BYOND Labs

Big changes at the BYOND server room

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:59:03 GMT

If you weren't online between about 9pm and 10pm BST tonight, you may not have even noticed. Those who accessed the site during a short period of time were treated to a moving notice:

And in about 10 minutes, we schlepped the BYOND servers up the west coast of the US, from southern California to Seattle. We sent out change-of-address cards to all the nameservers on the internet, and waited as the community started trickling in to visit our new digs. Some took longer than others, depending on how long it took them to receive those new address cards. If you're reading this, you've made it. Welcome!

Our new server room gives us well over 8 times the processing power of the old, in turn giving BYOND ample room to continue growing. For the technical, here is a comparison of stats:

Old	New
Web Single 2.66 GHz Pentium IV Xeon 4 GB mem 1 SATA disk Hub/Database Single 1.8 GHz dual-core Opteron 4 GB mem 1 USCSI 10k rpm disk	Web Dual 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon (Harpertown) 4 GB mem 2 SATA disks Hub/Database Dual 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon (Harpertown) 4 GB mem 2 SATA disks 1 SAS 15k rpm disk

Old

New

Web

Single 2.66 GHz Pentium IV Xeon
4 GB mem
1 SATA disk

Hub/Database

Single 1.8 GHz dual-core Opteron
4 GB mem
1 USCSI 10k rpm disk

Web

Dual 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon (Harpertown)
4 GB mem
2 SATA disks

Hub/Database

Dual 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon (Harpertown)
4 GB mem
2 SATA disks
1 SAS 15k rpm disk

That's right, both servers now have 8 full cores, giving us many times more processing power than before. We're still working through a few software-related issues remaining from the big site upgrade a few weeks ago, but the new hardware is humming along mightily!

Best AFD Ever

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:25:07 GMT

BYOND is growing. We see that in the internal stats that we collect regarding everything from website hits to number of unique computers logging into the pager each day. It's also quite apparent in the publicly available stats -- namely, the instantaneous number of people online.

You may have noticed that the number of online people is regularly in the 3000s these days. We didn't hit that milestone until earlier this year, on January 14th. Heck, we only hit 2000 for the first time less than a year ago, back in July. And the pace is accelerating.

Yesterday we hit 3900 people online for the first time. But you people weren't satisfied with that. Yes, for a brief 5 minutes or so, we actually peaked above 4000. No fooling. We doubled the number of people simultaneously logged into BYOND in less than 9 months.

For comparison, here are the numbers for the past three years on April 1st:

What a great milestone for BYOND. Thanks to all of you April Fools for making it happen!

Upcoming game submission functionality

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:21:08 GMT

After much discussion with the BYOND Staff and the BYOND guild leaders, we're about ready to roll out some new guild functionality: The ability for any guild member to submit a game to the guild's list. As part of this, we've started expanding the hub pages to include guild information.

Here's how it works (subject to any refinements before we roll it out):

Guilds will have two additional options:

And when you go to a hub page you will see a couple of new things. On the left side of the Version box, there is a list of guilds this game is listed in:

On the right side is a new link for submitting the game to a guild:

Because it's a somewhat expensive hit on the database to calculate which guilds you can submit the game to, we wait until you click the link to figure that out, and give you a list like this:

After you've submitted to a guild:

The guild staff sees this:

If you have game management privileges for the guild, or if the guild auto-approves games, then it goes right onto the list.

The first draft of this functionality is in place and we should have it out shortly. We hope it will encourage guild membership and for games to be added to guilds.

We have several more ideas for how to add Member/Guild functionality to the hub pages, and of course we're interested in any ideas you might have.

How do we make BYOND the user-friendliest?

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:17:19 GMT

Okay, not as sexy as getting to dream up features for member pages, but bear with me. I've been lured back to BYOND to work on various aspects of the system; documentation will be a big part of it. We want to make the BYOND software as user-friendly as possible, and also the BYOND website, both the player and developer sections. I thought I'd do a little informal surveying to see what you all thought could use some revamping. Here are some questions, which you can answer directly or just use for inspiration.

First, go back to that time when you were new to BYOND...

1. What were you looking for when you came to BYOND?

2. What were your first frustrations?

3. How did you learn how to program (or to use the Dream Seeker)?

Moving into the present...

4. What advice would you give to someone who was new to BYOND today? (This advice could be about anything.)

5. Have you had friends who tried BYOND, but didn't continue with it? Why did they drop out?

6. Have you had friends you tried to introduce to BYOND, but they decided not to download/use it? Why not?

7. What new documentation do you think would be useful, if any?

8. What do YOU think about the layout of the website, both the "play" and "develop" sides? What would you change to make it easier and more useful for players and developers, new and old?

