ID:92621
 
Due to various factors I've been somewhat absent. Although still rather busy I'll be more slightly more active.

BYOND

I'm very impressed and excited at the recent updates. In particular the improvements to networking are a huge step forward to making higher quality games. Developers now have the possibility to make some types of games that were previously (nearly) impossible.

I had been working on a client-server system where players would have to run the game themselves and connect to the server. Fortunately this kind of method isn't required now. After several tests games run very smoothly through hosting normally.

Duel Monsters Online

Some of the BYOND updates broke a lot of old features, and outdated some of my old hacky methods; it's taken some time to upgrade those systems to use the latest BYOND updates.
Aside from that I've made some major changes and updates, not too many new things but a lot of improvements overall. Can't give an expected release date at this time, I have to be honest that I got a little carried away with the feature/upgrade list this time. It's going to take time.

Mega Man

I downloaded it recently and realized I never updated it. The update had quite a few improvements, such as 4 stages with Robot Masters, charging, sliding, 4 powers, 1 transformation, 6 playable characters, and just generally felt more polished.

Unfortunately the pixel/collision systems I built for that game are honestly garbage(The update has some improvements but it still runs poorly). I had designed it with too many possibilities in mind, so it was never optimized.

New Pixel/Collision System

After several revisions and attempts(at least 5 "completed") I finally gained enough experience to develop a much more efficient and usable collision system.

It's optimized as much as I feel it needs to be without getting silly and runs very well in my opinion. The procedures seem to generate low CPU usage.
CPU Usage for all procedures added together after 5,000 frames of me leaping around shooting bullets/sliding/running into stuff is about 0.946 Total CPU.
Compared to over 5.6 Total CPU for 1,000 frames in the Mega Man game.

Network Testing Results

As I mentioned earlier the BYOND update provides some major network improvements. I decided to test the game with Lufia to see how smoothly it plays and runs over a network with my latest project.

Game: Mega Man platformer with accurate rectangle collision detection, jumping, running, shooting, sliding, charging, rush coils.
Frames Per Second: 60 (sixty)
Distance between host and client: 10-15,000 KM (6-9,000 miles)
Time played: About 10 minutes
Overall: 9/10

Testing involved basically running around, jumping, sliding, shooting, charging buster and bouncing on the 10 rush coils positioned around the area.

The game ran very smoothly with barely any CPU usage. Definitely no noticeable jumps or skips or lag spikes. Felt very responsive even over that wide distance.

As Mega Man is a game that requires precision controls and instant response, it was a good test subject. The game was fully playable, the true challenge was accurate and timed jumping, fortunately because there were no noticeable delays the entire test felt responsive throughout.

Conclusion:
With the network improvements and with what I've tested and seen myself, I feel BYOND can potentially handle medium-to-fast paced pixel based online multi-player games smoothly with relative ease. Depending on the game and programmer of course.
I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of interesting games we'll see in the coming months.

Game Ideas

Lots of games are possible using a pixel based system. I would like to first make a Mega Man game to replace the poor quality one I made initially. That will help me iron out any problems. I've already made a huge amount of progress, I would upload a video but I'm sure people don't like watching boring development progress videos.

Closing Notes

I doubt I'll be releasing a library or anything of the sort, although it's running nicely the code, comments and layout won't be up to the high standards of the forum folk. It's a shame that BYOND doesn't have a "library society" that could take a developers demo and bring it up to a standard with a specific format for code, comments, documentation, optimizing, discussing with members how library would be used and tweaked for usefulness and so on.
There are a lot of good demos floating around that could be a valuable resource to all developers.

I'll do my best to post occasionally to keep anyone interested informed of progress on my projects.
It's good to see you're still around.
The whole networking improvement really isn't a big deal; it's very minor from what I've seen so far.
Whatever improvements they have made has made the pixel based platformer go from horribly unplayable over a network to running very smoothly(I'd like to test with 4-8 players at some point though). Although, I doubt the current updates allow for more players, use less bandwidth or have less latency, but it's a good start.

What have you seen/not seen so far to make them appear minor?
"Game servers did not send outgoing packets as frequently as they should due to Nagle's algorithm. By default, TCP/IP does not send more outgoing packets until the previous packet has been acknowledged. In newer implementations of TCP/IP, acknowledgement of packets is often delayed by 200ms (2 BYOND ticks) or more. This caused some games to only refresh icons or images every 2-3 ticks instead of once per tick even when lag times were low. This version disables Nagle's algorithm but uses some internal queuing to prevent a bunch of tiny packets from swamping the server's bandwidth. This change significantly improves the performance of every action-oriented game, and games that use pixel movement extensively."

http://www.byond.com/docs/notes/463.html
Thanks for posting. Those notes are what inspired me to investigate and test.

Although I'm still unsure how and to what degree this affects standard games. If there are differences, I'd like to see some comparisons and such.
From the testing I've done with Decadence, it works friggin' great with up to 8 people. Falacy has been raising a big stink over his game being slow, but everyone else seems to like the new update.

Something to keep in mind is the update doesn't magically fix bad internet connections. Some people may notice BYOND games being slow, but that's something they can't blame on BYOND anymore.
I suppose it depends on what people are looking for.

For the time being I'm mostly interested in developing low player games(2-10). From what I've seen it will suit my needs just fine.
Hey why not put in new cards to your DMO game like "ground breaking" it lets you brinng a monster from the graveyard back to your hand.Maybe you could even put in some of those "destiny hero" cards or even the rest of the "spirit monster".
My first priority is to get the game put back together, once I get a few things out of the way I may start to add a few more cards.
Kajika, if you're interested in adding more cards to the game repitoir, I will be more than willing to lend assistance in writing up card effects or obtaining imagery for game usage.
I'm sure there's a reason, but there are some of us who are wondering why DMO's been down recently (I think it been since March 28th or something). I assume its due to updating and if so, do you have an idea of when it will be up and running again?
The server DMO gets hosted on is the process of maintenance and upgrading. Unfortunately they didn't seem to finish and have taken Easter off. Should be back up within the week.
When will the DMO game be back on to play?
I know you're busy and all, but just curious about the day and time the DMO will be back on.
I haven't got a definite word yet. The server guys have to fix some things they broke with our BYOND installation when they transferred us over. I'm hoping it will only be a day or two at most but I can't say for sure.
why u dont host the last dmo version?
it has been like 3 weeks now since they host the last time
Why is DMO not back up yet?
What are you doing to it? Icons or monster icons or cards?
When is it coming back up?
It has been like 2(two)months since its
been gone and i havn't been on 3(three)!
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Why is DMO not back up yet?
Don't know. Server people had some issues with the transfer of servers. They have major upgrades taking place.

What are you doing to it? Icons or monster icons or cards?
I don't really know any more. I barely work on it and don't recall what I've done since the last version.

When is it coming back up?
No idea. I've hassled the server people.

It has been like 2(two)months since its been gone and i havn't been on 3(three)!
It's been about a week. I've done all I can for now.
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