I’ve been a BYOND player and developer since August 19, 2002. My BYOND key could drink legally in the USA. Humor me as I share with the community what has made BYOND so compelling to me, why I think it has got an incredible potential and is going to be successful at attracting and retaining passionate developers which will make some incredible games.
I'm also going to speak about what I think needs to change for BYOND to be successful.
BYOND as an engine has no peers at what it does. People will reference Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine, and others as real threats to BYOND’s future. Those certainly are great game engines, but they don’t interfere with the niche that BYOND is focused on: accessible multiplayer games.
Other game engines, even with recent improvements require a lot of effort to handle the networking between client and server. This makes Godot a perfectly adequate place for somebody learning to build a singleplayer game, but making a multiplayer game is a nonstarter for somebody like me. Anybody looking to make an online game without investing a huge percent of their development time into the networking elements, are going to find BYOND the best option.
There is also a misconception that BYOND has a seriously limited engine, but with the introduction of pixel movement, particles, planes, transformations, partial multithreading on servers and vectors/pixlocs they have really increased the ceiling of what a BYOND game can do. If you think BYOND is limiting your favorite game, its likely the developer refusing the learn to leverage new features. Very few projects now leverage all of what BYOND can do, or even close.
Due to how easy it is to create a game, launch it online and generate a community of hundreds of players, BYOND has a key advantage: Instant gratification.
You can develop a game while concurrently enjoying a community of fans who will test your code, provide feedback and generally appreciate every feature implemented. This isn't typical in the world of game development, on BYOND you can work on your projects in increments and enjoy the fruit of your labour as you work. I can't replicate this feedback loop elsewhere, my little test projects on Unity didn't garner an audience, everything I've worked on elsewhere just never saw the light of day because the audience and immediate viability just wasn't there.
If you find yourself starting and never finishing several projects, solutions like BYOND make projects digestible enough to be realistic.
As a parent with a busy career and personal life I see huge value in being able to make things in my free time and see it playable, enjoyed immediately. There is a huge audience of interested game developers who would be well suited to this community:
1) Rookie developers who don't know how to make a game and want to learn,
2) Hobby developers who want to prototype or get a game concept into playable form without making it their full time job,
3) Strong developers who just want to make games, and don't want to deal with the overhead of back-end network systems, marketing, web hosting, etc.
We as a community can be very self defeating and negative. There is a reason we have so many long-term developers here, BYOND works very well in the niche its carved out.
Then there is another major consideration. BYOND's ownership is not squeezing the community for every dime its worth. In fact, the development of BYOND is entirely financed by donations and has effectively no mandatory pricing whatsoever. There are no barriers to entry, no revenue sharing or up front costs. You should for these reasons donate to BYOND, unlike developing for Unity where you could spend years making a game and be impacted by some aggressive licensing model fiasco.
The perception of BYOND's success is a bit problematic. Lots of people would assert that BYOND has lost some momentum and from a players perspective, that might has some validity. The number of players has fallen in many communities over the past decade, with the SS13 community going the opposite direction and growing and being an amazing example for BYOND. Players and popular games are a lagging indicator of what drives real growth and success here. The important variable for BYOND prospectively is the growth of Developers. If you build it, they will come.
BYOND hasn't always had the most conducive environment for attracting Developers. Huge influxes of fangame players don't necessarily translate to a fun place to make games. Engine limitations or just clunky problems have been a headwind over the years to making good games. The engine with 516 has reached a level of viability and maturity that's very different from how things were back in 2002.
There has been a very intentional effort to cultivate a more inclusive and supportive space for developers, particularly on the unofficial BYOND discord. I can see this working, the seeds of a positive development culture are taking root and I'm seeing some exceptional talent develop. This approach, to support and create a positive space for developers will work.
If you are a player wondering what the future looks like for BYOND, know that we have the tools to make games that are far better than what you might be familiar with. Expect that the learning curve to make higher end multiplayer games is flattening and passionate community leaders like Ter13, F0lak, Kaiochao and of course Lummox Jr himself are putting in a lot of time to teach, support, make libraries and provide examples so that rising talent will be successful.
If you are considering making a project in BYOND, get on the discord and start. Ask questions, make mistakes, the collaborative culture is at an all time high. The engine is ready for a great game, be ambitious and creative.
