Efencea is back!
A recent work by Vermolius and Tayoko has come back to digest again this week. Efencea pits you against another player, in a battle to build increasingly formidable defences to guard against wave after wave of enemy forces. The game puts a very competitive edge on those classic single-player tower defence games, in that you build up the waves to attack your opponent. This game puts forward some really clean and bold artwork, a definite visual selling point, courtesy of Tayoko. Efencea has recently rolled out an update and features a global player ranking mechanism.
Random Anime of the Week
BYOND Anime has started up their old tradition of posting an interesting Anime every week. For anyone who is into Anime, this is definitely worth checking out. Typically BYOND Anime will cover Animes that you may not have heard of, things that are very well thought out and importantly fun to watch. R.A.W (as the weekly articles are called) are currently run by Aries and Maggeh. Kudos to you two for your good work in BYOND Anime. If you'd like to discuss the R.A.W or in fact Anime in general, feel free to post in the BYOND Anime forums.
BYOND the front-end ...
Tom and Lummox JR have been working together on BYOND's website and the core mechanism for the hub. The aim has very much been to increase the performance of these those key systems, making sure BYOND grows and handles more members smoothly. The focus has been on the database backend, which in turn touches almost all features BYOND offers. To help in this project, statistics collection on hub entries was turned off last friday. It is still an on-going project, however this is definitely an interesting bit of news to all you people who wonder what kinds of tasks go into keeping a site like BYOND well oiled and ready for action.
Lummox JR guards Fort Knox
As promised, Lummox JR presented a guest article for DevTalk. Lummox decided to cover one of those classic difficult spots for most games, AI and bots. The approach recommended is very nice, make your AI pay attention to sight, sound and smell. It sounds pretty simple and the article certainly explains a system that makes it easy to implement. The effect on your AI if done right will truly be a sight. Terms such as stealth and evasion are suddenly a lot more applicable to AI driven by these concepts. Have a play and try it out on your games.
Would you like to play a game?
Wargames has put out a new update. If you check out the update list, it is plain for all to see that Acebloke really doesn't muck about when he's working on something. Wargames in itself is a really slick game. In a nutshell, you build up a city state and aim to wage war with other players. It plays out a lot like BYOND's very own 'Empire Earth', presenting a real depth of gameplay in terms of units and their strengths. They say "The only winning move is not to play.", clearly they haven't been to BYOND! Check it out.
Nothing special this week :(
I guess it's our fault anyway, we haven't been doing much. | |
Heres an idea for a feature that definately could give byond that next edge, would especially help a few of my games.
An ingame audio feature that allows players to talk to one other, If byond can't handle such a feature, I'll stick with ventrillo. Chatting programmings would love this feature, so would multiplayer strategy games. This is just an idea, I would like some feedback on the possibility of this idea. Thank you. | |
Fat Albert wrote:
Heres an idea for a feature that definately could give byond that next edge, would especially help a few of my games. I don't think BYOND can really handle audio streams from clients at the moment, but it's certainly something I'll try to discuss with Tom and Lummox. It might end up like 3D sound in the sense it doesn't get used a lot, but I can certainly see how it would be neat for some games. | |
Fat Albert wrote:
An ingame audio feature that allows players to talk to one other World of Warcraft has this and still everyone prefers Ventrilo. | |
The main reason ventrillo is prefered over World of Warcraft's ingame chatting feature is because ventrillo organizes who is chatting with who very well, especially for large amounts of people for raids and such.
Having this ingame chatting feature will save a hassle of having the players download ventrillo, and needing the server ip, and password. Players could just hoppin the game, pluggin the mic, and start talking. And if a player didn't even have a mic, he could have to option to hear whoever, and giving help and instructions would be much easier, and less tidious. I'm just posting an idea SuperAntx, it seems like byond is really trying to expand its boundaries. And we need to explore what is avaiable to us. | |
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