I may have conflated the fact that Dream Seeker serves (or served) ads with the pager sending network requests to Google's servers

Dream Seeker hasn't played a single ad in probably north of 5 years. It's basically just a membership beg at this point. --I keep seeing the dominant complaint by people who drag the software being ads, and all this tells me is that they don't use the software.

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.

Neither of those two articles I posted are libraries. They are core features of 516 I wrote tutorials for so the community can start to wrap their heads around the very useful features of the next major version of BYOND's engine when it comes out into open beta soon.
Was a hosting service considered recently? You can't find a $4/month VPS these days, and self-hosting is becoming impossible without a static IP, so maybe that could be an incentive to have more SS13 instances and DBZ rips pollute the pager.

Ter13 wrote:
I keep seeing the dominant complaint by people who drag the software being ads, and all this tells me is that they don't use the software.

I just assumed that there were no ads for my area, and the splash screen sometimes being black instead of showing the notification about the membership was it failing to load an ad or something. With Dream Seeker routinely corrupting icons and other people mentioning ads, that was my first guess.
In response to Tsukumogami
I do think an official BYOND web hosting solution could be an avenue for monetization. Similar to the minecraft approach to making money, people will pay a premium to have it be: easy, reputable, and leveraging specific BYOND expertise.

What would be cool, if there is a system of BYOND costs for deployment licensing and hosting, the ability for players to gofundme style support their favorite games for both of those key aspects. One issue is there is a trust problem on BYOND - players don't mind donating to their favorite game to cover server costs but a lot of developers don't spend the money on what they proport to. There is an opportunity there absolutely.

But I had to dig past the inherent toxicity of how you phrased your suggestion to get to point you were making. Its just dense with disagreeable negativity and sprinkled with unfounded gossip. I am not even sure if you are aware of how much of a negative Nancy you come across.
In response to Tsukumogami
I don't know what you're talking about with icon corruption.

TBH I no longer think you're coming at this maliciously, but you have this tendency to just blindly repeat rumors you've heard from people and state them as a thing you know a lot about. I wish you'd just stick to talking about the things you've experienced instead of trying to speak for others.

Was a hosting service considered recently? You can't find a $4/month VPS these days, and self-hosting is becoming impossible without a static IP, so maybe that could be an incentive to have more SS13 instances and DBZ rips pollute the pager.

I'm confused because the last part sounds like you don't want that and yet you're saying there should be an incentive for it. Which is it? Generally more rips are obviously not to be desired of course, but ain't nothing wrong with new SS13 codebases. It's a popular game and I'm glad to see it thrive.

And if you're talking about BYOND running a hosting service, that's a hard pass. It involves combining skill sets I don't have with administrative duties that would only take time away from development, while introducing myriad other problems.
Masterdan wrote:
But I had to dig past the inherent toxicity of how you phrased your suggestion to get to point you were making. Its just dense with disagreeable negativity and sprinkled with unfounded gossip. I am not even sure if you are aware of how much of a negative Nancy you come across.

Is this about my previous posts, or this one? I'm just joking.

Lummox JR wrote:
I don't know what you're talking about with icon corruption.

TBH I no longer think you're coming at this maliciously, but you have this tendency to just blindly repeat rumors you've heard from people and state them as a thing you know a lot about. I wish you'd just stick to talking about the things you've experienced instead of trying to speak for others.

These mostly are things that I've experienced. Or at least it's not just something someone told me on IRC or discord. We had to troubleshoot people failing to upload an icon somewhat regularly only a year or two ago, so 514-515 times, and purging the cache or changing one pixel before uploading it again tended to help. I think my cry for help about dealing with manually purged cache that got zero replies was something in connection to that, too.

Lummox JR wrote:
I'm confused because the last part sounds like you don't want that and yet you're saying there should be an incentive for it. Which is it? Generally more rips are obviously not to be desired of course, but ain't nothing wrong with new SS13 codebases. It's a popular game and I'm glad to see it thrive.

And if you're talking about BYOND running a hosting service, that's a hard pass. It involves combining skill sets I don't have with administrative duties that would only take time away from development, while introducing myriad other problems.