What does BYOND need to do differently going forward? There are a few key things:
1. The way people communicate has moved on from the Web 1.0 days. The main signpost for this community which is BYOND.com needs to remove some unnecessary and underutilized baggage. New people coming to this site might think its dead. This is partially how libraries and demos are sorted algorithmically to not prioritize new and relevant/rising innovations but rather the all time most popular items. The game sorting doesn't quite result in the most active and popular games rising to the top as the algorithm again favors an "all time" popularity rather than momentum. The presence of "recent updates" don't reflect the flurry of activity and really, a lot of the community communication should live in Discord where it is most effective. The site needs to become a concise pitch to developers, download link, highlight of role model projects and then access to a more relevant library, demo and games page.
2. We need more outreach to other communities. With a more modern website that has more of a pitch to developers as its initial focus, we can go to game developer subreddits, we can post about BYOND or our projects on YouTube, etc. The merits of this engine are not well broadcast and we all play a part in being cheerleaders for it.
3. Make more games and share them more broadly. There is a lingering problem with creators not understanding copyright and trademark law and the community damage that has come with enforcement of these things. We as a community need to compile some thought leadership on what we can't do legally because rookie developers are not lawyers. There was a huge problem with people misconstruing fair-use laws and bad advice turned into takedowns, demoralization and a loss of broader community engagement. Let's keep making games that take inspiration from our favorite source material, but know what the law is and abide by it in all instances.
The potential of BYOND with the tools we have prospectively, is immense. The culture is better and the support has never been more available.
Lets make games. If anybody wants to show off some of the super cool stuff I see daily in the Discord, especially in the hall of fame - feel free to gloat and post to this entry to help me make my point.
Get on the discord: https://discord.gg/WUetUEVdk4
GOA is rebooting as SOA with a major update and launch in the coming months. I'll do a separate update for that. Largest update in 14 years. https://www.byond.com/games/Masterdan/ShinobiOnlineAdventure
ID:2949535
 Oct 22, 11:23 am (Edited on Oct 22, 3:16 pm)
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Dan, it's been a pleasure having you back. We never interacted back in the day, but god damn it's been great to meet adult you and really vibe on making cool stuff and talking about high level community management. You are a true gentleman and a scholar.
Regarding BYONDiscord: I'm glad that the consensus that this work has been worth the trouble we went through over the last couple of years is growing. Thank you so much for the recognition and the kind words. You're one of the best folks we've picked up lately, and I am brimming with excitement for what you are about to drop on all of our heads. Regarding the website: As for discussing BYOND's problems, I really prefer a solution-oriented, minimalist approach. BYOND's engine and community is now in the best shape it's ever been in. The site, however, doesn't do a very good job of representing that. Let's examine what a minimal, simple solution that we can all achieve today would look like:
Discord collaboration: I've built some tools to help on this front. Gurubot is my discord's everything solution, and it has the ability to create embeds that show your game's live status on the hub, and create links directly to your game. Anyone who contacts me regarding getting a server widget for their game's hub will receive assistance setting it up. The widget updates every 5 minutes, updating the stats about your game in a discord embed, and setting up clickable play links to your game's servers.  The GuruBot Hub Widget will transition any user that clicks on the widget to a landing page, that might look a bit like this:  Once the user is at this redirect, their pager will be opened after a few seconds, and they will connect to your game. The redirect page offers users assistance if they don't have BYOND installed, and some information on the data I collect (none!) and how to contact me with questions regarding the service (don't). While it links to BYONDiscord by default, I've released a copy of the hub redirect that is fully customizable. You can host it in your BYOND member files if you are a BYOND subscriber, or on your own website if you own one. I've also got a live hub monitor that keeps track of all the live games on BYOND's hub, and provides links to their hub pages in BYONDiscord! Games are listed even if they don't have a hub, or are unpublished, so my discord does not make a distinction between fangames or regular games. I have a custom sort for them that is solely based on activity rather than fan metrics.  