Within BYOND #12

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ID:1785301
 
Feb 13 2015, 5:52 pm (Edited on Jul 16 2017, 9:10 pm)

Hello everyone! In case you happened to have a rather unlucky Friday the 13th today, a new Within BYOND is ready for you to read and it filled with new updates from BYOND, game developers, and resource developers. This edition also features three 2015 visions from Toddab503, DanteVFenris, and Mickemoose, developers who share their thoughts on 2014, and plans for this year. Read on!

This release is a few days off schedule, and we will be returning to our 2nd and 4th Wednesday schedule, meaning the next release should be on February 25th, 2015.

BYOND Website

In the event that you haven't noticed, the BYOND website has recently received a makeover. Things are a bit more white around here now. Tom has posted an update regarding some of the changes that have been made, along with future plans for BYOND. Game developers now have the ability to tag their own games, putting the listing process into the hands of the creator, instead of waiting for a moderator to follow up. Additionally, hub pages which have a server hosted that has the Webclient enabled will display an inline client. This will help promote the availability of the option going forward.

Accounts who haven't seen any activity for the past two years, will now be deactivated. If you find that one of your accounts has been deactivated, you can recover it by resetting your password via email.

BYOND Games

Frontline Assault, a turn based real time strategy game that takes place on a hexagon infused playing field, has been brought to version 0.6 by Poplava. The game play has been largely changed, now featuring supply routes, splittable units, and more map generation choices. AI players are available to play with, so check it out.

Phat T has continued progress with Path of Hero, making several updates to the RPG game in development. Bases for guilds are now available. Players can now party together. Quests, a casino, and a war system have been added. Defensive traits can now be accessed though the character information interface.

Posting a brief update on the development of Eureka, Kozuma3 tells us that they are now making all of their own graphics, and players can dash at rapid speeds. The RPG platformer will feature parties, quests, and skill trees in a side scroller's world.

Pixel Realms has posted two biweekly development updates on Severed World, an RPG which takes place in a whimsical fantasy world. Bosses are in charge this time, with an update log which features three of the boss battles planned for the game. A large slime capable of splitting itself into two, and a gigantic dragon, who attempts to crush the player, and burn them with fire. If that isn't enough, an over-sized bunny may try to blow you up with bad Easter eggs. Crafting details have been released, and interface menus, artwork, and sounds have been created.

After running into some small problems and fixing them, Mr_Goober laid out a brief outline of what needs to be accomplished for MicrORPG, then he created several editor tools for the various aspects of the game.

Kalero is an RPG in development, where humans have been enslaved by beastmen, has seen development progress lately, with the addition of skills, equipment, status effects, and many bug fixes. Public testing has had a target date set for around a month from now, and a request for artwork, or other similar contribution has been made.

Devourer Of Souls has added a new class, the Priest to the roleplaying game Sigrogana Legend 2. Additional, daggers can now be crafted, castle dungeons have been revamped, and snowmen can now be built.

Unlockable has posted new information on the survival RPG Inheritance. This weeks feature shows the interface for two systems, crafting and combat hotslots, which are achieved though a combination of skin elements, and HUD displays.

Final Impact: Aeon Catalyst is a turn based RPG that has recently undergone Alpha testing and is being developed by Mana Productions. Not much information is current available, but the screenshots and video look promising.

Work has continued by popular demand on Guilds of Magic by Kaliba. Guilds of Magic is a roleplaying game in a world that is powered by magic. Wizards band together to help or hinder civilizations, or to assist or defy the commands of the Magical Council. Updating from the original version, many magic spells are being revamped.

Loyal_Krauser has began a Indiegogo campaign to raise money for Soul Ascendence, a unique action RPG that includes a story with real time battles that take place on the drawing board. He is currently looking to raise money to purchase art and music assets to improve the game's aesthetics value before going on Steam Greenlight.