I think that outside of the SS13 sphere, anime rips are that other secondary lifeblood of BYOND. So, yes, I think them clogging the pager would be better rather than worse.

Shame if it's a no-go. I don't know if it would be a good a cache stream, at least not right away, but it could steer more people towards making (as in downloading a Finale rip) and playing games here. But, yes, I just thought that a native BYOND hosting would be less intensive, and thus probably cheaper than the current solution of having to rent a VPS and instal Linux on it just to run one game.
I agree with the substance of what you are saying, the dry jokes are a bit hard to identify as jokes rather than criticisms, so that was my feedback. I do not see Lummox as interested in hosting per-se, but the potential remains significant. I hope this is re-opened in the future, even if that requires partnership with somebody who has a core competency in this space.
Tsukumogami wrote:
I think that outside of the SS13 sphere, anime rips are that other secondary lifeblood of BYOND. So, yes, I think them clogging the pager would be better rather than worse.

I tend to agree with this statement. In fact, I think we really need to retire how we talk about this community, and just refer to them as rp fangames at this point. Calling out this subcommunity as 'rips' at this point is counterproductive. All of us use the software. All of us write code in the same language. We all participate largely, in the same spaces. Tossing around terms like 'rip' and trying to shoehorn them into a separate category from the handful of original IP'ed live games undermines our ability to respect one another and foster an environment where people actually want to collaborate, teach, and learn from each other.

A lot of the extant anime games have been passionately hacked at for years by dozens of hands. They no longer resemble that manic first wave of leaked properties that stormed the site in the early 2000s, and I feel that we should treat that labor of love with a little more kindness and understanding than we often do.

I don't really hold that against Lummox at all; I know there are reasons he can't be seen to be directly supporting trademark infringement on the site.

So again, to dovetail back into what I was saying in my last few posts: It's kind of on us as a community to collaborate and fill those gaps, and create that better culture. Not to loop back to the discord culture, but one of the things I spent a lot of time trying to put a stop to was the posturing of users between different subcommunities within that space; That effort was spent largely on the way developers chose to speak about SS13 as well as the anime community. In wanting to foster a productive, supportive environment, we basically try to make sure any negative conversation about SS13 or the Anime community is coming from a place of talking at a high level about game design, or in making specific criticisms of coding paradigms and design considerations with a constructive energy.

It's all about finding solvable problems and figuring out where to apply your energy to the solution.

The way I see it, the fangame community is eyes on product. More eyes on product is a good thing, even when it's a bad thing.
I do agree with you Ter, the term rip was reasonably spawned out of a chaotic time in BYONDs history where there was a ton of game volume coming out of the leaked code of the DBZeta source. Because the owner of that game left and literally all of the fangames at a point in time were rips, the term became fairly appropriate.

In 2024, there are a ton of fangames that take inspiration from Dragonball, Pokemon, Naruto, Bleach, One-piece, etc. The difference is that: (1) some of them only take inspiration but avoid trademark infringement (2) A lot of games are being developed that are not built on unsanctioned source codes.

To diminish the work of developers in that space under the rip brand doesnt serve us well at all. Similarly, encouraging people to not make fangame and make "original" games can be pretty demoralizing too, as it implies these fangames are low quality or unoriginal (and there are of course valid components to that). A non-fangame might be a very generic JRPG and call itself original, containing no original concepts or implementations.

I guess the whole thing is, words matter. Respect for developers is really important to cultivate interest, and so we need to be intentional about words.
In response to Masterdan
Masterdan wrote:
I do agree with you Ter, the term rip was reasonably spawned out of a chaotic time in BYONDs history where there was a ton of game volume coming out of the leaked code of the DBZeta source. Because the owner of that game left and literally all of the fangames at a point in time were rips, the term became fairly appropriate.

Yeah, that term was more used to shame people for making their own editions or spinoff games that were already made in BYOND. It showed signs of competitiveness even if that was not their intention. If your game was called a rip, you will probably be stuck with 10 players online, unless the "rip" was necessary on saving an abandoned game.
It is still important to continue assigning the pejorative "rip" to games whose current owners did not write the bulk of the code, and who operate the game without the original author's permission, usually for financial gain.

