Aug 5 2012, 2:52 am
|
|
EmpirezTeam
 |
2D games are totally history. That's why games like Angry Birds have earned over $100 million. Completely dying off here.
|
I was referring to PC games. Angry Birds is popular because it's playable on nearly all pocket devices. Little exceptions don't matter, most of the market is 3D anyways.
| |
Zaoshi wrote:
I was referring to PC games. Angry Birds is popular because it's playable on nearly all pocket devices. Little exceptions don't matter, most of the market is 3D anyways. What about Terraria? Binding of Isaac? Limbo? Bastion? Space Pirates and Zombies? Super MeatBoy? Gratuitous Space Battles? There are countless 2D indie games that have come out recently and have been wildly successful. 3d is excellent and all but 2d is anything but dead. | |
I don't know some of these games.
Isn't Super MeatBoy available on multiple platforms, not just PC? Terraria somewhat reminds Minecraft (open world sandbox that allows creativity), that definitely helped it to take off. In general, these indie games are unique, indie developers aren't afraid to experiment, they don't really have anything to lose. You managed to show few examples out of hundreds or even thousands, 90% of indie games die without getting popular or making much money. On other hand, 90% games made by big companies take off, most of which are 3D. Some adventure game still stay 2D but they're not getting popular. To be honest, I can't remember any recent 2D game that's not indie. | |
Zaoshi: I mean no offense, but your view on the gaming industry is exactly the problem that developers from all over the world have been fighting against for years. Including the developers at 'big companies'.
Thankfully, enough people disagree, that this idea has less and less traction. Indie games are doing better now than they ever have been before. And thats a good thing. The more the gaming industry becomes a factory churning out positive RoI boxes, the less creativity is going to be allowed. Thinking outside of the box, and the exact creativity you cite, is a risk and is typically found less and less in big-budget games. Much to the dismay of the game developers working on those games. This is also why you see big-shot game developers leaving larger companies, to form their own little one. | |
I'm not saying innovative/unique games are bad, but right now they're minority and market is dominated by 3D FPSs/RPGs/MMOs.
| |
I'm a bit late to weigh in on this, but I agree with JBoer - Zaoshi is being a bit naive here. It's easy to look at a TCP or UDP socket tutorial (or a DirectX or OpenGL tutorial) and think that it'd be easy to re-create what BYOND does. It's easy to send some bytes over a network but there's a lot more to it than that. How do you decide what data needs to be sent to keep each client up to date? How do you encode that information? On the graphics side there's also a lot more than simply drawing images on the screen - how do you know where to position the images, what image to draw (ex: what frame of animation to show), how to layer the images, and how to manage the loading of resources?
I think a lot of BYOND users conclude that "2D is dead" because they don't play a lot of indie games and their only exposure to 2D games is through BYOND, which is a limited 2D platform. Even though I'm not familiar with most of them, I'd guess that most of the games mentioned here (Terraria, Binding of Isaac, Limbo, Bastion, Space Pirates and Zombies, Super MeatBoy, Gratuitous Space Battles, Angry Birds) could not be properly re-created using BYOND. | |
Unless BYOND moved over to a more robust networking system and added clientside scripting most of those games wouldent be re-createable because it would be unplayably laggy if played over network
Although Limbo has already been done I think and Bastion and Binding of Isaac would certainly be possible | |
Except many of these games that were listed are only single player or involve very little multiplayer interaction (Terraria is a clear exception here). As I see it, there's nothing about BYOND that inhibits re-creations of any of these successful indie PC games.
That said, let's make it clear that I'm not trying to promote the re-creation of these games, but rather promote the capabilities of the BYOND platform. | |
The thought that BYOND excels only at singleplayer games kind of strikes me as a major concern. BYOND as a platform should strive to use multiplayer support, it is one of the great aspects of the platform. There is a lot of competition on single 2d game making clients, if BYONDs network back-end is really that unusable then we have a bigger issue to discuss here.
I think there is a missing market, people try to have either single player games or games with 100+ concurrent players, BYOND handles servers of ~2-16 players very well, games that play like Diablo/terraria would do well, the MMORPG angle that most games take is in my opinion a poor choice. | |
how to manage the loading of resourcesBYOND games don't have a lot resources, even if someone carelessly makes 200 MB of icons/sounds/music it still can be loaded at startup without worrying about memory. Games like BF3 eat 150 MB just for empty screen with no resources loaded. how to layer the imagesI think I've read somewhere Dream Seeker sorts all atoms by layer in order to draw them correctly. Personally I think that's a bit waste of processing power. I'd simply set min/max layer (ex. unsigned 16 bit integer) and use hardware to take care of layering, I wouldn't need to worry about draw order. what frame of animation to showMake a timer that changes frame every 0.1 second? Quite trivial I'd say. how do you know where to position the imagesIsn't BYOND tile based and we know location (x, y) of each tile and size of tile? Finding position is trivial. The only issues I can think of are pixel offsets and big icons, but last time I checked BYOND had some problems as well concerning big (more like huge) icons. How do you encode that informationThere's plenty of free encryption algorithms, but for server-sided game that's not even needed, unless someone actually bothers to make a bot. How do you decide what data needs to be sent to keep each client up to date?This depends on number of players. If game won't have many players you could send all updates to all players. With more players/big map would have to send only nearby updates, not too hard overall, unless some special situations arise (like big/huge icons). | |
Zaoshi wrote:
How do you encode that informationThere's plenty of free encryption algorithms, but for server-sided game that's not even needed, unless someone actually bothers to make a bot. haha Forum_account isn't talking about encryption here. How do you decide what data needs to be sent to keep each client up to date?This depends on number of players. If game won't have many players you could send all updates to all players. With more players/big map would have to send only nearby updates, not too hard overall, unless some special situations arise (like big/huge icons). It's actually not as simple as you make it. This data generally only comes in once every 0.1 to 0.3 seconds, depending on your server and such and such. You need to include enough data for the client to extrapolate further game state(s) and correct for lag. Additionally, you need to be able to resolve de-synchronization between client and server, though this is not a difficult problem IF you're going with server-client model rather than peer-to-peer. | |
And of course, while you may decide to trivialise these bits individually, you are still talking a combined task best measured in terms of man-months to develop and test to a reasonable level, and that's before you get onto the business of the game's content.
