Why do people that hate the platform and find it frustrating to work with continue to use it? If I hold my hand over an open fire, I don't just stand there and complain about how much it hurts, but that seems to be what every detractor of the platform does.
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I use it because it's the only way to play one of my favorite games. It's sort of like having this restaurant that serves amazing food but it's in a rough part of town and you don't really feel comfortable walking there at three in the morning but you HAVE to have a burger, right now.
But to give you a serious answer, I use BYOND because I have no choice. If I had a choice in the matter I would not use BYOND. | |
If there's one thing that I've come to learn, through using this service, it's that things which are advertised well, do better than things which actually are good. This isn't true in the long run, but for the immediate future you should really put all your brownie points, however few they may be, into ads and the suchlike.
Just my 2C. | |
Why? Stockholm syndrome.
Byond works well enough as a hobbyist platform. It lets people play around with game development and it lets users play for free. Charging for the service seems like a really risky proposition when so many of the games on here are based on stolen intellectual properties. Seeing so many Naruto Sex Adventure ~RP~ games in the list probably goes a pretty long way to deterring serious game development teams too. | |
The engine is well suitable for commercial games. I can see that you have made an effort and it's commendable, really. However, for an engine that has been in existence for 17 years, anyone can see why it is unsuccessful as a business. Looking at BYOND's history(over a span of 5 years), I can dishearteningly say that it does indeed fail as a business, and I may have a speculation as to why, albeit a rather blunt one. It took BYOND 15 years to get pixel movement, and even though it is finally here, a lot of people are still dissatisfied with it. The production of the Flash client is commendable, too, but its factor in the result of BYOND as a business? indeterminate. BYOND's pillar to success is a responsibility for the developers of the community, yet they're(myself excluded because I'm not a game developer) not fulfilling that role, but neglecting it, rather. Can you really blame them, though? Some of them left because they have other priorities in life and some left because they are just fed up with the engine's limitations, and then there are those who are aware of the limitations but stay anyway in hopes that said limitations will be addressed. I'll never be able to fathom the reason as to why most of these feature requests aren't addressed, considering you have the technology to do so at your disposal.
Anyway, in short, if you want to see BYOND succeed, do the things that are necessary for that to happen. | |
Magnum2k wrote:
I'll never be able to fathom the reason as to why most of these feature requests aren't addressed, considering you have the technology to do so at your disposal. This has been the bane of my aggravation with BYOND as a software for the majority of the time I've been here. I'd like to know why most of the important feature requests aren't even replied to. I'm not expecting Tom to snap his fingers and make a bunch of new essential features and changes, but at least some recognition that there are some vital aspects of the software that are seriously lacking. | |
Doohl wrote:
I'd like to know why most of the important feature requests aren't even replied to. Who's to say which ones are more important than others? It's also generally much faster and easier to post a feature request than it is to implement a request. | |
Most SS13 users dont want to touch the rest of BYOND because BYOND is that scary thing that runs the game at a smooth 10 FPS, generates completely nonsensical 10 second lag spikes, I've been in wizard rounds where theres a whole minute of input delay and you just loosly flop around the station, with no apparent reason for the lag other than a bunch of gibs and magic missiles fired
The question is why anyone would actually want to touch it in the first place Not to mention, I've actually tried some other games, while most are horrifyingly boring or simply dont start because the new pager is a buggy crapshot, some are actually quite fun, but extremely poorly coded, runtime everywhere and a lot of the time have absolutely unbearable camera/control schemes No experienced developer would poke BYOND with a 12 feet stick in its current state, it wouldent be too difficult to fix it, but you actually have to try rather than adding ads and jumping ship I noticed BYOND survived a lot of newbies wanting to make games, but right now Game Maker also takes that spot, BYOND could be real nice if it was simply upgraded to todays standards, right now its left behind in 2004 (good times) | |
Somebody get Teka in here quick, if we can just get him to buy another two or three hundred memberships BYOND will be saved.