F0lak and Kaiochao have been working on a new project for the new calendar. While a name has not yet been decided, it is anticipated to take place in the same setting as Hazordhu I and II, and recent video posts have show a very promising environment. The latest videos demonstrate one of the quests players may see, coupled with dynamic lighting, weather, and monster attacks. Progress videos are planned for each month, keep an eye out here.

Rice has continued its development over the past few weeks with the publication of IchiroKeisuke's bi-weekly Dev blog. Improvements include a new charms menu for access to several interface elements, and a system for obtaining minerals and other resources. Map features have also been added.

Shortly after publishing a new website for the pre-Kickerstarter Immortal Dream, BloodOcean7 presented the development of Electronic Wastes, where the player becomes a robot who has lost his prime directive in a post war environment and must defend themselves using a solar powered laser, while attempting to recover the lost data.

Lord of the Bugs is Yut Put's attempt at creating the classic BYOND game Hedgerow Hall, while putting his own spin on the game, and without ever playing the original. Players take on the role of a bug in a open world environment, gaining skills, and experience to fill a niche in the community.

DanteVFenris posted several updates on the progress being made on Unluckiest, an inspired fantasy RPG. The posts offer information about some of the classes that will be available in the game, including the Ki, Food, Hero, and Puzzle. Fishing has also been demonstrated in a recent video post.

BYOND Resources

  • Doohl has posted Part 1 and Part 2 of his excellent tutorial on how to create and use custom controls for the Webclient.
  • Mr_Goober has published ZNDev, a collection of models that follow a procedural code design philosophy.

DanteVFenris

Hey everyone, DanteVFenris here. I am very excited with the developments of my game Unluckiest, a solo project done by me. My dream is that I get a healthy fan base so that can enjoy my work and critique it for needed changes, so I can make it as best as it can be. I can't really say I've had any accomplishments, it has been fun just letting the creative process go wild. I plan to consistently work on this game, with updates far after release until my vision of a sprite world has all the crazy concepts I can think of. My story for the game is also something I'm excited about. It started as a short story skit that I posted on Wattpad and I just loved the character so I decided to incorporate him as the main villain. My plans for 2015 are to hopefully gain a good fan base and make updates such as randomly generated guns (think Borderlands), new zones, new PVP concepts, and a whole lot more!

It is really nerve wracking sometimes letting your baby go out into the world, but I hope it finds a home in gamer's hearts and they can enjoy it as much as I had making it. So stay tuned for the craziness of Unluckiest. It will be releasing soon, and I am super excited, comment me if you're interested in testing, and look at my YouTube videos to see what its all about.

Mickemoose

I've been making some pretty low quality, unfinished games since I first joined in 2005. I always had a vision for a Super Smash Bros styled game using Sonic fan characters lol. In 2013 I finally got what I wanted albeit more thought out and dare I say, original game. Using our best friends as the character roster, we were able to create a small demo and play with it for a few months, during that year, a huge amount of work went it. In 2014, we accomplished something we had never done before.

We made a game that was fun for us to play. Wolf Pack Battalion saw a great deal of things I didn't think I could pull off, but actually did. The latter part of 2014 was spent polishing and improving on the game itself, but 2015 saw us jump into upgraded sprites for our characters. I can see Wolf Pack Battalion being feature complete and polished by the end of 2015, maybe even the summer.

In retrospect, I could have asked for advice and help on the forums a lot more. I couldn't of done some of the things I did if I didn't ask for help. Don't be afraid to ask for help guys!

2015 is going to be a great year and I hope all the developers on BYOND feel the same way!

Toddab503

In the past couple years I spent the majority of my time acquiring experience in BYOND through the game Final Resurrection: Redemption. A game I chose to create for fans of the DBZ fan game Final Resurrection by Volkov911, which was one of the first few BYOND games I played back in 2008. Many of its 50+ fans were leaving BYOND when it went down, and felt disappointed by Volkovs sudden departure, so it felt like a no brainer when Volkov approved of me creating my own game to continue everything.

I attempted to move away from its very loose fan game roots, and went with heavily community inspired changes, but naturally being my first release I made several beginner mistakes and didn't steer as far from being a fan game as I should have.