9. Anything else?

How should hub pages be changed?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 17:59:55 GMT

Okay, Mike's Herculean efforts on the Member pages and Lummox's progress on Dream Daemon are shaming me into getting some work done. Next up on my plate is moving the hub pages from the C++ to the Perl backend and adding new hub page functionality.

I'm not sure we've covered this previously, but the BYOND website and hub infrastructure were originally created in C++, and raw C++ with almost no libraries used at that. Everything was built from scratch.

C++ is not the friendliest language for implementing web functionality or for text-based processing, and especially not when you are building everything from scratch. On the other hand, Perl is a text-processing language with a rich set of libraries available to make it easy to generate web pages and access databases and the like. And object-oriented Perl provides a nice clean way to solve problems.

So a few years ago I built a new Perl-based web infrastructure and experimented with it by creating a new admin system for the BYOND staff. That went well, and we started implementing most of our new web functionality, such as the Member pages, with the Perl backend using modern program methodologies such as template-based text generation. This resulted in a vastly simpler, easier to maintain code base (I mean, I can't even express how much simpler) than the original C++ infrastructure. So much so that I coldly left Mike to handle the C++ while I cuddled up to the warm and friendly Perl and promptly tried to forget everything I almost knew about C++.

In the intervening time, Mike has significantly enhanced the Perl infrastructure and we've managed to solve performance issues and such to our satisfaction. So it's our desire to move more and more of the website over to the Perl backend, thereby allowing us to make changes much faster than is possible in the C++ (as evidenced by all Mike's work to upgrade the Perl-based Member pages).

Now that we have this cool new guild functionality in place, we want to extend the hub pages to include guild-related information and whatever else makes sense. So as the first step, I'm in the process of porting the current hub page functionality over to the Perl.

While I'm doing that (hopefully the first pass can be mostly handled this weekend), here's your chance to give us ideas for how the hub pages should be upgraded.

So, how should hub pages be changed?

A face lift for an old friend

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 23:49:22 GMT

Now that January is over, and with it my old job, I'm now going to be working full-time on BYOND. As my first task, Tom asked me earlier in the month if I'd like to revamp a BYOND app that hasn't seen an update since the last millennium: Dream Daemon. One of the major goals of BYOND 4.0 is to move hosting away from Dream Seeker and run it all through DD, which is actually quite feasible.

Progress has been advancing on Dream Daemon to the point where it's now possible to show some screenshots from the application as it stands right now, and with it, I can list a few of the new features that are bringing it into the 21st century. The new application uses tabs like the new pager does. The first tab will look pretty familiar:

On the World page, you can set up hosting options and start or stop your game just like you always could--but you can do a lot more than that. Dream Daemon didn't used to let you change hosting settings like privacy or security on the fly, even though Dream Seeker did. Now you can. You can also close hosting to new connections, and reopen it again, just like in Dream Seeker (via the orange X road sign). And although it doesn't show in this shot, the World menu includes a Reboot command.

Welcome to the Players page, or at least a rough mock-up I've got going so far. It's too sparse for my liking yet, since I intend this to be the real command center for game hosts. What it does have so far is a major improvement over what Dream Daemon had before. Before it could only tell you the number of users logged in; now you can see who is in your game, and who was in your game. (Players who have logged out appear in gray, and will show how long they were logged in.) Notice the icons next to the names; I get the world icon because I'm the host, and Tom has a smiley face because he's in some of my friends lists (more on those in a bit). It'll also show if anyone was kicked out via a ban.

Ban and Kick work just fine; a kick will ban someone only until the end of that session, unless you decide to change your mind and let them back in of course. You can also send messages to your players, which they'll see right in the game. (For expediency I'll add a shortcut so you can send server-wide announcements too.)

Here I introduce one of the new power features of Dream Daemon: host-based bans. These are more configurable and more powerful than pager bans, and will help with games that don't already have a good ban system built in (not to name any names...). Besides banning keys, you can also ban IP address ranges, although that isn't set up in the interface just yet. What you can do so far is manage multiple bans and even make them catch slippery users. It's easy to keep track of why you banned people, and you can send them a message if you like to tell them why they're banned.

If you're wondering what a sticky ban is, picture a ball of tar. A sticky ban will try to find players sneaking around your ban and ensnare any new keys or IP addresses. Although it's not foolproof (if only!), it's about as tough as a ban can get.