This allows better user onboarding for the community, and helps to de-emphasize the dated website, while still harnessing the tools Lummox has provided us. I'm more than willing to share all of these tools with the community, and have shared them with Atomix so he can integrate them in the old BYOND discord. Onboarding users: Realistically, we should be doing the work of onboarding users ourselves. Your discord, your rules. We set up a Tutorials and Snippets forum in our discord that allows anyone in the community to post useful resources they have found. I do need to do more on this front; I would really like to set up a few more tools for transitioning newly found discord users to the software by creating a user onboarding resources list in the discord. This would walk users through an overview of what BYOND is, how to install it, and how to get started making a simple game, as well as teaching them which additional tools they have available to them, like the developer reference, the bug reports and feature requests forums, and a curated list of demos and libraries that we, as a community decide are worth using in 2024. All of this can be done without Lummox's help, and is being worked on by fantastic members in our community. For instance, F0lak has created an open developer reference that anyone with a github account can edit. He's even written a discord bot for quickly searching for and linking to articles in the reference, and he's working on a tool that will convert that open reference back into a compiled html file that Lummox can use to update the actual reference with community examples. Resource listings: The current algorithm for resource listing is no longer reflective of the reality of engagement with the site. The resources need a new way of ranking themselves by user engagements. I think for demos/libraries, ranking them by downloads over the last 24 months would be the best way forward. For games though, I think we just need to break the hub listing into two categories: live, and recent plays. Games should rank themselves across a 6 month average of activity. I think the live listing should just be who has the most players in all servers for that game at one time. For games that aren't hosted server-wise, I think recent downloads would also be a fairly good metric for popularity. For those games not distributing themselves through the website, such as via steam or itch, their frontage being dominantly focused on their steam listing would more or less moot their need to be listed highly here. Call to action: Look y'all, for years we've asked what Lummox can do for us. We are here. We're gonna be here forever. Let's work together to make where we're at a nicer place to be. Let's make the shit we wanted to have when we were just starting out. Let's help some new developers have a good time learning useful life skills with DM. Fixating on only the negatives only blinds you to the solutions standing directly behind them. Let's do what we can do today to support each other in the creation of assets and spaces for ourselves and others. | |
Agree wholeheartedly Ter. You are doing the lions share of building the community and we need others to step up rather than feel like everything needs to be done by Lummox or yourself. I'll definitely use Gurubot for my projects.
One thing I highly recommend, and its up to Lummox of course, is making the BYOND Discord official and linking it prominently on the BYOND.com website. I know we love to work around BYOND proper without interrupting Lummox's flow, but as we've seen from vectors and pixlocs - there is power in baking in what the community builds for itself into the offical product. So much of the BYOND whitepaper, blue book, etc should be superseded with some of the super cool content that's more up to date that lives in the Discord and oref. So I really think the community needs to do its part - but Lummox please make legitimate and prominently highlight the things that work so the community can find it more easily. | |
I've pruned this back to where things went off the rails. Grudgewanking and bad-faith behavior break with the posting guidelines, so it's all in the bin. Some good points might have gotten thrown away in that, unfortunately.
Anyway let's keep things going from a place of mutual respect. | |
I also pruned back my initial post to be less focal on the discord side of things.
This thread is about the future of the platform, and while discord communities are currently playing an outsized role in that, I feel that it's best to gather consensus on the creation of resources and how to accentuate what BYOND does well and makes it appealing, rather than stay stuck in what it does poorly and makes it unappealing. | |
I think what's exciting, is we have tools like Discord to better support new developers and share code and provide timely help so that people can get unstuck and keep making games. Leveraging tools and legitimizing them or providing more formal advertising to them is still something I feel will help. A tool being available or crafted is great - BYONDiscord and Oref are good examples, a path to formal implementation is also important but not something that needs to happen with expediency.
I respect the process of development, vetting and improving to a stage before it gets digested into the main product. I also think that new things can be kept unofficial for some time until they take root in the community or until Lummox has the time to feel comfortable that they are the best implementation or expression of a concept. The thing is, I generally just see a lot of promise and hope that its adequately leveraged. That might be a journey and that's okay. The direction is awesome, and as we see it show results it can move from proof-of-concept to a change in paradigm. In the meantime, if you are making a game or want to make a game, know that you'll get time and attention from some of the best developers we have in the BYONDiscord, and its very newbie friendly. | |
Weird how all posts referencing Roblox and Godot were removed, as well as legitimate criticisms about obtaining an executable and new players having to go through the pager (an issue which Vylocity at least attempted to address).