I've learned a lot from that experience, and plan to rerelease the game in two forms this year. One being a fan game for the older fans, the only fan game I ever expect to release actually, and the other being a completely new version that significantly changes everything into how I feel it should have been. I've also set a personal goal to release at least 12 games this year, many being small to moderate in size, which I will gradually polish and advertise over time after completion.

I've had several of them in mind for years, so I hope people will enjoy them, and keep an eye out for their releases later this year!

Feb 13 2015, 6:55 pm
no ss13
Feb 13 2015, 6:57 pm
Very nice! I like the little developer interviews too!
Feb 13 2015, 7:11 pm
I concur with tom. It's a nice touch to the Within BYOND series. I sometimes like to talk to developers on what they doing and what they hope to accomplish in their work. =]
Feb 13 2015, 7:15 pm
These are always pleasant to read, and actually get me on the forums.
Feb 13 2015, 7:30 pm
no ss13 [2]
Feb 14 2015, 12:28 am
In response to Lustiwe
Lustiwe wrote:
no ss13 [2]

If this post would include SS13 half of it would be SS13, with all the codebases, but it isn't because most interaction with the SS13 communities & BYOND is "WE BROKE BYOND!", and it's not like we're trying to get away from BYOND, noooo.

-an SS13 player
Feb 14 2015, 2:30 am
wow triple posting. please edit your prev- //shot

Very nice! Three of these posts within a week. I like this a lot. Keep it up.
Feb 14 2015, 12:42 pm
We have a Facebook set up for Severed World! Please like/share: https://www.facebook.com/severedworldmmorpg

IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/severed-world
Tumblr: http://purple-chance.tumblr.com/
Feb 15 2015, 2:02 am
In response to PJB3005
PJB3005 wrote:
Lustiwe wrote:
no ss13 [2]

If this post would include SS13 half of it would be SS13, with all the codebases, but it isn't because most interaction with the SS13 communities & BYOND is "WE BROKE BYOND!", and it's not like we're trying to get away from BYOND, noooo.

-an SS13 player


Most of SS13's interaction with byond is byond forum users blindly claiming that any bug with byond we encounter must be from bad coding, along with other snide attacks to our code bases and code skills, while we watch as all official byond correspondence seems to want to pretend like we don't exist.

The hostility exists on both sides, don't deny byond's part.


-/Tg/station13 Webmaster, Game admin, coder.
Feb 15 2015, 9:46 am
In response to MrStonedOne
I think you're reading into it a bit too much. Higoten can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Within BYOND content is largely drawn from posts in the Game Updates forum.

If you want SS13 to be included, write up a quick summary post every other week in the hub's forum and make sure to check "Crosspost to main forums". If you don't have anyone with hub-helper status that can crosspost (because of SS13's unique shared-hub situation), you could also page Higoten a link to it and I'm sure he'd be happy to include the news.

Anyways, back on topic, I like the idea of including interviews. Nice work Higoten, as always :)
Feb 15 2015, 11:15 am
In response to MrStonedOne
As someone who spent nearly 2 years programming / administrating / being actively involved in the SS13 community, particularly /tg/station's, I can say that there is more hostility outward from the isolated SS13 communities toward BYOND than otherwise.

The dozens of people I've interacted with who hold maintain SS13 branches seem to always hold the opinion that "byond sucks", "the website is full of kids and anime games", etc.


But aside from that, SS13 is just so decentralized and complex that it wouldn't be worth mentioning on these posts. You'd have to actively be part of a lot of these communities in order to figure out what's going on, and even then it's pretty impossible to actually keep up.
Feb 15 2015, 12:24 pm
When I played SS13 a number of years back, the first person I encountered proceeded to taze me, handcuff me and lock me in a cupboard. My guy had so much potential, he could have been so much more, but I wasn't able to learn how to play in the short spaces of time I had where my character was both conscious and unbound.

