May 30 2013, 1:43 pm
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Tom
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Yeah, we can work something out. Maybe if people realized we really do need a bit of help to keep going, they'll kick in $5 or whatever. We have about 50K active users at the moment so it wouldn't take a huge percentage to help out.
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If you do get a donation thing set up, I'd be happy to put a link to it on the SS13 board. I hope this doesn't sound rude, but I'm guessing most of our players don't really see much point in being a paid member. I think more of them would be willing to kick a donation your way though.
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Thanks, much appreciated! Although most of my interaction with SS13 users is getting told how much BYOND sucks so I'm a bit dubious. Perhaps you could link them to some of the posts here and they'll be willing to help out.
I don't really care about the money so much. It's not going to make or break us. What I mostly want people to realize is that we've worked very hard to keep this thing going, and I doubt many groups would make this commitment. When that is met only with insults and criticism, it is very demotivating. I've worked on a bunch of technical projects and I can tell you, what we've done here is not easy! | |
I'll probably sign up sometime soon. As much as BYOND gets under my skin when I try to work with it the point that SS13 wouldn't exist without BYOND is fair.
It's a love hate relationship, I guess. You can't hate things you don't care about. Sorry for being such a douche about it. edit: PS Kaiochao wrote: Why are there a ton of websites hosting a ton of Flash games? Something is preventing this community from developing that many little games. What could it be? Adobe spent an awful lot of time and money on documentation and tools for developers. When you want to build something with flash you have a complete work environment. If you get stuck you can call up a professional flash person and they'll solve your problem or find someone who can. This is the difference. I understand that you can't just pull all of that out of thin air but that's what is missing. It's not the limits of the platform, as many have said you can design a good game within the limits. It's the limited developer support that you can't work around. If you hit a wall you're mostly on your own. I have never once found an accurate answer to a tough question without sitting down and putting in the effort to investigate it myself. When it's a question about something going on under the hood, I'm stuck. I'm not that smart really, I can't reverse engineer the interpreter and figure out what byondcore.dll is doing like SOME PEOPLE (TOBBA (YOU ASS)). I understand this is the result of a bunch of people's best work. I don't know anyone who worked on BYOND but you're probably great people and putting in the effort for this is admirable. I'm just speaking frankly about the product because this thread is about earning money and fixing the product is one option there. Also because the product has driven me batty and seeing it improve might restore some small peace of my mind. | |
I personally have sent a message to -every- BYOND user I knew to get memberships in a vain hope to see BYOND live on and continue to flourish, so with that said...
Tom, I know that there's room for improvement, as others said there are resources available to nearly ever computer you can utilizes (DirectX, OpenGL, etc), you could work on client siding a lot of the work, generally put there's a lot you can improve on. I'm not saying BYOND sucks, I've seen it suceed. (NEStalgia, the forbidden Game; Duel Monsters Genesis). I know it can suceed, I still have hope to have Project TH completed. I know BYOND does what some things don't. That being providing the network infrastructure included. THAT is a blessing that makes me and those I do work with -want- BYOND to continue progressing. The huge problem, however Tom, is in the end, we've been waiting nearly 20 years for functions that should have been added 10 years ago. This includes the client siding and other minute needs. It was a few years ago we got Pixel movement, after 15 years. It isn't that you guys lack the means. We know you do. And you probably got the funds to get those key functions in. Once BYOND is nearly perfectly streamlined to a near SNES level gameplay with a working infrastructure for Network play that offers few issues? I expect this to put up a nice and strong niche market. As for money issues? I suggest in the ToS for BYOND that any money gained via a BYOND service be registered through BYOND, andd a "small" amount (roughly 10 to 25%) for loyalties be given into BYOND. Why? Well, Memberships don't work. People are getting a fairly simple (in comparison) game creation software, for free. That free software contains Networking code, for free. Then we get cases like SilkWizard the Evil, whom abused this fact to benefit for himself and abandoned BYOND first chance he got. If people will get pissed they need to lose 50 cents for every $5 they earn (so they end up with $4.50) they deserve to leave. Let's see them get far coding their own networking and the sort. They'd never get it done as quick or as cheaply as they could here. | |
Latoma wrote:
Well, Memberships don't work. Huh, what's that about Silkwizard? | |
IfStatement wrote:
Latoma wrote: *History Book Thump* Class open up to BYOND History page 143. "The SilkWizard Rebellion." During the creation process of the "Flash" function of BYOND, the User "Silkwizard" was greatly involved with Tom of BYOND. However, the moment the plugin was completed, Silk began to push to get accessed to Steam, leaving BYOND after bringing in a decent playerbase, and taking the playerbase with him. Now Silkwizard has little to no involvement at all with BYOND, and has not paid a single sign of respect to the source material upon which he has to thank. Edit: To make the situation worse, Silk provided superior benefits at lesser prices if someone became a "Silk Membership" member, leaving nothing for if one became a BYOND member worth noting. Effectively, BYOND gained little to nothing from the existance of NEStalgia except for a playerbase that would avoid the ads entirely (hence no Ad revenue) by simply accessing through the pager, and never visiting the web pages. Effectively, a similar problem that others from SS13 admit happens with them. | |
I really like the donation button addition. I think it may help because, for example, there are some people who have like $3-10 laying around Paypal, and if they see something that interests them even a little then they may think "Sure, why not." Granted, I don't know how often that happens, but I've seen it at least three times with people I know.