| |
Azoshi wrote:
Make a timer that changes frame every 0.1 second? Quite trivial I'd say. You also have to keep track of flicked animations. BYOND doesn't do anything that's mind-blowing. Whatever BYOND does it'd be possible for someone else to re-create. When you look at things at a high level and overlook all of the details, it sounds like it'd be easy to do. The fact that you don't see how many details you're missing suggests that you wouldn't have any idea where to start. There's plenty of free encryption algorithms, but for server-sided game that's not even needed, unless someone actually bothers to make a bot. I'm not talking about encryption. If the server wants to tell the client "this mob moved to this location and its icon_state changed", what does the message that's sent from the server to the client look like? D4RK3 54B3R wrote: Except many of these games that were listed are only single player or involve very little multiplayer interaction (Terraria is a clear exception here). As I see it, there's nothing about BYOND that inhibits re-creations of any of these successful indie PC games. I'm sure it's possible to use BYOND to make games with similar gameplay but it'd often be impossible to create something that looks and plays exactly like those games. Actual games have a lot of graphical polish that BYOND often can't handle well. BYOND doesn't make it easy to have images fade in/out or rotate. Since BYOND is multiplayer, a lot of the nice-looking graphical effects seen in other games would either waste bandwidth and the server's CPU time or just wouldn't as nice when running over a network. DvK87 wrote: I think there is a missing market, people try to have either single player games or games with 100+ concurrent players, BYOND handles servers of ~2-16 players very well, games that play like Diablo/terraria would do well, the MMORPG angle that most games take is in my opinion a poor choice. Agreed. And it's not just that a BYOND server wouldn't handle 100+ players well. Having a dedicated central server is just a bad plan. It means that you, as the game's developer, would have to pay to host servers as needed. The BYOND software lets anyone host a game. If you make a game that's suited for 2-16 players and let anyone download and host their own server, everyone still gets to play with their friends and you can accommodate 100 players as easily as you can handle 10,000 players. | |
Issue with games like SS13 is that is that it can be really boring with a few players, so you're forced to have a single server with 70 players on it (/tg/s servers normally achieve this, they're not on the hub though)
| |
Also a lot of lag comes from users including extremely poorly written libraries, such as for pathfinding
I managed to churn out an A* solver that worked perfectly and was fast and modular in 27 lines of code, while I've seen horrifyingly slow 700 line libraries that do a much much worse job at it | |
Forum_account wrote:
D4RK3 54B3R wrote: Well, that's not necessarily true in all regards. Terraria, for example doesn't have very fancy graphics. Breaking down Terraria's graphical effects, the most obvious one would be its lighting system, but it doesn't even use or need inter-tile interpolation (something that both of our lighting systems for BYOND feature). I know for certain that lighting systems, either yours or mine or shadowdarke's, are capable of running in BYOND's singleplayer and multiplayer games without much problem. Going down the list of mentioned indie games, however, I have to agree that most of them use graphical effects that do not translate well into BYOND. Mostly involving the following:
| |
Forum_accounts lighting library causes BYOND to flip out if you're moving too fast due to all the extra objects, even if playing locally
Again, lighting is something that should be done on the client, doing it on the server is limiting, slow and makes me puke Sadly this is currently not possible You can actually get an effect like Forum_accounts lighting library using overlays on turfs instead, but it breaks the entire game because you cant set mouse_opacity on overlays, so unless you set mouse_opacity on every tile and compensate for that it will block clicking on anything | |
I personally don't believe Byond will go anywhere without some expanded functionality. Native Pixel Movement proved a huge jump in quality and performance of games produced. Adding features like the ones F_A suggested would show another grand improvement.
Then again, another big point is that Byond isn't getting it's name out there that well. If anyone played Gravity you'll see there's a "Programmed with Byond" Logo right at the start. This is what should be in any of the games that can be ported out as an EXE. If we can get the word out, and raise the popularity of Byond we'd probably see more features come out as well. The only problem is: Most games don't get made due to lack of features. Byond won't get any new features anytime soon until it's more popular. Byonds main way of getting popular is by producing the aforementioned games. It's a Vicious cycle that we desperately need to break. First Suggestion: Yut Put gets his game into an EXE format (as well as including a Byond logo at the start) and posting that thing all over the internet. I suggest his because it's short and nearly completely finished. Perfect for getting the word out. Though, those water pits are bullshit. | |
The sad part of that is that Space Station 13 is probably BYONDs most popular game, but also 100% neglected by the BYOND developers and constantly plagued by Dream Daemon crashes or general issues with BYOND
| |