Some new features have been added to the website this week that make it much easier to communicate.

Take a look at any game, and you'll now see that instead of a Reviews tab, there should be a Discuss tab. Now, reviews aren't the only way you can talk about a hub entry: You can leave comments too. Authors can decide if they want to restrict comments to just BYOND Members or even turn them off altogether, but by default comments will be available for anyone to use. This can be a great way to discuss new changes in the game, schedule upcoming online sessions, or whatever. You can even just leave a note to say how much you like it.

The same kind of thing is now available for blogs, too. If you add the new Blog Comments box to your layout, users can leave comments for you. You have the option of making comments private, so people who leave comments will only see their comments and any replies you make.

As part of this change, non-Members are now able to subscribe to comment threads of posts that interest them.

Another change to comments you'll see now is that when you want to navigate to older comments, you don't have to reload the whole page. That's our shiny new AJAX in action. To make it easier to see how far along in the comments you are, comments have numbers next to them now. If you want to hide those or change the way they look on your blog, you can create a style for .comment_number in your site's CSS.

Speaking of things you can add to your Member site, for a little while now another new box has been available: The My Medals box. With it, you can proudly display the medals you've won in your favorite games. What's life without a little one-upmanship, right?

Have fun making the most of these new features!

Today we're introducing a new BYOND version, and new features to go with it. The new items on the menu are scores and medals, and they'll make games a whole lot more interactive and competitive.

Medals are represented by icons, and each one stands for some kind of special goal completed in a game. Scores are flexible bits of information, not just about scores but perhaps about how far a player has progressed or how often they have won. As an author, how you use medals and/or scores is up to you. As a player, earning all the medals you can is a status symbol, and scoring well enough could get you listed among the top players.

Whenever a game uses these new features, you'll see a Standings tab on the game's hub page. This tab will show the top-scoring players and which medals have been earned, and it will show which medals are available.

The score and medal displays for a game are interactive. Scores can be sorted, so if a game records a player's score and their highest level reached, you can click at the top of a column to sort it. For medals, click on any medal to see the people who have earned it.

To work with scores and medals in your game there are four new procs in BYOND: world.GetScores(), world.SetScores(), world.GetMedal(), and world.SetMedal(). These procs connect to the hub in order to transfer information, so when you earn a medal in a game, it will show up on the website. See the new article in Dream Makers about how to use these procs and set up your hub entry.

Today we're unveiling some new features for the hub pages on BYOND. Hub pages have been getting more and more stuffed with information, so our goal has been to present this information in a much cleaner way. The new and improved hub page takes advantage of the fact that we can use JavaScript to build virtual "tabs" into the page. Using tabs means we can now use the whole width of the screen to show more information, which means things won't be so cramped for people with low-resolution displays.

New tabs

The first tab you'll see when visiting a hub entry is the Overview tab. This gives a little information about the game including its banner, short description, when it was created, etc., and you'll also find options for adding it to your favorites or watching it in your pager. Below this you'll see whether the game is live or not, and you'll get a short excerpt from the entry's full description.

The next tab will say Now Live or Waiting List, if the entry is a multiplayer game. This is where any live games will appear, and the waiting list of people who want to play. If you want to join the waiting list yourself, this is the tab you'll need.

In the Description tab, the full description of the game will be followed by an optional video and/or any screenshots. If you want to edit the screenshots for your hub entry, the link to do that is here.

Games that have bonus features for BYOND Members or have subscription features will have more information about both in the Subscriptions or Bonuses tab.

If the game has been reviewed, or you are a BYOND Member, you will see a Reviews tab. This tab will show reviews from any of the guilds where the game is included in their listings.

Finally, games will show a Related tab that shows which guilds list the them, and which other games people are likely to enjoy if they like this one. The old hub page used to list only six guilds and six other games, but the new page has room for more. This tab is the place for submitting a game to a guild.

Changes

One of the biggest changes you're likely to notice is that the format for the list of reviews on a hub entry has been changed. In order to encourage more guild-based reviewing, and sweep a lot of less useful reviews under the proverbial rug, now only the guilds that list a game will have their reviews show up there. You can still write reviews on your own blog or anywhere else you have the ability to submit a post, but to reach the biggest audience you should post in a guild.

Game authors also have some say now in how a guild lists their games. While the guild can still put any game they like in their favorites, the game author can choose to hide that guild on their hub entry page. The guild will not appear in the "Listed in Guilds" area, and its reviews will be tucked away out of sight. The list of guilds that can be shown or hidden appears on the hub entry editing page.

Coming Soon

One of the reasons for the update is that we will soon be unveiling some new features. It will soon be possible to keep track of scores for a hub entry, and create medals which can be awarded to players and seen on BYOND.

