ID:2401947
 
Ive seen multiple times people complain about byond, in that it isnt strong enough to do anything powerful. Just what is the limit of byond?

Ive seen The last of us with multiple moving objects and vars alongside nearly 200 people acting on their own

Epoch is a massive game with mechanics Ive seen rival the most recent innovative mechanics

And even Falacy had dbz games holding over 200 people .
BYOND is plenty powerful to have a plethora of unique, polished, and ambitious 2D/small-scale multiplayer games and I'd argue that very few people have really pushed the engine even close to it's limits, and we're getting lots of performance improvements with recent builds so really, it's not so much the software is holding the devs back as much as it is a lack of competent and motivated/inspired devs.
Since all logic is serversided*, you are fairly limited on how good you can make your UI's. There's always going to be network delay between when you do something and the game reacts. Not a problem for a 100% local singleplayer game though.

Other than that, most everything is workable. There's better options out there, but that doesn't make BYOND horrible, especially if your game is small, lightweight, and multiplayer.

*Besides HTML-based interfaces, but if you do that, why bother with BYOND at all?
Thank you thank you appreciate the feedback. Just wanted to know if byond was worth the investment.

And I suppouse ill attempt to reach byonds full usable potency
I know the others covered this but I feel like I need to state my opinion as well.

I completely agree with the above responses, and I'll add there are other limits like total objects in game at once or total map size that you're highly unlikely to ever even get near.

However. At the end of the day, most people that know BYOND under-sell it. They've written it off as a niche, weak, or similar. And I get it. But if you're creative, motivated, determined, and push through the grind... Anyone, with or without others, can create a really solid game on BYOND that could be very fun, possibly profitable, and maybe even worthy of things like Steam.

BYONDs greatest limitation is how few solid developers are using it to make real games. Change that, and BYOND will rise to great heights. Make games, and watch many limits fade away as players roll in and other developers find inspiration.
it's also worth noting that BYOND is basically an entirely new beast than it was ~5 years ago. A lot of the stigma and such about byond are outdated.

Lummy has, and continues to impress me with how many quality improvements he's made and the extent of his willingness to reach out and interact with the community. If you read this Lummy, i <3 u and you're doing awesome stuff.
I'm going to have to disagree with some of the points made. You see, you asked what the limits are, and your replies were "not many games reach the limit" and "server side logic". Anyone thats used the software long enough has encountered many problems by now. When you've run into a software bug, that's a limit. When you encounter network lag because of the netcode or TCP protocol, that's another limit. When you find it difficult to debug code because of a lack of debugger, that's another limit then. When there's a freeze up by bug or internal implementation, another limit. The list goes on deeply.

We also found that with Goon Station and several other games, they offloaded a lot of logic to the clients browser. So "server sided" code isn't a complete answer either.

If you want a real answer, here it is. BYOND's an ugly mess that wraps around Windows, and Windows is an ugly mess that wraps around hardware. Windows strips maybe 10x potency from hardware, and BYOND strips maybe 100-1000x potency from Windows, as a complete guess. So if peraflop processors, memory speeds, and etc come out, BYOND will be powerful enough to even emulate The Sims 3 lagless. Pretty cool, right?

So how about we talk about how this isn't about BYOND and this is more about motivating yourself for what you immutably plan to do already. What kind of project are you going to create?
aside from barely being able to comprehend what you're attempting to say, I think you grasped the wrong context of OP's question..
In response to Kumorii
What part didn't you understand? That BYOND has a lot of limits? That a fair amount of logic can be offloaded to the client? That if we get peraflop processors, software rasterizers can be built to handle present-time AAA games in this software?

I don't think what I've typed was hard to understand, but I'll elucidate my wording for you if you tell me what was confusing for you. I'd prefer that over you alluding that I'm illiterate without a fair explanation.
In response to VampyCrampy
VampyCrampy wrote:
I don't think what I've typed was hard to understand, but I'll elucidate my wording for you if you tell me what was confusing for you. I'd prefer that over you alluding that I'm illiterate without a fair explanation.