To this day, I still get people adding me on Discord and asking me in DMs if I have such-and-such game source that I could give them or sell them. These people are interested in making a little money without doing much work.

Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't think it's too much to ask that modern games here be driven simply by passion as they used to be.

As an aside, yes I'm aware there have always been some back door dealings with selling people guild houses on Gekisen, or bankai changes on BLN. But I do not believe that these games were created for the explicit purpose of making money.
In response to Ourico
Ourico wrote:
It is still important to continue assigning the pejorative "rip" to games whose current owners did not write the bulk of the code, and who operate the game without the original author's permission, usually for financial gain.

why does it matter if they wrote all the code or not, though? It's easy to say it matters, but I don't think it matters if the code wasn't stolen. A lot of people start making games sharing their codes, and you can say half of the games on BYOND have codes that are not theirs. I have shared a lot of codes with a lot of familiar people who do not give me credit, and I don't care. I rather see them happy! It's weird how people want to categorize a game because of the source code. People can have their fun, and there should be no shame (if it's not stolen).

Even though, I was someone making spinoffs of my favorite games that were abandoned; I was still accused of using a source when I spent countless hours figuring out how they did something and wrote in code. Good thing no one can accuse that of me now since I made an entire networking game in PYTHON via BGE from scratch.The word 'rip' definitely falls under toxic community.
Ter13 wrote:
It's all about finding solvable problems and figuring out where to apply your energy to the solution.

The way I see it, the fangame community is eyes on product. More eyes on product is a good thing, even when it's a bad thing.

I'm trying to make a more specific point here, which is that BYOND the way it is is mostly suited for these extremely small developers, to whom I don't think the term "onboarding" can even apply seriously. Maybe the idea here is that they would start with small games and then explore BYOND's new, more advanced features as they get more comfortable with the engine, but, if so, I don't know if that's how it would really go. Though at least that seems like a more realistic plan than something I've imagined this was about initially.

Having eyes on BYOND is the biggest problem that I can see right now, at least among the solvable issues, but I don't have good ideas how to get people to pay attention to it. Maybe Lummox is right, and I jumped the gun regarding Discord, but, to put it mildly, I'm not too sure if shifting focus to it will make the entirety of the engine more accessible rather than less. What parts of the site are there even left to de-emphasize other than the reference docs and the forum?

Masterdan wrote:
To diminish the work of developers in that space under the rip brand doesnt serve us well at all. Similarly, encouraging people to not make fangame and make "original" games can be pretty demoralizing too, as it implies these fangames are low quality or unoriginal (and there are of course valid components to that). A non-fangame might be a very generic JRPG and call itself original, containing no original concepts or implementations.

I'm very familiar with this outside of BYOND. Making an original property as a nod to something you like is a lot harder than basing it on something that is copyrighted for the same reason why people opt to use existing codebases instead of making something from scratch. And with something fully original, it's even harder, unless it's something that you had gestating in your head, and hopefully in writing, for years. This is all neither here nor there, but it is still tangentially related to how easy it is to make an online game in BYOND and why this particular type of games might be important for it. Unless the interest for these online RP games fades entirely.
Oh some good conversation.

Ourico - I think I understand the spirit of what you are saying. Yes I brought in probably 400-500 USD over my time running Gekisen which was a Zeta rip making guild houses and cosmetics - this was over the course of a couple of years and I was ~15 when I worked on that game. On the whole, I put in more effort into that game than I received financial compensation and that is probably the thing that matters. You can make a little bit of money and that's okay, but you have to have an underlying passion and interest in making a fun game as the chief priority. I am a glass half full guy, I believe that the majority of people making games here - regardless of proficiency are doing so out of genuine interest and passion and the money becomes a side hustle (for the record I made $0 on GOA). I say this because most people can make far more money working part time at 7-11 than off of sleazy practices in a BYOND game. There are however, a few developers who take code that they didn't ask to use, barely work on it and spend 90% of their development time finding way to monetize it. The only effective cure for this behavior is:
(1) make more and better games so these old leaked sources cant compete, and
(2) when a game is abandoned, open source the code so it isn't traded between only sketchy players - but gets into the hands of passionate developers.