Par for the course unfortunately. This is precisely why I kept my post so short. | |
Ourico does bring a couple of completely valid points regarding the executable and the installer being a barrier to entry for the platform.
On the subject of positivity for that, thankfully BYOND can be packaged and redistributed as part of an NSI. If you want to put your project up on itch, you just need to distribute a copy of BYOND in your own custom, signed installer. The membership beg before joining a world will still be in place with this approach, but you can always make the entry-point a little more professional by building a quick splash screen that shows up briefly before running DS to legitimize your own project's branding and offer user reassurance that they didn't just install malware. BYOND natively allows joining games with guest accounts, and opening DreamSeeker without the pager open at all. So the developer would just need to roll their own account system for logging in if they wanna do any kind of server-side stuff. No Godot or Unity games require you to log in with your Godot or Unity accounts to play, so why should developers who want to branch out expect to not have to write their own user account management system? Yeah, that's a lot of hoops to jump through for developers, and it would be great if BYONDexe just had an up-front yearly cost instead, with a couple of tiers, and a boilerplate agreement indemnifying BYOND of any malfeasance you do with it so that the weird quasi-relationship with fangames is no longer a concern. I believe though, that this is the plan in the near future, and now that the platform has webview2 coming soon, these problems can finally be looked at. The pager itself is increasingly looking like tech debt --Instead of a massive overhaul to improve its functionality, I kinda feel like the development energy is better spent again, streamlining its necessity as a part of user engagement with the platform and really making DreamSeeker more of a self-starter. As for Godot, in terms of the branding and presentation of that software, their website is actually one of the first things I looked to when I was making a mockup of what BYOND's website could look like in 2024 last year. Godot has a fantastic user-onboarding process, and can, and should be learned from. Their website is extremely minimalist, and that's a strength; not a weakness. Again, I'm not saying we don't NEED any improvements. I just really like encouraging people to be the change they want to see in their world. We lift each other up when we do the work on ourselves for ourselves. The community HAS to serve itself in order to thrive. It cannot exist solely on one man's sweaty back. | |
Because I'm just generally a fan of BYOND having a business model and not just a development model, I really like the idea of monetizing the BYONDexe concept. Distribution licensing and price tiers really resonate with me as a developer because I probably would pay for that type of additional polish and ease of mobility on a project I want to grow and feel professional. I know BYONDexe is a testy topic, but actually its just not fully hatched yet in my opinion. Theres something there that should be tied back to economics and until that is ironed out it should be kept at a purely discretionary basis for Lummox.
An example: Tier 1: basic exe deployment - ad beg remains. Need to be a BYONDmember with an approved hub. Tier 2: some fancy additional exe features including a splash page, server browser, etc. ad beg remains. ~$139 per year. Tier 3: no ad beg, all the above features, maybe a highlight at the top of the server browser. ~399 per year. Then you do something clever, let the players of those games donate to the hub to level up its tier so the dev doesn't have to. Like discord boosting. Hell, let BYOND members have a $1 credit each month or something to put towards a game they like. Maybe I'd pay for Tier 2 and if my players chipped in enough they'd get to 3 on their own. Anyway, not a coherent idea as of yet but directionally sensible. The actuarial math I don't have and don't appreciate is how much donations are driven by the ad beg versus just goodwill. | |
Masterdan wrote:
Because I'm just generally a fan of BYOND having a business model and not just a development model, I really like the idea of monetizing the BYONDexe concept. Distribution licensing and price tiers really resonate with me as a developer because I probably would pay for that type of additional polish and ease of mobility on a project I want to grow and feel professional. I know BYONDexe is a testy topic, but actually its just not fully hatched yet in my opinion. Theres something there that should be tied back to economics and until that is ironed out it should be kept at a purely discretionary basis for Lummox. All of this, please and thank you. | |
And one fun little caveat, because Lummox has some risk on the copyright infringement front, a DMCA takedown would not entitle the developer to a refund and would break their licensing for the exe. Not sure how possible, but I think that's fair. One challenge is the developer asserting no copyright infringement, how best to handle that is tricky - I'm no lawyer, but I do think losing the license cost on a valid DMCA is a way to hold developers accountable.