I think he's just accusing you of using hyperbole in a way that sort of makes your point worthless.
I just--

I just wanted to know if Byond could handle 100+ active players....

There are too many words used here thought I don't understand for my Gang$ta brain to handle
In response to Rod5
A point I made is that Byond scales with your hardware and network. The internet connection of the average household will not be able to handle 100+ active players. A good internet in the 100mbps+ upstream will make it tolerable but I still have my gripes.

If you have good hardware and good network, yes. Otherwise no.
In response to Rod5
Rod5 wrote:
I just wanted to know if Byond could handle 100+ active players....


Short Answer: Yes. Some SS13 and some anime servers have regularly had 100+ players.


Long Answer: Kinda, but it depends heavily on exactly what kind of game you're making. Assuming you make your game in the most efficient way possible for any of these examples:

If you made an action shooter game like Feed or Decadence where you have a lot of projectiles/stuff moving around and doing stuff at once with a high tick rate, you're going to eventually start running into a ceiling; but again this depends entirely on how active or "busy" the players in your game are. If 100 players are running around firing projectiles and avoiding mobs/other players simultaneously, BYOND is gonna start to strain under the pressure.

However, on the flipside, if you make a game where the players aren't as active/"busy" moving/doing resource-intensive stuff, you could easily get a couple hundred people into a server. If you're making a typical BYOND-style fantasy RPG and didn't have all the players in combat making "magic projectiles" or anything like that at all times, you probably wouldn't have many issues. Same goes for click or puzzle-based games.

That said, BYOND is best suited for smaller scale games so that you don't have to limit the extent of your game simply to allow for a larger player pool. If you really wanted to be ambitious you can setup a cluster-server type setup to support large amounts of players across multiple servers but to my knowledge nobody has ever actually done this with BYOND and is moreso a theoretical option.

tl;dr: depends *heavily* on the type of game, but in most cases if your programming is good; yes you can support 100 however that's not to say you won't be straining things.
In response to Rod5
Rod5 wrote:
I just--

I just wanted to know if Byond could handle 100+ active players....

You been here too long to not know how this plays out.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
Rod5 wrote:
I just--

I just wanted to know if Byond could handle 100+ active players....

You been here too long to not know how this plays out.

Lul.
Well I dont know what is possible nowadays since games dont really reach that number anymore on Byond.

And SS13 isnt that good an example being how simplistic that game is and looks.

Best example I can get is Spires of Agartha with actual alot of moving things happening at once and alot of people moving at once. And if even 100 people are on with 40% of them fighting, it starts to lag.

So really, I'm in the dark here of what can really be pulled off. Being everyone I asks **** talks Byond into the ground as a platform to build an appropriate game on.

Byond's Gangsta
When you're thinking about using BYOND, ask yourself a few questions:
1) Is this the only option I'm going to default to and be capable of achieving, because I do not have the patience or know-how to invest in other software and languages? **
2) Do I want to support BYOND and help generate it popularity and revenue with my efforts, even though my work may be represented better with a different product?
3) Do I want quick multiplayer results? **

If you've answered yes to these, stop asking questions, and get to work!
I put ** next to the ones I believe are most relevant to you.
In response to VampyCrampy
VampyCrampy wrote:
When you're thinking about using BYOND, ask yourself a few questions:
1) Is this the only option I'm going to default to and be capable of achieving, because I do not have the patience or know-how to invest in other software and languages? **
2) Do I want to support BYOND and help generate it popularity and revenue with my efforts, even though my work may be represented better with a different product?
3) Do I want quick multiplayer results? **

If you've answered yes to these, stop asking questions, and get to work!
I put ** next to the ones I believe are most relevant to you.

So, i can Honestly say that the Above post is a really Necessary piece of advice for Everyone looking to use byond to produce a project.
In response to Rod5
Rod5 wrote:
And SS13 isnt that good an example being how simplistic that game is and looks.

I mean that heavily depends on the server. For example Eris looks way better than your games. And I am not sure what you mean by simplicity? For example SS13s Atmospherics and Powernet systems are known CPU hogs due to how insanely complex they are for what they are. Amongst other things.