BYOND Labs

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.

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.

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!

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?

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!