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Figures my post was too spicy.
Is it disrespectful to say that Roblox is the real successor to BYOND as things stand right now? We can make concessions how Unity and Redot do some of the thing that BYOND tries much, much better, and then circle back to how BYOND still slightly one-ups them in one way or another (even if it's not true), but with Roblox, it is the second coming of BYOND for this generation in many ways. People who don't know that BYOND existed make games for it, BYOND RP communities branch out there. A good number of the features that we pretend UE doesn't have, most notably the pager, are a big part of it. It even has a very robust way to handle monetization, a feature that Masterdan wants in BYOND, as I mentioned before in my bad faith post. I hope I didn't go over the line suggesting that all those cool bleeding edge incredibly exciting pieces of code and projects available exclusively on BYONDiscord could be shared outside of it, because I believe that they could and should. L*nux was just a suggestion, and I know that it's probably far too ambitious to consider, but, after cutting support for everything but the worst and worse that worst Windows, this would be very appreciated. I can't judge whether that would help onboard any new (or old) users, but, anecdotally, I do know one person who said he can't play BYOND games because he is on Linux. Either way, the fact that people complain that Roblox cut WINE support suggests that there is something that might be worth looking into here. And I haven't even got to the subject of Google's adware embedded into Dream Seeker that might put off some of the potential users in that post. It even happened on this forum not too long ago, likely earlier this year. Hopefully that thread didn't break any guidelines and is still available. I also did a cursory search through F0lak's post history, as well as used Google, Bing and Startpage to search for Oref on this forum, I couldn't find any mention of a link to its Github page, or any other hints of its existence (this thread didn't come up, either, for what it's worth). Making this thread the only place where you could learn about the fact that it exists (but not much more than that) if you didn't join BYONDiscord for that and much more that you are missing out on. Or if you somehow got banned from the central repository of all BYOND knowledge that isn't years out of date. According to Oref's commit history at Github, the project became public on September 8, a month and a half ago. That just goes to show how important it is that BYONDiscord gets prominently featured on the site as soon as possible, as how are you expected to make people aware of its existence in a timely manner otherwise? | |
Linux is attractive because there are so many developers who like it. Its unattractive because it would be such a resource sink for Lummox who doesnt profess to have an expertise in it. Its simply not a core competency of the small, 1 man band we have here.
Roblox I did respond pretty thoroughly to. You are correct that the fangame mania that propped up BYOND a decade ago has found refuge there. It is what it is. Roblox isn't good at making games and it isn't competing with BYOND directly as the niches it carves out differ significantly. Most of Roblox users play on tablets and few would consider it a true game engine - just a highly modable minecraft. I do think that some of what makes Roblox a 27 billion dollar company is the same jet fuel BYOND has had a slight dose of in the past, I've always encouraged tapping into the demand that exists for fangames without engaging in copyright infringement. Its a fine line. But to recap. Roblox is 3D and highly monetized. BYOND is 2D and lost BYONDimes some time ago. The audience BYOND was drowning in in 2005-2010 has likely pivoted to Roblox and you are absolutely right. Were those people likely to be developers or good for BYOND? I hope so, I was part of that group. We are a lot more accepting of this younger fangame audience than in the past - its going in the right direction. About stuff not getting from the Discord to BYOND.com. I agree its a problem. Its not a problem of intention, Ter does a good job getting his stuff double posted, its a problem of convenience. Work in progresses don't get put on the site because they are actively being improved and not "launched". This ties to my point of the Discord being important - but we need to probably be more intentional about cultivating the important things from it to the site in a better and more timely way. That's a todo for the community, not throwing shade at Lummox or Ter. | |
Tsukumogami wrote:
Figures my post was too spicy. I agree. Roblox has taken a lot of characteristics that were prominent in BYOND in its heyday. For one reason or another, though. The management at the time seemed to shy away from BYOND's OG identity -- likely due to the toxicity it brought to the community side of things. That being said, I don't really see Roblox as a competitor or something that really needs to be compared to. It does what it does well -- making the production of unpolished but interesting 3d games easy enough that a kid could make one with enough time. But it doesn't seem to have much intrigue in the 2D space of things. I think BYOND's competitors are like RPGMaker, GameMaker, etc. The former, I truly think BYOND can outdo. But that would require competent frameworks to be completed. Word to Forum_Account, the legend that was misunderstood. A lot of his libraries must be recreated in modern BYOND. | |