That brings us to our final page, the Friends page. You can set up different lists of friends, and by checking those lists you can restrict hosting to only certain people. This is a great way to run closed testing on a game or hold project meetings. Also, anyone on your friends lists will be immune to bans (as are you, the host), so if you have a beef with Danny's brother Jay, but Danny is your friend, you can sticky-ban Jay yet still let Danny come and go as he pleases.

This screen shot shows one list I created as a test, and for the sake of presentation I limited hosting to just those three people. Since Tom is on at least one of my friends lists, he gets a smiley face on the Players page.

I have a few more ideas in mind for DD before I'm done with it, and it needs some polishing up--things like keyboard accelerators and more tooltips. So far I'm happy with the project, and excited to start using it in earnest. Hopefully this will even give you some ideas on how you can make the most of your newfound freedom as a game host.

Ballot stuffers, hanging chads, election irregularities...

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:00:50 GMT

Another new feature for the aforementioned Member site layout upgrade is now complete: polls. Attach a poll to any new blog post and use it to find out what your audience thinks. There's also a new content box that shows your website's latest poll in the sidebar.

See it here: http://test.byond.com/guilds_rock/BYONDLabs?post=26528

From there, you can go to your own site, Add Post, and attach a poll to the post.

Just a few more content boxes left before this stuff goes live. As always, comments and bug reports are appreciated.

How would you like your page today?

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:54:35 GMT

There's a big update to the Member pages in the pipeline, and it's time to preview. While it's geared towards giving better presentation to game-oriented guilds, it has the nice side effect of allowing all Members to customize their pages significantly more than before.

The centerpiece of this update is the new website layout editing page. In it, you can choose which content boxes go in which of the three main sections, order the boxes within those sections, and even order the sections themselves. You'll still use CSS if you want to reposition them on the page, but reording them within the HTML opens up new possibilities.

We also have several new content boxes that you can choose to display on your page, including:

blog calendar

large favorite games summary

full favorite games list like hub channel pages

recent comments like the main Members site

recent blog summary like the main Members site

recent forum posts lists

For some of the boxes, you can also customize them by setting their titles and/or parameters such as the number of items to show.

Also changed in this update is the favorite games list. You can now list up to 100 favorites, but still only the top 10 count towards BYOND ranks. If your site is a guild, your guild members' rankings also influence the "Guild Members" rank of your guild's games. We're hoping that game-oriented guilds will add games and use the new game listing boxes to emphasize those games on their pages. Especially those soon-to-be-official game guilds -- start adding games!

Play with it here: http://test.byond.com/guilds_rock/?command=edit_layout

Any layout changes you make will go live when we update the main site with this new version. There are a few more things to add before then, and maybe some bugs to fix (please report here). Suggestions and comments are also welcome!

What guilds should show on games page?

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 18:28:25 GMT

As Tom has been discussing since we rolled out the Member blogs, it's our intent to replace the current game channels system with a guild-driven system.

The idea is that player-run guilds will be used to categorize, discuss, and publicize the games. Here is a draft of the new games.byond.com page showing this approach (however, the guilds shown are placeholders):

The idea here is to show the guild's latest blog post, latest forum post, the last game they added to their list, and the top three games on their list. These officially sanctioned guilds will probably be able to have a much higher number of games on their list (possibly unlimited).

Here's what you can help us with: We're debating what the official guilds should be. We'd like to have somewhere around 8-10 guilds that all games can be categorized within.

The current game categories we have are:

Action
Arcade
Board-Card-Dice
Chat
Fan Games
Puzzle
RPG
Strategy
Utilities
Words

We're not sure these are the best categories. We'd like to have categories that will make sense to people based on the kinds of games they like to play, will encourage community discussion in each guild, and will allow us to market the site to specific game communities. Some potential categories we've discussed are:

Singleplayer games
Games for non-gamers (party games, ports of popular board games)
Single-session games for gamers (like Ultimatum, ports of German board games that have 200 page instruction booklets)
Multi-session games for gamers
Anime and related fangames

If you have suggestions, let us know. In particular it would help if you answered these questions:

- What kind of gamer do you think of yourself as? ("I'm a board gamer", "I'm an RPGer", etc)

- What kind of category would attract you to BYOND if you were checking out the games page for the first time?

- What kind of category would make you jump in and want to talk on the forums and debate which games should be added to the list?

Developer pages: first draft

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:05:12 GMT

Okay, having thought about it and listened to the comments people provided, here are images of the first draft of the new developer.byond.com pages. Since it was convenient, I used screenshots of Last Robot Standing development -- if someone can provide sexier screenshots, that would be cool.

Click these to see a full-size image (the first page is broken into two images).

As always, let us know what you think!