When you analyze BYOND one feature at a time you can ignore lots of problems. Code organization, design, and performance don't matter when you're writing 50 lines of code to implement a single feature. You're less likely to have bugs because you don't have other features that can interact and interfere with each other. You don't need to do as much testing. Implementing each individual feature sounds easy (for most of them, at least) because that is the easy part. These kinds of software projects are difficult just because of the magnitude of the project, not because of the complexity of individual features. This is the reason why most BYOND games aren't completed - people are often capable of implementing any feature the game would have but can't handle those other problems (organization, design, etc.) that creep in as the project gets larger. If you think a project is easy because every feature is easy, you don't understand how software development works.

Bravo1 wrote:

Terraria could be replicated in BYOND if it weren't for the fact that you can't display that many tiles without extreme slowdown from Dreamseeker. Even at somewhere around 15x15 there's noticeable lag. Since each block seems to be it's own entity then you're looking at easily 5-10 times the "tiles" on screen.

I doubt that BYOND would handle drawing so many tiles (many having transparent overlays to show illumination) and it certainly wouldn't handle the particle effects. The illumination would be difficult too since the tiles are smaller and there are so many more that would need to be updated.

Kaiochao wrote:

I want to know, what kind of popular game is BYOND even capable of making? Just building games and NES-style RPGs?

I figure you could re-make almost any NES game using BYOND. On one hand that's a good thing because there are lots of fun NES games. On the other hand, it's only possible because NES games lacked the graphical effects that BYOND can't really handle.

I wonder if anyone realizes; if BYOND were to implement Forum_account's 3D idea (not 3D models, but simple boxes with icons slapped on the faces), even a Minecraft clone without mouse-look or dynamic lighting made with BYOND would not be hard to make at all.

You might not be able to have lighting that's exactly like Minecraft but you could have built-in dynamic lighting easily enough.

BYOND is still missing something. It's not that flexible, fast, portable, or easy to use. Using BYOND will always be a tradeoff but it's not quite good enough at any of those things that you can overlook problems with the others. Right now people say things like "DM is slow" and there's no way to avoid that entirely - there will always be something about BYOND that's less than ideal. Adding a big feature (better graphical capabilities would probably be the easiest to add) would let people say "DM is slow *but* I can make a 3D game, zoom the camera in, rotate the map, scale/rotate objects, and have dynamic lighting." Providing frameworks would be another easy option. The best people can say right now is "DM is slow but I couldn't figure out Java."

Zaoshi wrote:

Java isn't exactly fast either. It's definitely faster than BYOND, but when it comes to games I personally think C++ is best choice.

To clear things up here, I don't think either one is better than the other overall; that's a choice solely for a programmer - understanding the technical differences between both of the languages will immensely help you instead of just saying "C++ is better than Java when it comes to game development".

I've played games made with Flash (a lot of Kongregate games), Unity (a few on Kongregate) and Java (Runescape, Spiral Knights, Minecraft, Drakensang) and the only constant thing about them was lag.

As far as I know, rendering images exceptionally fast(which is what I'm going to guess you're expecting) is a known problem in Flash.

As for Java... Minecraft has slow chunk generation, lag spikes when I turn the camera, when I tried to host multiplayer it was horrible as well, only 1-2 players were able to play lag-free. Loading texture pack with high resolution textures takes like a minute. 4096x4096 texture should be about 64 MB in size; data bandwidth is several GB/s, so it should be within few miliseconds to create such texture, no idea why Minecraft takes so long. Runescape has generic low FPS through whole game, considering it's an MMO it could be fine, but other MMOs don't suffer from such problem, so I'll just blame it on Java, unless you think Jagex doesn't have good programmers. Spiral Knights had random 1 second spikes in some levels, as far as I asked people everyone had it, 'nuff said.

I have never experienced these problems and I usually play Minecraft on my AMD Athlon Neo Processor w/ 2GB RAM.

Minecraft runs great for me. Just saying.

I have a fairly terrible computer in terms of gaming and I can play Minecraft at Normal rendering distance with no issues, even works on Far rendering if I'm not running it single player.

Zaoshi wrote:

I just tried vanilla Minecraft with Far rendering distance. Made Creative Singleplayer world, it runs at about 45 FPS with random spikes of 70+ FPS, I'm not doing anything, just staring at the screen and it changes a lot. As I start moving it drops to 30 FPS. Then I walk into chunk lag. On singleplayer... FPS doesn't change and it doesn't bother to generate/render chunks unless I walk into them. Then I turn around and FPS drops to 10 while chunks are loading.

If there were any buildings (custom stuff, not seed) or monsters it would be even worse.

Do you have dedicated graphics?

It isn't as big a deal as you make it seem to be. It was just a simple comment. I chose to join in along with the conversation, nothing more.

No. Dedicated Graphics is when you have a card or chipset with it's own separate RAM, dedicated to only graphical memory. (There are chipsets like this in some gaming laptops)

They all have memory, just separate graphics card tends to have more or/and much faster memory, as well as processing power.

Minecraft doesn't use any neat rendering effects, it shouldn't need a lot graphics memory.
Even if it would render 500 blocks away (which it doesn't) it makes 1000 x 1000 block area around player, or 1,000,000 blocks. That's only about 160 MB to store position + texcoord.