Masterdan wrote:
And one fun little caveat, because Lummox has some risk on the copyright infringement front, a DMCA takedown would not entitle the developer to a refund and would break their licensing for the exe. Not sure how possible, but I think that's fair. One challenge is the developer asserting no copyright infringement, how best to handle that is tricky - I'm no lawyer, but I do think losing the license cost on a valid DMCA is a way to hold developers accountable. DMCA wouldn't apply to Lummox in this case. The only DMCA complaint that would land on Lummox's doorstep would be for content on the hub. Simply hiding hubs that have had DMCA strikes until the user appealed and the appeal was forwarded to the rights holder, or until which time the rights holder sends a demand letter explicitly demanding removal would be enough. None of this would impact a BYONDexe key in any way. Tsukumogami wrote: I didn't go over the line suggesting that all those cool bleeding edge incredibly exciting pieces of code and projects available exclusively on BYONDiscord could be shared outside of it, because I believe that they could and should. I will admit, I did not take it very charitably earlier that I was accused of gatekeeping resources at the same time you were mocking two public resources that I posted this week. It felt very "Heads I win, tails you lose". Maybe that wasn't your intention, but it definitely came across as demanding access to my work while also both insulting me for producing it, and telling me you weren't interested in it. This felt very incoherent and hostile. But since you have repeated the same accusations that you were asked to stop making by the moderators, maybe I was not clear enough last time, and you did not get an opportunity to dispel this myth you are manufacturing: There are no resources being gatekept on BYONDiscord. All of my work gets posted here first, and then linked into the discord when it is ready, and I've gotten community feedback from people I trust within my community. People are free to post whatever they want, wherever they want. I am not telling anyone to create exclusive content for the discord, and I am not telling anyone to only post it to the discord. It's up to F0lak to market Oref. I will throw him shoutouts for the work he's doing, but it's not my place to promote it for him here. If you want an answer as to why he hasn't shared it yet, you'd have to ask him, instead of accusing the whole community of malfeasance. I have webhooks that pipe questions asked on this forum directly into my discord, so that users are notified the minute someone on the website needs assistance. Several of us actively keep an eye out for those questions and answer them when we can. No one is being gatekept. They are just choosing to not engage with unproductive nonsense and instead engage with people that are supportive. I actively encourage other users to make resources of their own for the good of the community. People are welcome in my discord. They just need to not be disruptive to the space. We encourage anyone who wants assistance to join, have a good time, and treat others with respect. | |
A monetized BYONDexe is something that will be worth looking into, considering WebView2 support will be here soon. Reviving a monetized webclient might also be worth looking into.
Another thing that I think is worth considering is more interoperability with other programming languages or even other game engines. One thing that we may have never considered is the idea of Dream Seeker having a kind of headless API mode, where it could be used strictly to provide online multiplayer support for third-party game engines, as strange as that might sound. This would make BYOND a lot more useful, for a lot more developers. The infrastructure is already there, so why not let it be used with any engine? This would need to be designed to work with monetization, as expected. A headless API mode for Dream Seeker would also likely be much more compatible with Wine, as developers could just implement their own GUI, in another engine. One language feature that could increase interoperability would be the ability to specify a starting index when creating new lists, so that developers have the option to start at either 1 or 0, to match whatever other programming languages that they might already be working with. This might be controversial, but I think it's better to have the choice, instead of forcing one way or the other. This would be very helpful for polyglot developers. Something that we as a community can do to increase interoperability is work on providing more boilerplate code and scaffolding tools, for various programming languages, to help interface with BYOND's DM language, in various different ways. This could also help bring in more developers and raise awareness about BYOND. The future of programming is an alliance of increasingly advanced polyglot infrastructure, not a constant battle between various languages and engines. | |
Tsukumogami wrote:
Is it disrespectful to say that Roblox is the real successor to BYOND as things stand right now? No, but it's completely incorrect. I can't speak to the game situation on Roblox or migration of users. It's a different platform altogether, and always has been. It's also something that was built from the ground up to be mostly what it is, and although I'm sure it's gone through its share of evolution, it's always had a team and Big Tech Money behind it. You're comparing apples and bagpipes. I hope I didn't go over the line suggesting that all those cool bleeding edge incredibly exciting pieces of code and projects available exclusively on BYONDiscord could be shared outside of it, because I believe that they could and should. Nothing is being kept exclusively on BYONDiscord, except for the alpha testing which is a different thing. I don't know where that idea came from, but it's not even in ICBM distance of the truth. So you're working with a very faulty assumption and you came in hot. And I haven't even got to the subject of Google's adware embedded into Dream Seeker that might put off some of the potential users in that post. I'm trying to be generous but that's straight-up defamatory. At best, you've been taking in extremely bad/malicious sources of information and completely failing to apply the sniff test to them, and now you're repeating these things uncritically. So, to set the record straight: There's no adware in Dream Seeker. There never has been. The only part of the software that ever delivered ads (and doesn't anymore) is the splash screen which used the embedded browser control to play a video ad via JavaScript, in an iframe. That's nothing like adware, and nothing insidious is installed. It's basically equivalent to having an ad on a website. Adware is a different animal altogether, and it's a particularly loaded term, as you know. The video ads were from a trustworthy provider (not Google), and were extremely constrained. Growing incompatibilities with embedded IE and communication troubles with the ad network failing to deliver any campaigns slowly strangled the whole thing. We haven't had any ads at all in quite a long while now, and I'm fine being done with it. Regarding Google specifically, Google ads only ever existed on the site and that was a long time ago. It didn't last long. It even happened on this forum not too long ago, likely earlier this year. You're either repeating a lie or you're outright telling one. I want to be clear that the presumption of good faith is on a razor's edge at this point, because you're being cavalier with accusations that the software is untrustworthy. We can put that part of this to bed now and move on with useful discussion. | |
Ter13 wrote:
I will admit, I did not take it very charitably earlier that I was accused of gatekeeping resources at the same time you were mocking two public resources that I posted this week. It felt very "Heads I win, tails you lose". Maybe that wasn't your intention, but it definitely came across as demanding access to my work while also both insulting me for producing it, and telling me you weren't interested in it. This felt very incoherent and hostile.The thread was squeaky clean by the time I came back, so I didn't know what anyone requested. Your two recent libraries were just an easy target because they were mentioned as an example of why it's important to link the BYONDiscord now so that the community can use these wonders. If they are posted for everyone to see here first, then it's even funnier that they were used to promote it. Of course it's anyone's right to only share their things wherever they want to, or not at all. I don't want other's work for myself under the guise of "everyone". But apparently there is just so much community-oriented work done on Discord and nowhere else, and that community is just one BYONDiscord click away from discovering it, wouldn't it be a shame if they were stuck with the old outdated reference dock just because there's no link to it on the game hubs - it feels like some kind of a point is being made here. Masterdan wrote: Linux is attractive because there are so many developers who like it. Its unattractive because it would be such a resource sink for Lummox who doesnt profess to have an expertise in it. Its simply not a core competency of the small, 1 man band we have here. Meme01 wrote: I agree. Roblox has taken a lot of characteristics that were prominent in BYOND in its heyday. For one reason or another, though. The management at the time seemed to shy away from BYOND's OG identity -- likely due to the toxicity it brought to the community side of things. Lummox JR wrote: No, but it's completely incorrect. I can't speak to the game situation on Roblox or migration of users. It's a different platform altogether, and always has been.I'm comparing the phenomena of easy-to-make low-effort games that are related to one's interests that then get swarmed with players who share that interest, and what platforms they congreagate on. DBZ and Naruto used to be huge on BYOND, but nowadays attempts to make an RP game about something newer, like that zombie sister anime, fizzle out quickly. The circumstances are different, but you can still see somewhat similar end results. Obviously BYOND can't make the same pitch to VCs and get showered in billions of capital to replicate whatever it is Roblox might be doing right, so I don't know if this comparison can mean that you should try to copy some aspects of it to help the platform, but Unreal Engine, Unity, RPG Maker and even Godot get some financial backing, too, and they are brought