BYOND is dead. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. But, we keep parading it around like Weekend at Bernies. People blame the anime C&D, but that wasn't the fatal shot.
It was the iPhone.
Specifically, it was smartphone gaming. Smartphones killed BYOND. Nobody plays on their computers anymore. Not unless it's some next-gen blockbuster franchise game, like GTA. We're on consoles and portable devices, and we're never coming back.
If BYOND wants to be more than Lummox and friends' personal sandbox for exploring programming language and compiler design, it needs to be on people's phones.
Yes, this will never happen, but it needs to happen. Just like BYOND needs to ditch the tile-based MUD shackles and embrace sprite-based action gaming. Again, never gonna happen. And that's why you got strings tied to the limbs and are pulling them.
The new graphics are nice, but they're makeup on a corpse. Dressing up a dead body hoping to score one last time before its put in the dirt for good.
The webclient was a nice idea. 20 years too late, but nice. It could have done to replace Flash when Adobe killed that, but it didn't. It won't. It's a pipe dream, like DM and DUNG, and everything made with them. Curiosities. Little more.
Your big claim to fame is a trollfest 4chan found. The only game to break out of BYOND was a fangame of old Dragon Warrior titles. Mediocrity was the peak of BYOND, and it'll never see that again if you stay this course.
The only option for the survival of the platform is to bring it to phones. Anything less is twiddling thumbs as the world burns around you.
~X
ID:2845200
 Jan 1 2023, 7:38 am
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Jan 1 2023, 10:40 am
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Ter13
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BYOND's core design is incompatible with mobile gaming. A server-directed engine is just a technological dead end that won't bridge the mobile gap.
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Hrm, I've seen BYOND do many things people said it never could. I wonder if mobile is really something that it can't. Plus, there are plenty of sever-directed games on mobile.
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The way the engine works, every frame, the server sends the client every object it can see in its viewport. I'd be highly surprised if there's a single mobile game that does this.
The underlying design of DM is basically a mutant telnet console. Any kind of attempt to port BYOND to play nice with smartphones will either fail, or cease to resemble BYOND. If you want to develop for smartphones, there are tools that are designed for that. BYOND isn't that, and it would be foolish to try to shoehorn what this engine already is into that direction, as we'd be throwing away more than we'd be keeping. We're in the classic situation where the developers we do have are bought in to the engine as it is, and any attempt to modify the engine in fundamental ways will alienate them while gambling on attracting new blood. If you wanna develop games for mobile, learn a tool that was built for that from the start. | |
Guess porting a BYOND game to mobile is my next project, then. See you in the app store.
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Both Game Maker Studio 2, and Unity have extensive 2D game development support and export pipelines to a wide variety of platforms. Best of luck.
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Haha. No. I'm talking about a BYOND client. You're not getting rid of me that easily. You and I are gonna be the best of friends for a very long time.
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If you're just trying to get your chat working on other platforms that's pretty trivial, you can even handle BYOND logins. Actual graphical games are another beast and are exactly what the HTML5 webclient was meant to handle, which uses a thin client protocol that's technically still part of the engine.
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Open source the webclient :D
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Yeah I highly doubt the server sends every object every frame. Probably only the ones that changed.
Even if it did the dumb thing though, BYOND worked in 2003, and today's mobile phones are certainly better than the desktops of 2003. | |