ID:2353818
 
Winter is back, again and again, to remind us the vernal equinox is a filthy lie. My car, laboriously reclaimed from over a foot of snow yesterday afternoon, is covered again. Not by quite so much this time.

What a week this has been on the development end! I got out a new release earlier in the week that included a lot of huge fixes, plus the big change to icon memory in Dream Seeker that means some projects will see incredibly significant memory savings.

Of course that icon change caused a little bit of a ripple effect in Dream Maker, so today I put out another new release, 512.1415, that fixes the issues in the icon editor. Client and server are untouched by this latest release, so you can leave your servers running 512.1414. This also doesn't impact the Linux compiler either, just Dream Maker in Windows. So no Linux build for 1415.

The raft of features in 512 is pretty impressive already, but pretty soon it's gonna be time to think about 513 features. I keep planning to get to resource loading issues, and I'm thinking maybe the next major version is the right one to do that.

Another big development is that BYOND finally has a Patreon page. Yes, I should have done that quite some time ago. It's a nice option for users who regularly donate on Patreon to other creators, and would like to simply set up something regular to show their support.

But you still have the option of course of becoming a BYOND Member or donating through BYOND directly. And if you like the introduction of new language features, filters, visual contents, better memory handling, speed improvements, and more, I hope you'll join in as a Member. Big thanks to everyone who's done so so far.

I'll be getting back to webclient stuff (again) shortly, since I think the worst of the revolving-door bugs are in the past. This week was all about tying up a bunch of loose ends and miscellany.

That's a wrap for this week. If you have a spring break coming soon, live it up! And if you have actual spring to go with it, please try not to gloat.
sounds good lummmoxjr cant wait to try out the update
this may sound hard but ill ask anyways
can xone ps4 play byond games?
i tryed webclint on my xone rsc were downloading but they stoped.
did that everytime so you able to make webclint work for xone?

btw you a fan of darksouls type games?
Some rough ideas for various patreon levels. Higher level gets all previous levels of course. Voting points refer to giving folks an ability to vote extra on features and bugs they want to see fixed. Response tickets are about having you personally respond to a thread.
Level 1: Thanks.
Level 2: 5$ - Monthly YouTube summary video.
Level 3: 10$ - Weekly YouTube summary video and 1 extra voting point.
Level 4: 25$ - Honorable mention somewhere in BYOND or forums. 5 extra voting points. 1 redeemable response ticket.
Level 5: 50$ - 5 more voting points. 5 redeemable response tickets.
Level 6: 100$ - 1 redeemable ticket for developing an agreed upon class library or example project
Level 7: $250 - 3 redeemable tickets for developing an agreed upon class library or example project
Level 8: $500 - Get name permanently cemented in About BYOND Credits as donor.


I was the first or second person to sign up for the Patreon. I'm also making money on Patreon every month, so I got a little experience here.

I'm going to come out and say: please don't bend over backwards trying to come up with tiers, adding more work you have to do every month that is making videos or tabulating votes or doing ANYTHING that's not making BYOND better, because that's what your patrons are paying for.

Voting on priorities? Heck, I'd love to be able to dictate the direction you go in taking suggestions or have my bugs prioritized, or just snap my fingers to summon you like a genie to get a response in a thread.

Except.

Except.

I don't actually want that.

BYOND isn't a crowdsourced project. It's not a good idea to have it crowdsteered.

Patreon is about patronage. It's about a relationship between creators and customers/users/consumers. It has support for tiers and reward packages and things, but. I've seen very successful artists whose patreon channel is just "Here I'm doing the thing I would be doing anyway that you enjoy so much you want to give me money to keep doing it" and I have seen failed patreon campaigns where someone was doing a thing well and then they tried to do ten other things.

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Simple, S...ummox.

Keep doing what you're doing. That is what I pledged for.
In response to AlexandraErin
AlexandraErin wrote:
I was the first or second person to sign up for the Patreon. I'm also making money on Patreon every month, so I got a little experience here.

