Popisfizzy wrote:

Okay, the fact that no one has pointed this out yet is pissing me off, so here goes:

BYOND is not going to be as good as a paid-for product because the people who make BYOND do it as something on the side. Fucking duh, man. The people who make RPG Maker are employed by a company to do so, and they are paid a salary for their work. Asking BYOND to get the same quality out of that is insane.

Game Maker started out the same as BYOND too. Totally free, and remained totally free for years.
Then it added a "donation" button, but that was optional. At this point Game Maker had everything it has now, except for a few bug fixes, preformance improvements and one or two new features. The difference between using Game Maker version 5 and 7 that you might notice is one works on Vista, the other doesn't.

Just another excuse if you ask me. Game Maker had the exact same situation as BYOND for a very long time (actually, BYOND had more than one person working on it, so it had a better situation) and only recently did Game Makers situation change, and nothing about Game Maker has changed since then.
Like I said, BYOND could (and should) be comparable to programs like Game Maker, but it isn't.



Also, there is a bug in the newest version of Game Maker that causes application errors like you are getting.
Chances are the games you are playing are using MP3s, and your default MP3 playing program has been changed to something not windows media player. This basically makes Game Maker games that use MP3s crash.

Nadrew wrote:

Game Maker didn't quite have the same situation as BYOND, they have for quite some time had plenty of money behind the project, from investors, and the private funds of the project's creator (who has plenty of personal funds, his 'job' is just for hobby, he was born into money).

BYOND never had that luxury, they couldn't afford fancy licenses and things like that, they used what was easily avaliable and functional at the time. And now BYOND is still BARELY able to get by on the funds it brings in, not enough to make it more than a pet project to the developers.

Simply put, Game Maker had the funding and support of its ORIGINAL programmer to move ahead quickly, just trying to relearn what some of Dan's programming does is holding BYOND back, and there's nothing to do to solve it. We can't bring Dan back, he doesn't have time.

I don't care if it's a single developer working on GameMaker, for YEARS Tom was the only one working on BYOND and Tom doesn't really have THAT much programming knowledge, not compared to Dan and Lummox. In the last couple of years since Lummox came on board there have been more advances to BYOND than the entire lifetime of BYOND saw before that. Chances are this will continue and progress will be made, BYOND's development was at a near stand still for a while there because it simply wasn't in the best interest of Tom to devote any real effort to it, he had to survive. BYOND has already LOST Tom more money than he'll ever admit to, and we should all just be happy that he didn't give up like he was going to if things didn't turn around.

BYOND stuck with the "BYOND will be free" Idea for a long time. While it was a nice idea, it hurt BYOND in the long run.

If Dan would have stuck around and there would have been some funding behind the project (which would have kept Dan around) things would have advanced far quicker than they have, and that's just how it is. You say there hasn't been any real progress? You're full of crap, totally full of crap, there have been MAJOR changes to the engine recently, some of which make way for even more major changes. It wasn't exactly an easy task to change it from BitBlt to OpenGL and then eventually to DirectX, that took a major effort on the part of the developers just to get through Dan's work to make it even remotely possible.

That raises the question, when Lummox came into the programming scene, why wasn't Dan's code just scratched and started over anew building a new engine for OpenGL or DirectX from the start. If Dan's code is/was really as bad as it had been it probably would have been much less of a project to start over. Theres some challenges adapting the rendering to existing code structure, but having done a 2D engine that functions pretty much exactly like BYOND's I have to kind of go "Huh?" when any amount of difficulty from Dan's coding wasn't just removed. There are projects where you're talking millions of lines of code where its not even remotely realistic to start over. BYOND is likely small enough that starting over isn't that hard of a thing to have done. Theres also a ton of benefits that would have come along with it.

BYOND will remain barely floating until it brings something of worth to the table. Completely ignoring the hoard of Anime rips whats that really leave? Over at yoyogames.com, right away you have a list of games with images from them starring at you. Just off the front page I can say a few games look quite interesting. Let's jump into BYOND Action! Wow! 1 Game and 1 Player playing! BYOND sure seems alive and well! Oh wait, there are 2 others, didn't notice them at first since the logos are the same color as the players/games text. Lets see, otherwise a bunch of names that tell me nothing about the game, as well as nondescript logos. Oh look, a "More" button that is conveniently the color of most of the text on the page as to not stand out (can't possibly have people realizing there's more stuff!) Finally you get a list of games that are being hosted/that you can play and its based purely on the user's choice of whether or not a game sounds interesting based on 150 characters of text, a name, and a small 64x64 logo that probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the game. It's certainly not BYOND's fault, but when a person jumps into crappy game after crappy game that is barely worth being considered "in pre-alpha" How long are they realistically expected to dig around in hopes of finding something good?

Lummox JR wrote:

Starting a project over from scratch is quite ridiculous. Real programmers will tell you that's a death trap, because it just reintroduces bugs that have been solved by considerable testing before. The compiler is in any case far too difficult to reconstruct from scratch; the know-how is beyond me. And any reconstruction would have to maintain compatibility with existing games.

That's a fair point, I wasn't looking at the whole package and never so much as gave the compiler/pager side of things a thought.

Dan's code isn't bad at all, just difficult to understand. He has an aversion to comments and there's a lot of complexity on the backend due to the old client-pager-hub interaction, some of which we still use and some of which we don't.

Out of curiosity though, how much does keeping reverse compatibility cause issues with implementing new features?
From the programming side of things, I imagine it would be much easier to simply have BYOND 3.5 to run 3.5 games, BYOND 4 to run 4 games. Having the pager know how to tell the difference and handle things would probably be much more simple than having to keep full backwards compatibility.

And to be honest, Game Maker isn't as powerful as BYOND--not at the language level. It can create pretty games with nice framerates, and yes it supports 3D, but those come at a cost (not just monetary). I tried it myself a few years back and was shocked by how glitchy the games were, particularly when it came to the graphics--the engine was extremely crash-happy. I'm sure it's not that way for everyone but it soured me on it.

BYOND has always had the better potential of the two. I daresay it would be much more advanced now if the project had a lush source of capital six years ago to keep Dan involved, but that's not how it went. The assertion that BYOND has stagnated, though, is quite wrong. It did stagnate for a while a few years back, but it has been making good progress ever since.

In all fairness too, it comes down to the users here. BYOND and GameMaker both give users essentially the same canvas and pains. Neither can be held responsible for what people actually do with them. BYOND can't be blamed that majority of the stuff made with BYOND is crap, but it can be blamed for not doing anything to promote what is good. I hope to personally do something on that side of things because I *do* like the software side of BYOND and want to see it succeed, I just absolutely hate the way the hub has gone and just about every criticism and suggestion has fallen on deaf ears. Hopefully something I'm planning actually comes to fruition and does what I feel the BYOND site isn't. Time will tell though and hopefully I won't be throwing money away.