There will always be people that use their relative position of authority in dishonest ways, hopefully the players have enough options that those toxic communities fail.

Tsukumogami, I do understand what you are saying. The rookies who come in our front door are not necessarily ready to come to the discord and meaningfully learn from the pros who reside there. However, don't underestimate them. They start confused, emulating and hacking away at source codes. They learn through osmosis, they quietly read forum posts and open libraries and demos and slap code poorly into their projects. Over the course of time, things start to click and these same kids might take proper programming courses in highschool/university, they start understanding basic concepts, and start asking harder questions.

People grow up. In 2002 people on BYOND bemoaned the young playerbase. I was one of them. But I'm 36 now. Lets just hope to be blessed with people who mean well, who come to try and will get better. We can bemoan the fact we aren't poaching seasoned game developers from Unity/Unreal Engine, but this lovely place works for exactly what it is.
I agree with Dan. I got my start programming disassembling NES games and trying to figure out how they worked under the hood. Curiosity about how things are put together, and trying (and often failing) to improve a pre-existing project is really the best way to learn real world programming. Even in the professional world, nobody starts from scratch and builds their way up. Professional programmers start out as tinkerers, largely building off of pre-existing examples and their first internships tend to be doing some small task in a large, existing codebase and making a mess of things under the guidance of more experienced programmers.

What people work on doesn't really matter to me. The fact that they are asking good questions, and getting a better insight into what it is that they want to do is the most important part of a support community. Who are we to tell people what they should and shouldn't work on, and who are we to narc on developers to rights holders the minute they do something sketchy? It's not our job to tell people what to make, and it's not our job to protect other companies' copyrights. It just better to leave it alone, and focus on the work rather than waste energy policing what other people make and trying to reinforce an arbitrary hierarchy of user value based on what community that person comes from.

As for what needs to be de-emphasized: It's basically just the forums. The sort for the resources needs some improvement. The Off Topic and On Topic forums probably need to straight up go, and only the minimum of forums need to be around: The bug/feature request tracker, BYOND/Dev help should probably stick around, announcements and the like should stick around, but if you look back in On Topic / Off Topic, it's just a cesspool of locked drama threads and threads that went without engagement. --It's not a good look for anybody checking in on the engine.

The process of using the site should largely just be:

Get offered a choice between the play/discover side, and the developer side. Play/discover side should largely just be a membership beg and the hub, emphasizing games solely by their activity instead of fan numbers. The developer side should just be an onboarding process: "Here's where you download builds. Here's where you request new features / report bugs. Here's some useful resources for those just starting out." De-emphasizing the forums at this point is just wise, as forums aren't coming back. Gen Z and beyond will not do long-form discussion like us old ones do. It's just an outdated mode of communication.

Still, The forums do have their uses. They are a great place to house tutorials and resources. So Still having them around specifically for the production and dissemination of resources that the more ephemeral side of the community can easily link back to is going to be their main purpose moving forward.

Frankly, an awful lot of people have come back to BYOND this last year, and shared their experiences. One common thread with all of them that have come back, is a certain degree of trauma from having engaged heavily with the community on the site. It doesn't feel very good for a lot of these people to come back, and still have that big pile of negative experiences and memories just sitting there on the site, and for people to come back into it in the same context that they left the site; Strangled by the consequences of who they were 17 years ago. The ephemeral nature of Discord gives you a bit of an opportunity to try again and get different results as users become more and less active, and the faces engaging the most rotate out every few months. It really is just a more comfortable environment for people to slot back into. That's why it is flourishing while everything else is languishing: It's the only space at the moment that isn't trapped in the trauma of the past, and isn't trying to bring back the old culture. That time is done. It is never coming back. We cannot bring new blood in with our own nostalgia. We have to meet new users on their terms, and create positive experiences with them instead of being fixated purely on our own adolescent memories.
BYOND.com has one community it needs to focus on - developers. The players will have a community in the games themselves. There used to be this inherent struggle to win what BYOND was in the Web 1.0 days, is it a fan game dominated platform? An unregulated 4Chan clone, an elitist meritocracy of code gurus? That tension has come and gone because communities are decentralized. What should remain under the domain of official BYOND is bugs, developer help, tutorials, and engine suggestions. These days it’s easier for people to make a community for a certain purpose than shoehorn it in to BYONDs site. So to answer the question on what to de-emphasize? The stuff that is scarcely used and is superseded.

