ID:1496064
 Feb 13 2014, 10:25 am
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Last time we heard about it was over half a year ago, where someone said it was "side-tracked" but "mostly done" except for a issue with sound handling. Has there been any progress with it?
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Finally you've heard the words of your customers and switched to HTML5 ... !!!
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Oh, that's a shame about the monitary issues, you guys really deserve more. At least it looks like the donation bar went up by a few hundred dollars recently.
Everyone pays too much attention to Byond's limitations. I mean, ok, yes, its fairly limited. Your not going to make a 3d game with it. But great things arise out of creativity with obstacles. Look at practically half of the game consoles released before 2000. Literally a hundredth or less the processing power of modern consoles, yet emulating them is still incredibly popular, and those consoles are considered valuable antiques. Anyway, its too bad that the flash client might not even see the light of day, though I can understand the issues with it. I wish at least it could be released 'as is', without promising future support or backwards compatibility. Personally I'm interested in it for the potential to make it into a mobile client(primarily for SS13), and the idea of developing independent games for it is interesting and holds a lot of potental but I don't possess the knowhow or desire to do so. Basically if it can load and play Space Station 13, I'd be happy with it and prefer a 'as is' 'no guarantee will work' release. At the very least, it might attract some more users. People can be lazy and untrusting of downloads they haven't heard of. Given how popular SS13 is, a 'play in browser' link could attract a lot more people to it and, by extension, Byond. SS13 does have a large very visible thread on a popular forum after all, so that's a lot of people who could look at it, see the 'play it here, no downloads!' button and decided to give it a shot, and liking it. That as opposed to having to download a whole program, install it, and navigate through it before being able to play. Remember, if SS13 takes off, so does Byond. | |
This is fantastic news! :)
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When are we moving to HTML6 though?
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Keeth wrote:
When are we moving to HTML6 though? In all seriousness, I don't doubt it's gotta really bite for Tom and Lummox to release new, major features, only to have people asking when they are going to implement Oculus Rift support and 4K rendering at 120fps. | |
Keeth wrote:
Is this your clever way of avoiding the question? He thought you were being ironic, because your question shows that you have no understanding of the topic at hand. | |
Watermelon Storm wrote:
Keeth wrote: Right over your head. | |
Tom wrote:
Long mostly rambling post, but I'll answer your question at the top! This is good news. Is this going to be a recreation of BYOND itself as far as the engine goes? Dream Maker can export to HTML5 if given the functionaoty. There's a lot of legacy functionality in dm that sort of keeps it from maturing, and fleshing out the old to give room for new stuff can transform BYOND into a better engine. Not only that, but you don't need an engine Dan wrote that you can't understand. | |
We don't plan on making major engine changes not because we don't understand it, but because it's just a monumental task that would effectively be a whole new product. Like I've said before, I view BYOND as largely complete-- we have a lot of games under the original infrastructure and many people enjoy playing these. Certainly there is room in this world for a better, more modern engine, but there's no reason we should be the ones to create it, as it would have very little relation to the 20-year old BYOND product.
This current project is effectively a subset of DreamSeeker within an HTML5 API. The BYOND 4.0 features will be replaced with a purely javascript implementation that will be up to the developers to define (eg, you would define controls via javascript on the server, send them to the client, and interact with them with input() and output()). So in theory this is offloading the development from us to the userbase, giving you guys greater functionality at the cost of more labor (which is what I think the power users have wanted for a long time). If this works, then one thing we could do is wrap it along with the server in a more modern cross-platform UI to support single-player exes as well. We have no plans to port the DreamMaker UI itself at the moment. It's just too large of a project. However, the icon and map formats are public (or at least easily deciphered) so there's no reason that couldn't be wrapped via third-party. This is all still a lot of work and I don't know how far we will take it just yet. We'll try to get the client out first and see if anyone uses it. | |
Yes, certainly if we discontinue it as a business, we'll attempt to open-source as much as we can. It's a little tricky due to the fact that we have a central server that is used via the software.
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@Tom, is the HTML5 client going to happen anytime soon...how long would you say till it's going to be usable at all because I feel the HTML5 client could definitely bring in a lot of extra players to BYOND.
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I thought the recent post Tom made last week confirmed they were moving to an HTML5 client.
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EnigmaticGallivanter wrote:
I thought the recent post Tom made last week confirmed they were moving to an HTML5 client. He also said it in post #1 of this thread. :) | |
Yes, I meant to say HTML5 client, just wandering how close it is to being able to be used since then games could be posted anywhere, such as Facebook and linked back over to byond to somewhat popularize the service if something good is made on the platform.
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If memory serves, the first mention of HTML5 confirmed was around 2 months ago.
In that 2 months, they've spent a significant amount of time working with the NEStalgia team getting a steam-enabled version of BYOND to play nice-like, and working on the multithreading features of the latest builds. However, Tom did mention that it's well underway and going fairly quickly. Given my understanding, they can't have started on an HTML5 client before December, as Tom and Lummox were still indifferent to the idea to the point of almost being against it. | |
I fixed the sound handling and the client basically works (it's actually a very simple, thin client). But you have to understand that it's not just a simple matter of rolling it out because it introduces a lot of feature creep and implementation issues, and that, more than anything technical, is the reason why it's been delayed.
We started playing with an HTML5 client (pretty easy to port from the flash client) which is more flexible-- not so much because Flash is dying but because it is natively tied to javascript so we can just offset the UI. The concept I have in mind is to not worry about backwards-compatibility and to allow people to develop games directly for this web client (in the future we could also just embed it in an exe version of the server to support single-player client/server games too). Instead of using winset & skins for the UI, they would just write that in javascript and we'd provide hooks to interface with the server as needed. This is much easier for us because there is a lot less to port and it's also a lot more powerful for the developer. It would require some knowledge of javascript & HTML so would be more for the power-user.
I didn't want to say much because, as with everything, this is all in flux and I really can't say where it's going to go. The truth is that we are really struggling financially and that has a huge effect on development, and at this point our priority is really to give a stable version of the existing toolkit and hopefully earn enough off that to at least keep the project afloat. Contrary to popular belief, BYOND can and has produced good games right now and it kind of saddens me that all anyone ever talks about are the limitations in the toolkit.
I know it is slow-going and probably disappointing for our users, and if the existing tools don't suffice for their projects, I totally understand people moving on. Big shifts like the web-client have the potential to be very successful (and maybe earn us some more money) but they also introduce a lot of changes that we may not have time to handle. I realize that open-source / volunteers is always an option and we may pursue that if we decide to scrap this as a business, but I have my reasons for not going that route at the moment, which I've outlined many times previously.
*TLDR: yes, it mostly works but is largely incomplete and we are pursing an HTML5 option that will hopefully allow greater flexibility without much more development overhead on our side.