This has been the bane of my aggravation with BYOND as a software for the majority of the time I've been here. I'd like to know why most of the important feature requests aren't even replied to. I'd like to know why 90% of the developers here have spent their entire time complaining about what BYOND can't do, instead of taking BYOND's limitations and designing their games around them. No one here is satisfied with DM, everyone wants super flashy effects, and particles exploding across the screen, and support for this, this, and that, when you can make a fun game WITHOUT all of this non-sense. I think a lot of you are simply not talented, and because we all need an excuse on why we weren't able to create anything, some of us play the "Well this engine ain't good enough" card. If you want "next level" games, go use a next level engine. It's like taking Aspirin for severe pain when you have Percocet sitting right in front of you. Unity3D is simply a click away, nothing is stopping you. Don't use BYOND then whine about how you can't use it to create the next Crysis when you ignore the engines that are designed specifically for games that advanced. Everyone moaned about pixel movement being such a necessity then when it finally came out, people STILL weren't finishing projects, and as a matter of fact, some of the few games that were finished during that time were using TILE BASED MOVEMENT. This is what I'm talking about. Tom could sit here and add another dozen features, we'd still be here complaining about what we can't do and what else DM needs before it's good enough for us to use. What's the point? | |
B-but learning other languages and frameworks is hard! I'd rather just use DM even though I hate it with a fiery passion! It's BYOND's fault because it has limitations and I can't understand that I need to move on if the platform doesn't suit my needs!
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The reason nobody who joins BYOND for SS13 ever plays anything else is that almost every game on BYOND is awful, because BYOND is a terrible platform. SS13 is stuck on BYOND because it started as a little project that grew into a huge and genuinely good game almost by accident. Every SS13 coder hates BYOND because it is really bad, and everything that can be done to migrate to an actually good platform is being done.
The reason your business is failing is not just a lack of business strategy, though that's an obvious problem. It's due to a fundamentally bad product. You lament that there aren't enough serious or successful games, but the reason for that is that no serious developer is going to use BYOND. No multithreading, too much hardcoded UI stuff, useless debugging tools, the engine is full of problems and instead of fixing them you make a new pager. The third nail in the coffin, besides poor marketing and a shoddy product, is your bad attitude. With some effort and intelligence SS13 and the audience it attracts could've made you some money. Instead you dismiss it as it doesn't currently benefit you despite being the best game on your platform, and call someone who's worked on it for years a useless leech. It's no surprise that your business is failing. | |
Also everyone arguing that there is nothing wrong with BYOND and the fault lies with developers is completely ignoring the fact that this thread is about the abject failure of BYOND as a product and a business. The evidence is on our side here.
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Biggs Mclargehuge wrote:
I'm now a 5 year member of BYOND, so I hope you keep your service online for the forseeable future. I hope my frankly reasonable criticism holds some weight with you now. Thank you very much for the contribution! All I've been trying to get across here is that we rely on these Memberships to fund our development time; without them, we have to spend all of our time trying to figure out how to otherwise make money, which is a waste of a lot of time and the source of many complaints. If we could rely completely on a benefactor system like Wikipedia does, that would be perfect but we've essentially tried that for the past few years and it didn't make anything substantial. I was even fine with that though until I ran out of money. The problem with your business strategy is that there's no incentive to hand over money for this service. It hasn't been very well maintained, and there hasn't been much effort or outreach to help us with the game, which could have led to a lack of good will on our part. Up until now there was really no incentive for the player since we've always given everything away for free. Now the ads may be enough of a nuisance (Pandora/justin.tv model) that some will kick in, but probably not many. Where I differ with you is the idea that people would be more apt to contribute if there were more bug fixes / features / etc, because that is going back to the altruistic benefactor model and very few subscribe to that ideal (in fact, I think it only really works when the volume of users is enough that the miniscule percentage of contributors is still nontrivial). As far as the product being well-maintained; it depends how you look at it. For two people, given the scope of duties here, I think we've done OK. I really don't think people appreciate how much BYOND does