A few things this includes:
(1) outdated libraries and demos that obfuscate current best practice and superior products or built in functionality. There is a developer consensus on which libraries just shouldn’t be used in 2024.

(2) forum sections that are so low activity it makes visitors think BYOND is dead. These categories have atrophied away as better mediums have taken over. Focus the forum on key areas like bug reports, snippets/tutorials, etc.

That’s mostly it. Fix some of the sorting algorithms for libraries and games to be based on current engagement, relevance and popularity rather that historical.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
As for what needs to be de-emphasized: It's basically just the forums. The sort for the resources needs some improvement. The Off Topic and On Topic forums probably need to straight up go, and only the minimum of forums need to be around: The bug/feature request tracker, BYOND/Dev help should probably stick around, announcements and the like should stick around, but if you look back in On Topic / Off Topic, it's just a cesspool of locked drama threads and threads that went without engagement. --It's not a good look for anybody checking in on the engine.


The forums will have little to do with the influence of Dream Maker. I don't think anyone will care what Sally was arguing about in 2006. People who are interested in Dream Maker aren't going to go on Off Topic or On Topic, they're going to look into the topics where they get Dream Maker advice. Cutting out On Topic and Off Topic also prevents people communicating in the community. Not everyone believes in discord, so those threads should stay. It's always a good idea to have these threads as well as it prevents people from cluttering up other threads. As long people who represent Dream Maker aren't conjuring up a huge fuss like let's say Godot, and throwing slurs around; if the engine is good people will use. Dream Maker has been more modern than the past, but it doesn't really work like a modern Game Engine. The reason why you may not see so many developers using Dream Maker anymore is because it's not the only option when it comes to making a networking game. Just about any game engine does networking, so Dream Maker just doesn't really come up as an option. Although Dream Maker has new features, it appears the features are within the language, and not the software as a whole. I haven't touched it in years, but I am assuming you still have to code in every sprite and that is pretty tedious. If the concern really is getting more developers on Dream Maker, then it just needs to start competing in GUI not just the language. A good start is implementing a proper tiling system where users are using tile-sets and not codes. For stuff like collision, make invisible tiles, then the game engine would be more like a standard game engine.

In all honesty, blaming the entire forums seems more like a way to avoid the real problems, and to summarize, it's because dream maker is just losing to its competitors. It sounds blunt, but that's all it is guys.
In response to Audio freak XD
Saying that "just about any game engine does networking" isn't really a helpful point. There is such a difference in engine approach in how BYOND makes multiplayer entirely simple and baked in to the engine, versus Godot/Unity which requires you to actually deal with the complexity of client side and server side netcode. In a game engine it isnt whether the box is checked for "has feature", its a huge question of how its implemented. BYOND as I mentioned before is a valuable niche - but trying to compare it to all game engines and all use cases is a waste of time and counterproductive.

What is fascinating is heres a thread on a forum about the future of BYOND and most of what is brought up as nay-saying is coming from people who arent.. using BYOND. There is this weird group of people who are just loitering and basically explaining why BYOND isnt their platform of choice any longer. Effectively we have ex-community members who persist in these forums to... salt the earth?

So you say the features added are with the language and not the software as a whole, but that just isnt true. BYOND released a new map making module for Dreammaker recently. In 515 the servers were improved to handle multi-threading for a key component of server side processing.

When you talk about coding in every sprite.. I dont even know what this means. Not to be rude but, importing spritesheets/pngs and accessing different states and frames through code has been a thing for a long time. I can't even think of a valid issue with how images and turfs/objects/mobs are connected.