It might not be a big increase, but it could add up over time. Besides needing good games, I really think some of the games should see if they can get some kind of benefit or thank you in for BYOND Members too. I've always thought that if that feature were used a lot more, then there would be far more incentive for people to buy the Memberships, and that could work wonders. If I am not mistaken, Memberships bought through a hub do the referral bonus too; so it's not like the Developer of the game won't get anything. I'm not sure how much it gives, but I imagine it's enough to cover the Developers expenses with certain games or game types. It might be difficult to manage for larger scale games, or games that can't do an appropriate feature, but I can think of a project or two I'm hoping to design that would be able to give it a try. Oh, by the way, does anyone know if there is any kind of affiliation system that might help BYOND? I've seen more than a few sites keep up a little list of tiny images linking to other sites in exchange for appearing in the same kind of list on those sites, and that Seems like it leads to a lot of new traffic. The places I see it the most are roleplaying sites, but I imagine a lot of websites support it. | |
How come when I mentioned a donation button on the pager .. it got ignored..
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I feel you lol I think the donation link should be right on the front page of byond and make it HUGE and explain our situation and why people need to contribute.
Get a dollar from everyone upfront and byond can relax a bit while working on other means of income. Either way this site needs to be monetized. | |
The hell are you talking about Latoma? NEStalgia getting greenlit on Steam would be a huge amount of money for BYOND.
You do of course realize that Tom directly gets a percentage of every NEStalgia subscription sold right? Tom has made thousands off of NEStalgia. The best thing that could ever happen to BYOND would be if a hundred NEStalgia type games cropped up that partnered with Tom with handling subscriptions. Your accusations are downright outrageously untrue :P | |
Latoma, that's not true about SilkWizard. He is actually one of our largest benefactors because we take 20% of all NEStalgia subscriptions (mostly sold through the standalone) and he still gets a lot of sales to this day. My hope was that we could get 10-20 NEStalgias and if a few of them got really popular, we'd make really good money just off the shared revenue.
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MagicMountain wrote:
It's the limited developer support that you can't work around. If you hit a wall you're mostly on your own. I have never once found an accurate answer to a tough question without sitting down and putting in the effort to investigate it myself. When it's a question about something going on under the hood, I'm stuck. I'm not that smart really, I can't reverse engineer the interpreter and figure out what byondcore.dll is doing like SOME PEOPLE (TOBBA (YOU ASS)). I don't think that's fair. We really do try to provide support and generally we don't let the bugs backlog too much (although it is in that state right now because we took a huge hiatus to try to revamp this business model / pager). You did point out one bug and I admit we didn't handle that well, although to be fair, it doesn't seem to me in that report that the issue is that frequent or critical (you later explained it was showing up a lot so presumably is a real problem, which is why I've made note of it). I don't want people feeling like they have to go under the hood-- that's ridiculous. If things are crashing or inexplicably lagging and the profiler isn't helping, and one can construct a simple demonstration of the issue, we do our best to fix it. | |
Tom wrote:
Latoma, that's not true about SilkWizard. He is actually one of our largest benefactors because we take 20% of all NEStalgia subscriptions (mostly sold through the standalone) and he still gets a lot of sales to this day. My hope was that we could get 10-20 NEStalgias and if a few of them got really popular, we'd make really good money just off the shared revenue. Part 1: Okay, this I didn't know about SIlk. I have been hearing from others more involved in the situation that Silk wants nothing to do with BYOND. Part 2: Key Problem: getting such a game made. Those who can do it are often too absorbed in their own laziness or greed, preventing them from working on major scale games. Case in point: I had a full team, we had full concept Pixel Art to invite more people. But then that PA quit. And the whole project has since stagnated to oblivion... This happens to a LOT of potential titles on BYOND. Others just don't live up to the end hype. | |
Please don't throw the whole ss13 community in with the likes of Tobba. We're not all jerks. :(
I'd also like to point out Tobba isn't an ss13 dev. He just griefs servers with exploits occasionally and ban-evades using VMs. Also, all these people saying they are -SS13- devs and such...no you're not. You're a dev for ONE FORK of an (poorly licensed) open-source project =p | |
I'd heard from others that support wasn't very helpful and I never felt like posting a new report after reading old threads for the same issues I was having with no resolution. That refcount thing is just the problem on the top of my head right now, I could dig around for some others I've forgotten but that's not really meaningful. I should have posted anyway and given it a fair shot, you're right that it's not fair to write you off based on assumptions.
Anyway, I wouldn't expect a free/donation service to provide a lot of support. I'm pretty sure tinkerers are the target audience and trying to solve problems is part of the fun. I'd just like to set a breakpoint or be able to tell which proc(s) cause a lag spike. The profiler is helpful in some ways but average/total doesn't show you if a proc takes 0.001s 99 times and 10s that 100th. It'd also be neat to be able to see what's in memory and get a running count of allocations/frees. You can build some diagnostics into the DM code but the timers available are too wide to do any meaningful profiling there and when the CPU is close to the limit any debugging code you add to find out why just makes the problem worse. | |
Yeah, I'll admit that the debugging is basically nonexistent so would rely on a lot of output statements in the code. We just never anticipated people would write games using 50K lines of DM! I mean, the first step in supporting that would be object files because it's ridiculously inefficient to wait through all that. (although FYI if you download 499 at least it won't lock up the UI while you compile)
But if you have problems, please do post Bug Reports. If you can provide a reliable test case illustrating the issue, we can almost always fix it. | |
Now I feel like a real jerk. Shows what you get when you believe everything you hear. I'll do that.
Also, try 250k :) Granted, some of those are comments, I was being lazy. | |
Wow, that's insane. It's a fucking miracle that even compiles at all. I think BYOND itself is under 500k lines but there are absolutely no comments anywhere!
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