I'm going to come out and say: please don't bend over backwards trying to come up with tiers, adding more work you have to do every month that is making videos or tabulating votes or doing ANYTHING that's not making BYOND better, because that's what your patrons are paying for.

Voting on priorities? Heck, I'd love to be able to dictate the direction you go in taking suggestions or have my bugs prioritized, or just snap my fingers to summon you like a genie to get a response in a thread.

Except.

Except.

I don't actually want that.

BYOND isn't a crowdsourced project. It's not a good idea to have it crowdsteered.

Patreon is about patronage. It's about a relationship between creators and customers/users/consumers. It has support for tiers and reward packages and things, but. I've seen very successful artists whose patreon channel is just "Here I'm doing the thing I would be doing anyway that you enjoy so much you want to give me money to keep doing it" and I have seen failed patreon campaigns where someone was doing a thing well and then they tried to do ten other things.

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Simple, S...ummox.

Keep doing what you're doing. That is what I pledged for.

QFE.
Can't disagree with keeping things simple but customer/community outreach is just as important as the thing you're selling. Giving people something "special" to re-tweet/post/like tends to have exponential benefits.
FINALLY! FINALLY YOU HAVE A PATREON!

I've contributed, but I'd be inclined to give more money if there were actual rewards. Poplava has some excellent ideas - albeit ones that may need a few refinement. Nevertheless, it's a good start and I pray that you don't half-ass this, since this could be a very good source of revenue.

I'll post some ideas as they come.
I agree with some comments above that for Patreon, it is important to keep it simple, so that time is spent working on the main project people are signing up to support. If time gets absorbed giving special rewards, that can take away from the main project.

BYOND is a project with a lot going on behind the scenes, so if I were paying for votes--even for suggestions of what I'd like Lummox to work on next--then I'd probably choose the wrong thing from a programming perspective of what really needs to be done. I think the recent fixes, evidenced in Yut Put's project, have shown that Lummox works excellently in just the way he is now. Upgrades to BYOND benefit all of us when that kind of performance improvement is achieved!

That being said, having donations with voting is something I'm trying, and one nice thing about it is that you know what your donors are most interested in (which is helpful for me, since I have several projects I'd like to work on, as much as I can justify the time away from my day job work). This is useful for me from a video creation/game design/artistic standpoint. Since Lummox is handling programming for a single big project, it's a different beast, so I'm not sure if voting or further rewards will be useful, but it is something to consider.

As for myself, I'd like to buy an original Blue Book or a new BYOND book, just for fun! I lost my original Blue Book, and miss those days! Still, having all the resources online is the way to go.

Anyway, thanks for the improvements this week, Lummox!
AlexandraErin said what I was gonna say and in a much better way also. So +1 for that.

Always K.I.S.S.
Goals would be a better choice for driving donations. Start with one for getting a code signing cert, that should drive some leads.
In response to MrStonedOne
MrStonedOne wrote:
Goals would be a better choice for driving donations. Start with one for getting a code signing cert, that should drive some leads.

That's a fun idea. I'd like to see one for upgrading the sites performance.
The site actually performs pretty well all things considered, the forum indexing solution just needs to be re-built from the ground up or some other framework jammed in place.

Lummox, what CHM editor are you using again? I'm still plugin away at my own general purpose Help Editor and wanted to compare features with one that someone actually uses.
Well rats. I haven't touched the help files in so long, I forgot to make sure I brought over the program I used.

I'm pretty sure however that it was HelpMaker (https://sourceforge.net/projects/helpmaker/).
Ok. Although, it looks like the project/site is no more. Looks like you might still be able to get at the source.
It's still downloadable via Softpedia. But it appears I'll have to use something else for help files in the future.
Should probably put a big noticeable link to the Patreon on both the games page in the benefactor section and on the membership page.