Implementing a proper tiling system, using tile sets and not codes.. There are so many ways to skin this cat but it sounds like you want BYOND to be the sort of game engine where you dont need to learn the simple language and the GUI just does everything for you? thats never been what BYOND is. I don't want a GUI based game engine, I can appreciate that is appealing to some people but things like autojoining turf libraries have existed for a long time. Some quality of life features in Dreammaker would be nice. I am trying to wrap my head around the idea of turfs being simply images with no real unique functionality and using collision masks.. I can see it, but I really dont think it fits with how well baked BYOND is out of the box, this approach to coding the terrain is just.. different. And I dont know that I like it to be honest. Having turfs actually do something, be unique and have interesting mechanics is powerful. Reducing the turfs to just.. tileset plopping for graphics only is boring.

For stuff like collision make invisible tiles? Collision is not an issue with BYOND, density = 1 has been a thing for a long time. You want collision masks instead of dense / non dense turfs and objects? Okay add it, its not hard.

See I am blaming the rust on this site as part of the problem, theres so much baggage here and like, weird opinions without the effort to actually engage meaningfully in the community to see if these complaints are grounded.

Like: BYOND has adware. BYOND hasnt even had ads for 5 years. But thats an instant complaint.

BYOND has been replaced by better engines: why are you here?

The issue with the community is we need to only serve the people who actively are part of doing something productive here. This is not meant to serve some weird social purpose for people who don't even work in the engine any longer!
In response to Masterdan
Saying that "just about any game engine does networking" isn't really a helpful point. There is such a difference in engine approach in how BYOND makes multiplayer entirely simple and baked in to the engine, versus Godot/Unity which requires you to actually deal with the complexity of client side and server side netcode. In a game engine it isnt whether the box is checked for "has feature", its a huge question of how its implemented. BYOND as I mentioned before is a valuable niche - but trying to compare it to all game engines and all use cases is a waste of time and counterproductive.

And right off the back, you misinterpreted my point. The point is overall these game engines: Godot/Unity bring more for the consumer basis than Dream Maker. Simpler UX with expected features that Dream Maker lacks. The networking in terms of Godot and Unity is quite simple as well. So that said, the website isn't an issue, it's the game engine. Developers aren't coming to BYOND.com and running away from a dispute that happened years and years ago. Complaining about the forums and anime games isn't driving players and developers away (and it wouldn't make sense to say this). I don't think anyone is being bombarded by what you decide to call a "rip". Beginner developers aren't looking to make a profit off their games either, majority just want to make a cool game - and they don't see Dream Maker as an option because the workflow feels tedious.

And as far as features go on UI, it's nice and all. But a few things isn't enough things to what people are looking for. If Dream Maker provided more tools that make the development process much less tedious people would pick it up and there would be more publicity, but there hasn't been that many updates besides in codes which is great, and a good start, but tiling is so much easier than coding in all every single sprite.

Anyways, you say it's counterproductive to compare it to other game engines - tell me why that is because I would say not considering what they bring to their table is highly counterproductive and ignoring game engine complaints is super counterproductive because it doesn't fix any problem but ignore them.

What is fascinating is heres a thread on a forum about the future of BYOND and most of what is brought up as nay-saying is coming from people who arent.. using BYOND.

Are you sure they aren't using BYOND?

There is this weird group of people who are just loitering and basically explaining why BYOND isnt their platform of choice any longer.

It's strange people complain about toxic community, but constantly invalidate the opinions of others by calling them a weird group of people who are just 'loitering'.

Effectively we have ex-community members who persist in these forums to... salt the earth?

You're guessing their intentions. And calling them ex-community members is the exact way to drive them all away. If they're here, they're community members.

When you talk about coding in every sprite.. I dont even know what this means

A sprite is what everyone here is calling an icon. Coding that in is tedious and people don't like doing that, a tiling system is much better and that is what competitors used (and for over 20 years). The point is, Dream Maker lacks a tiling system where you can import a tileset and build a map instead of coding each sprite. It would save people a lot of time. Dream Maker is the only game engine I know that requires you to code in the graphics piece by piece: It's tedious.

Not to be rude but, importing spritesheets/pngs and accessing different states and frames through code has been a thing for a long time

Hasn't been a thing in game engines for a very long time. Consumers who use alternative game engines have only needed to import a tileset and change offset settings.

There are so many ways to skin this cat but it sounds like you want BYOND to be the sort of game engine where you dont need to learn the simple language and the GUI just does everything for you? thats never been what BYOND is.