I have tried playing more recently but on the server I chose I couldn't seem to get into the game after character creation. I would be interested in trying it out again though.
Feb 16 2015, 9:36 am
cool
Feb 16 2015, 1:55 pm
In response to MrStonedOne
I certainly don't want to come off as pretending that Space Station 13 doesn't exist (Or any other developments, for that matter), or discount its important developmental progress in the least. I find it enjoyable to play a few rounds of SS13 every few months on a medium role playing server.

The problem that I run into with covering the game, is that it falls into something of a category most unlike any other game I cover. At the time of this posting, there are 49 live servers, of which I would guess that over half run code that is unique in some way to their server. This is mostly unlike other games where while some servers may be running older versions, there is always an up-to-date or latest version managed by the creators.

DarkCampainger is correct in that the majority of the information that I pull for the BYOND Games section comes from the Game Updates subforum. I'm certainly not opposed to straying from this avenue, in as much as I don't always include everything posted there. I understand (or think) that there are 3 or 4 large branches of SS13.

The BYOND Games section is mostly tailored for the reading of players, as opposed to developers (Not to discourage users from being both). This presents a problem, in that while the main code base may have received an update, it would be difficult for me to direct players to a server which will see the update without favoring one or two of the possible dozens of available choices (from just one branch, at that), or offer information on when their preferred server will be seeing the update, or even if it ever will.

I have mostly offered my thoughts on this issue. I encourage (all) developers who have news and information that was not covered, or not covered adequately, to create a post in the comments section offering the missing information for players to read, as my thoughts are that players read the comments, in as much as they (and if not more) read the original column. Additionally, I'm sure players would prefer to read more game news posts, as opposed to some reasoning about why a development was or was not included. :)
Feb 16 2015, 7:04 pm
For what it's worth, we've never had any animosity towards SS13 and have, in the last few months, really tried to work with one or two of their subcommunities in testing the webclient (mostly via reddit). We made decent progress there-- at least to the point of getting a playable (albeit unoptimized) round of the game, although feedback was mostly by just a few users. I think they've done something really amazing with BYOND and could use the added exposure that a stable webclient will provide-- which benefits us too-- so we are really trying to support that. At the same time, they have to reach out here-- even just by paging Higoten-- if they want more coverage on BYOND.
Feb 16 2015, 8:00 pm (Edited on Feb 16 2015, 8:09 pm)
Most of SS13's interaction with byond is byond forum users blindly claiming that any bug with byond we encounter must be from bad coding, along with other snide attacks to our code bases and code skills, while we watch as all official byond correspondence seems to want to pretend like we don't exist.

The hostility exists on both sides, don't deny byond's part.

From day one that the goons showed up, they did their best to destroy/degrade the SS13 community and set up their own private community. They had animosity toward BYOND from quite literally the first instant they got here. This even spilled over to other games, where certain members of SA actually spent an inordinate amount of time harassing/trolling a couple of BYOND developers. "For the lulz".

When the source code did finally get decompiled and released, that's when a number of goons really stepped in and started making up for all the damage they did to the existing SS13 community by making SS13 absolutely phenomenal.

Unfortunately, most of the people who write for SS13 are under some serious misapprehensions about how BYOND works.

Supernorn for instance in 2013 claimed that BYOND didn't support graphics larger than 32x32 (This limitation was overcome 2010). SS13's source code is littered with really bad code and is the definition of spaghetti. Entire systems that the game are based on are extremely wasteful and just don't play to BYOND's strengths.

Overall, SS13 isn't taking advantage of BYOND properly. People love to blame BYOND for SS13's problems, but the vast majority of them just aren't BYOND's fault. They are the fault of poor design, poor implementation, and poor planning. This is to be expected with a project that has run the course that SS13 has.

This isn't animosity. It's simply fact. The BYOND community as a whole does despise SS13. They view it as "not really a BYOND game". This is because almost all of the SS13 developers have made every effort to be separate from this community. Of course the people who are here really aren't going to be too fond of the way the SS13 community has treated them. On the other hand, the BYOND community at large isn't really worth the time to cozy up to for most SS13 developers.