for the developer. Many people try to move on from BYOND's limitations and rewrite games in C++ or Java but those projects generally take a very long time and rarely finish (I only know of one, which was Crispy's game). Still, I encourage everyone who feels that BYOND isn't suitable for their "dream" to pursue other tools, because there are so many today that didn't exist back when we started this, and many are much better for the kinds of things people try to do with BYOND. Regarding the lack of support for SS13, I don't understand the issue. We rarely interact with SS13 developers because they don't tend to frequent the main site (or contribute to our income). We've tried to keep BYOND as relatively stable and have made recent improvements on the compiler to work with larger projects (an SS13 build was actually my test case). Regarding some issues with lag, client-side processing and the like, those are very general and would require a substantial reworking of the engine. At this point I consider BYOND a largely legacy project and while we may add in wrappers to handle outside UI like Flash, we do not plan to make core engine changes. The main reason is that BYOND is, even now, still built on a tile-based system and so much of what people want is at the pixel-resolution and working that in without a complete rewrite is a nightmare. And we have no motivation for a complete rewrite when we are having the financial difficulties we are now. | |
Could just start off by fixing some generally rediclous stuff
such as proc/add(a = 0, b = 0) Manages to output the follow shitfest of a bytecode: /proc/add The funny part here, is that the DMB actually has a list of the arguments and variables of each proc, their names, and... their default values, which for some reason is entirely unused on arguments | |
Did you know: fanboys and their aversion to critique are one of the quickest things to ruin both a community and a product.
Proper debugging tools and developer tools are not 'flashy effects.' | |
I wouldent go as far as calling putting the gliding on the client and making games run at a framerate independant from the tick lag flashy effects either
Albeit from my understanding how the client <-> server interaction works right now, that would be extremely difficult | |
Things took a turn for the worst. Unfortunately, I'd be lying if I said I'm hardly surprised.
Since it seems BYOND is going under, and with several bad apples among the community, I highly doubt I'll continue to use the language. Granted, if one of our several ssj/kyuubi/bankai heroes show up to save BYOND, then I'll definitely come back and work on something. I hope for the best, Tom; even if it's a pipe-dream. | |
Apparently there's too much hate, arguing, and occasionally legitimate comments here for me to get many, if any of my answers, but oh well. It's probably hard to give a time frame, or evaluate the ads right now anyway; the previous comments just had my thinking I missed something important somewhere.
Anyways. BYOND has its good points, and bad points, but honestly it has been around for a long time, and while I didn't start developing games with it until much later; I have had it in my life for 5+ years now. So, I would be extremely upset if it were unable to continue, or at the very least stay up and running smoothly. That being said. I really can't blame Tom, or anyone else working on BYOND for how they think or feel right now. I see a lot of the comments here and I'm amazed that anyone continued BYOND for as long as they did considering how some people act. You can make hundreds of different arguments or points, and you can disagree with this post that I'm making all you want, but at the end of the day the truth is always the same; BYOND's largest problem is that it lacks good games and that is NOT because it cannot make them. Good games have come and gone because the developer quit for one of many reasons, most having nothing to do with BYOND, or because they simply weren't updated enough as BYOND and gaming in general advanced. Not ever, though, has anywhere near enough good games come out; which like it or not is the fault of the community not BYOND its self. I could go on for a few more paragraphs, and I could make a lot of comments and promises people may or may not believe, but there's no real point. All I've got left to say in this post that I feel NEEDS to be said is that I may or may not be able to do much, and I don't know how much time there is left to do something about BYOND's situation, but I wish it well and plan to do everything I can to help it stick around and stay as strong as possible; I just hope I can donate and develop enough to at least help a little because I know it's hard for any one person to make a difference right now. That won't, however, stop me, and hopefully many others others from trying. P.S: I'm not aiming for attention or anything else for that matter. Just stating my point of view, and extending some well intended hope and such. That, and hinting at what I'm doing to try to contribute to the whole money making thing; since that is what this topic is supposed to be about. | |
I'm now a 5 year member of BYOND, so I hope you keep your service online for the forseeable future. I hope my frankly reasonable criticism holds some weight with you now.