehandedly brought more people to byond through that game than can be counted) I played it for 5 minutes before I knew I had found my promised land. A few days later I decided to give up the dragon warrior game because I felt 10 fangames were more than enough. After piddling around and getting a feel for byond for about 6 months I decided that the time was right for me to really give it a go. And since final fantasy had only 2 or 3 at the time I jumped ship and started working on final frailties which we all know and love in an attempt to learn the ins and outs of code by doing. Ive always learnded best hands on. That was 2 years ago on march 9th. Wow I can hardly beieve its been that long. | |
No worries, about 80% of BYONDers come to BYOND due to Kunark... Of course because of my overwhelming, erm, popularity.
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I also played runescape for quite a while before becoming bored and moving on, i had a mess with some other online games but none really met my needs. I then found a harvest moon online game which was in development, i decided to hang out there on the forums for a while before becoming bored and searching google incase of other harvest moon online games. Lucky me, a result of Wildbloods harvest moon online game came up on my search, i then ventured into this cool little community called byond. As it was not being hosted at the time, i decided to try and look for other games, it took me a while to figure out how to play them by installing byond and then i played GTA Online for quite a few hours before coming to love BYOND.
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Used?
Anyway, I found it through a Dragon Warrior site, advertising his Slime Journey game.
This has been raised many times before on the forums, I'm sure by just doing a search you'll find out what you want to know- people might not like to repeat their story again.