up as BYOND's competitors that you can potentially learn something from, or just compare BYOND to and be happy that at least they don't have a game browser yet. That also reminds me, there is one good thing about my post getting deleted - I looked into the current state of RPG Maker, and all the buzz about Unite's online capabilities is gone, and people are still discussing the networking mods for MV and MZ. So, the part about it being an easy target for BYOND to bully seems very true. Its online games seem to struggle to handle 10 players. The only people who I know moved to Roblox at one point are some Bleach fans, and I learned it from one of them while talking to them on BYOND, so clearly they didn't ditch BYOND entirely. Granted, "RP" games aren't exactly sophisticated in the first place, but it still looks to me like it can offer some of the same things BYOND could, at least to that part of the userbase. If your point about apples and oranges is that BYOND is moving away from that sort of games, I have deletable opinions about that as well, but I'm acting under assumption that BYOND is still expected to at least acknowledge the tile games about anime protagonists begging for ranks instead of moving to the cutting edge pixel movement tech. Lummox JR wrote: Nothing is being kept exclusively on BYONDiscord, except for the alpha testing which is a different thing. I don't know where that idea came from, but it's not even in ICBM distance of the truth. So you're working with a very faulty assumption and you came in hot.I was going off Ter13's and Masterdan's initial posts about how vital it is that the discord link is prominently featured wherever possible (no pressure, though). Apparently, you are no longer missing anything (other than the link to F0lak's Oref, of course) by not being on BYONDiscord, but will that still be true once, and if, the site is de-emphasised and compressed of to just the essential, trafficked components? Lummox JR wrote: I'm trying to be generous but that's straight-up defamatory. At best, you've been taking in extremely bad/malicious sources of information and completely failing to apply the sniff test to them, and now you're repeating these things uncritically.I think I'm only recounting my experiences unless I'm talking about somebody else, so you can be sure that the malice comes from me personally. Sorry if there is distinction between adware and software that delivers ads. The only thing I wanted to load into that term is the point that I hate ads. As for Google, I may have conflated the fact that Dream Seeker serves (or served) ads with the pager sending network requests to Google's servers. Unless that also turns out to be untrue. Lummox JR wrote: You're either repeating a lie or you're outright telling one.I tried searching for it to add a funny "EDIT: found it" part to my post, and came up with nothing. It was a forum thread from somebody acting enthusiastic about developing for BYOND, and then acting angry about the ads, or the splash screen, or something, within just a few posts. Either way, you don't have to entertain the "repeating" theory, I saw it myself. If somebody else knows what I'm talking about, we can get banned for collusion together. | |
Tsukumogami wrote:
It was a forum thread from somebody acting enthusiastic about developing for BYOND, and then acting angry about the ads, or the splash screen, or something, within just a few posts. I don't remember that thread, but it's not what I thought you were talking about. Apologies if I was overly rough in shutting that down. In context with the word "adware", it set off alarm bells of some ultra-shady insinuations. There is indeed a distinction between adware and software that might have ads in it. Adware is a subset of malware, which is why it's a loaded term. And you also said "embedded" adware, which loaded that up even more because it implied DS was installing something sinister. I can see how this could be an innocent mistake for someone who's not as familiar with the nasty history of adware, so this could be something of a communication gap. Just for future reference, though, if you'd just said "the ads" instead of "Google adware embedded" it would've been way less confrontational. (Still a bit inaccurate in that the ads have been gone for ages, though. It's just a delay screen now.) Back to the point you were making, if someone was frustrated with the delay screen and a bunch of other stuff about the software... I can understand that. I tend to think someone that easily turned off by the delay was probably not going to stick around for anything else, but obviously I'd rather live in a world where it wasn't needed because the software was making serious bank. And I'd like for the constructive criticisms in this thread to help guide things in a good direction. Masterdan had some great ideas to go on. As for Google, I may have conflated the fact that Dream Seeker serves (or served) ads with the pager sending network requests to Google's servers. Unless that also turns out to be untrue. The pager doesn't send anything to Google's servers AFAIK. I don't think it even uses Google fonts. It definitely doesn't serve ads. When the pager was revamped with a browser interface ads were played with as an idea, but it never worked and we never served any through it. | |
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EDIT:
Good post though. MAKGAM.