Medals are represented by 64×64-pixel icons. They represent achieving some kind of goal in a game, like beating ten levels in ten minutes, completing a quest, or winning a tournament.

Scores work a little differently. Since games come in all flavors, the scoring system is very open-ended. For each player you could record a score, a level, a character class, their win/loss record, or whatever you like. More than one piece of information can be recorded per player or character, so in a way it's like having a mini-database. When this feature is ready, you'll be able to set up your hub entry to list which data fields to put on display, and users will be able to sort through that to see who's at the top of the standings.

Achievements start to take shape
Lummox JR has been working on the new achievements system. In particular, most of the fundamentals have been worked on, including the DM interface for awarding medals to players. This is what Lummox had to say on the Achievements work in general:

"On the software front, I've been working on procs to communicate with the hub that will be able to use the hub for storage of scores and stats, and to award medals. A medal is basically any in-game achievement, determined by the hub entry author and awarded by calling a proc."

This is still a work in progress, however you can expect it to be available this week or next.

Hub entries revamped
The layout of game hub entries are being worked on, in order to provide a cleaner interface that guides players to servers. The new system works by splitting content into one of several tabs, providing a summary of important tabs on the page users first view when visiting a hub entry. Tabs will contain more detail on their respective areas, such as subscription information, achievements, reviews and so on. The overall aim of the new hub system is to make BYOND's various features accessible to users in a meaningful way, while also making the act of joining servers an easy task for regular players of your games. This hub update should roll out at the same time as the new Achievements system.

You must be nuts!
Aaiko has released a new game, under his banner group Iccusion Entertainment, called Feval. The format of the game may be somewhat reminiscent of the classic game Bomberman, however Feval adds a number of new features to the game style, in order to make repeating playing more enjoyable. It implements a number of different in-game achievements (not related to BYOND achievements), as well as power-ups that increase various aspects of your character. Certainly worth checking out with a few friends.

Art Journals
Zxcvdnm has been writing art journals for a few months now, showcasing the art for two projects: Isorath and Espionage. Isorath is an RPG created by a partnership between Tiberath and Zxcvdnm, with Zxcvdnm creating the inspiring artwork in most of the game's screenshots.

Efencea is back!
A recent work by Vermolius and Tayoko has come back to digest again this week. Efencea pits you against another player, in a battle to build increasingly formidable defences to guard against wave after wave of enemy forces. The game puts a very competitive edge on those classic single-player tower defence games, in that you build up the waves to attack your opponent. This game puts forward some really clean and bold artwork, a definite visual selling point, courtesy of Tayoko. Efencea has recently rolled out an update and features a global player ranking mechanism.

Random Anime of the Week
BYOND Anime has started up their old tradition of posting an interesting Anime every week. For anyone who is into Anime, this is definitely worth checking out. Typically BYOND Anime will cover Animes that you may not have heard of, things that are very well thought out and importantly fun to watch. R.A.W (as the weekly articles are called) are currently run by Aries and Maggeh. Kudos to you two for your good work in BYOND Anime. If you'd like to discuss the R.A.W or in fact Anime in general, feel free to post in the BYOND Anime forums.

BYOND the front-end ...
Tom and Lummox JR have been working together on BYOND's website and the core mechanism for the hub. The aim has very much been to increase the performance of these those key systems, making sure BYOND grows and handles more members smoothly. The focus has been on the database backend, which in turn touches almost all features BYOND offers. To help in this project, statistics collection on hub entries was turned off last friday. It is still an on-going project, however this is definitely an interesting bit of news to all you people who wonder what kinds of tasks go into keeping a site like BYOND well oiled and ready for action.

Lummox JR guards Fort Knox
As promised, Lummox JR presented a guest article for DevTalk. Lummox decided to cover one of those classic difficult spots for most games, AI and bots. The approach recommended is very nice, make your AI pay attention to sight, sound and smell. It sounds pretty simple and the article certainly explains a system that makes it easy to implement. The effect on your AI if done right will truly be a sight. Terms such as stealth and evasion are suddenly a lot more applicable to AI driven by these concepts. Have a play and try it out on your games.

Would you like to play a game?
Wargames has put out a new update. If you check out the update list, it is plain for all to see that Acebloke really doesn't muck about when he's working on something. Wargames in itself is a really slick game. In a nutshell, you build up a city state and aim to wage war with other players. It plays out a lot like BYOND's very own 'Empire Earth', presenting a real depth of gameplay in terms of units and their strengths. They say "The only winning move is not to play.", clearly they haven't been to BYOND! Check it out.