Nothing of what I said should have given that impression. It's just a basic feature most game engines have. And BYOND has always been about providing a free multiplayer game engine to people wanting to make one.

For stuff like collision make invisible tiles? Collision is not an issue with BYOND, density = 1 has been a thing for a long time. You want collision masks instead of dense / non dense turfs and objects? Okay add it, its not hard.

Never said BYOND had a collision problem? If you used alternate game engines before, like let's say game maker, you would notice that invisible objects are needed because they provide collision to the appropriate tiles. And I am not sure why you're explaining this to me since I helped you learn to code in like 2010. I still remember you Dan.

See I am blaming the rust on this site as part of the problem, theres so much baggage here and like, weird opinions without the effort to actually engage meaningfully in the community to see if these complaints are grounded.

And I am telling you the website isn't the issue. The simple problem is: that Dream Maker is still outdated when it comes to the UX. The workflow is very tedious compared to other game engines that can do things faster. How would the website have any impact on the game engine? It's informative. Sure there's arguments, like this one apparently since you decided to be nasty for no reason.

Like: BYOND has adware. BYOND hasnt even had ads for 5 years. But thats an instant complaint.

I didn't say that?

BYOND has been replaced by better engines: why are you here?

I never said better, but losing to competitors which I provided a concise reasoning to why that is.

The issue with the community is we need to only serve the people who actively are part of doing something productive here. This is not meant to serve some weird social purpose for people who don't even work in the engine any longer!

Yeah, the point is that you wanna bring in new developers yet there hasn't been changes to the game engine that will draw in the attention of new developers. You rather complain about me and others who don't use Dream Maker anymore for such reasons and we're just telling you -why-. There's game engines with features that help us develop faster.

I have just been replying on what people have been saying - like how the term rip should still be used but I need to explain how that is a toxic term and should be dropped if you want a better community. My reply was to Ter which was to bring attention that the forums are not driving developers away, and to give what is. You don't need to be defensive about people's two cents, especially when you think they aren't using BYOND anymore which is a bold and toxic assumption to make about people.
Lets back the bus up a bit. My commentary wasnt just in response to you. Lots of the examples I gave were from other people commenting in this thread and general observations. So I'm sorry if it came across as me attacking you.

There absolutely are quality of life things I wish BYOND had. There probably is a better way to handle importing tilesets and pngs of spritesheets, so now that I'm better understanding what you mean exactly I don't disagree.

"And I am not sure why you're explaining this to me since I helped you learn to code in like 2010. I still remember you Dan."

What? 2010 was when I left BYOND, GOA was launched in 2007. You joined 8 years after I did and in no way were you some mentor figure for me. Regrettably I did not have mentorship in 2002-2010 when I was most active - something I would like to be improved going forward.


You literally have a non-BYOND game posted in the BYOND forum to show off a 3D multiplayer game - where you mention that the netcode was very hard. You are literally developing non-BYOND games and acknowledging elsewhere that its more difficult to do so.
In response to Masterdan
Lets back the bus up a bit. My commentary wasnt just in response to you. Lots of the examples I gave were from other people commenting in this thread. So I'm sorry if it came across as me attacking you.

Oh, then my bad. I thought you were grilling me. I am just chiming in.

What? 2010 was when I left BYOND, GOA was launched in 2007. You joined 8 years after I did and in no way were you some mentor figure for me. Regrettably I did not have mentorship in 2002-2010 when I was most active - something I would like to be improved going forward.

You're not Dan from Brazil with that Naruto fan game? OR are you a different Dan with a Naruto fan game??

You literally have a non-BYOND game posted in the BYOND forum to show off a 3D multiplayer game - where you mention that the netcode was very hard. You are literally developing non-BYOND games and acknowledging elsewhere that its more difficult to do so.

I coded that from scratch using PYTHON in Blender Game Engine. I even had to make my own software to host the game. Godot/Unity have builtin ready API where it's simplified, and have software that will host the game which is what I am speaking of. I don't use dream maker anymore, but I do still use BYOND.
And others could be users still, too. I rather not exclude them. It's OK to ignore what they say, but they can be like me as well.
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