The trouble is that there are a handful of users here that know more about BYOND and DM than anyone actively working on SS13. These are generally the people you hear making those "snide" remarks. Again, they aren't snide if they are true.

I'm sure if you guys actually extended the olive branch to some of the mainstays on this forum, they'd be more than willing to assist you guys in refining your codebases and fixing some of these "byond limitations" and "byond bugs" you guys seem to be continually running into.

I've seen a number of SS13-related bug reports and threads pop up on the forums over the years. People like Lummox, Ter13, Kaiochao, Tom, Doohl, Jittai, etc. go out of their way to answer questions and help provide support.

Maybe instead of coming here with drama for the general public, you come back with code problems / design issues and seek out people that actually have the knowledge you need. You might get better results from this community if you figure out how to use it without turning it into yet another rehash of the same crap the SS13 community has been doing to itself for the last ten years.
Feb 16 2015, 8:44 pm
Feb 16 2015, 11:04 pm
WHY CAN'T WE BE FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Feb 17 2015, 2:16 am
Don't try to oversimplify BYOND's situation. It's a very complex one that most people just fail to understand. It all started with a huge outbreak of multiplying, zombie clone, fan game rips, that would set the stage for a series of events that would forever change the face of BYOND. These zombie clone rips were seemingly unstoppable, as they exhibited some bizarre form of Darwinian "devolution". They quickly spread into the minds of those who played fan games and turned them into virtual training zombies. These zombies existed only to click on virtual training equipment, such as punching bags, within the zombie clone rips that they played. To make matters worse, they quickly gained enough power levels and GM levels to enter the next phase, in which they duplicate or rip an existing fan game. The situation became so severe that it was impossible to tell whether or not a fangame being ripped was actually a rip itself.

Due to the infinitesimally low quality of such multiplying, zombie clone, fan game rips, BYOND took actions to quarantine them, and give real games the better exposure that they needed, although collateral damage to some of the real fan games could not be avoided. Unfortunately, this would all backfire in an unusual way. A mysterious individual or individuals lurking in the shadows decided to take advantage of this unique situation in a way that would prove devastating to much of BYOND. The zombie clone rips had one major weakness that could be exploited: they were illegal fan games. This mysterious person or persons decided to contact the copyright holders associated with content found in many of these rips, as well as some of the "original" fan games. What resulted was a series of DMCA takedown notices being sent to BYOND. This effectively forced the hand of BYOND, and it had to declare war on all hubs associated with the intellectual properties in question. Out of fear of more notices, BYOND began to hide fan games in general, and not just the rips.

The casualties of this fan game war were enormous, and many refugees fled in all directions, to try and form their own communities, but most of them did not survive without BYOND. Some of those on board Space Station 13 saw many of these apocalyptic events unfold on the BYOND homeworld. It's likely that a large number of the refugees left for the station, never to return. The reports given to the station by survivors led to further misunderstandings, which effectively made them cease all operations on BYOND. In fact, by the time the war ended, the population on board the station was much greater than the BYOND homeworld, and none of them had any real desire to return. Unknown to those who still lived on BYOND, Space Station 13 held the only existing cure for the zombie clone rip virus, which was open sourcing. Unfortunately, the members of SS13 had no real desire to explain the benefits of open sourcing to the fan game communities, but they eventually became too zombified to figure it out anyway. Some believe that the Goons of Something Awful were behind a conspiracy to undermine other worlds in the BYOND system, which may not be far from the truth. Some of the Goons did in fact launch an attack on NEStalgia, but their efforts were futile, as NEStalgia's overwhelming success outshined them. It is not known what the Goons' true goals or intentions were, but it is interesting to note that they hold the only closed source fork of Space Station 13.

Today, BYOND's HTML5 client or WebClient makes BYOND games more accessible than ever before, and it may even be the key to reconnecting the many isolated BYOND communities.
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