Loduwijk's site

Losers who can't make a game but won't admit it

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 17:23:38 +0000

I just stumbled onto this post put up by the administrators of what appears to be some free, MMO browser-based game called "Poisonville". In that post on their forum, the owners state that they are shutting down their game for a variety of reasons, including... hold on to your seats for this one... Java and OpenGL have technical problems and are not modern tools.

ROTFLMFAO!!! And I hardly ever use internet abbreviations like that, but this is a special occasion. Way to fail.

Of course it's not their fault as crappy game developers, it has to be Java and OpenGL, because it's not like Java has a huge share of the programming world, and it's not like OpenGL is the industry standard in graphics programming. So let's find some other graphics engine instead. Little do they realize that whatever tool they decide to use instead has a high probability of just being an engine that is based on OpenGL anyway.

Way to epic fail and try to pull a bluff check on the world in an attempt to redirect the blame... and getting an epic fail on the bluff check too. Except that there was a person on their forum who actually believed them... epic, critical anti-bluff? Rolled a natural negative 20?

I want so bad to be able to post on their own forum about this and tell them they should not bother trying to make games because they are clueless, but it appears you cannot sign up a new account there anymore; at least, I can't see where to do so.

Utilities should always be featured

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:56:22 +0000

ID:773631

Is it true that the distinction between games of members vs games of non-members applies to demos and libraries as well?

If this is so, I think this should be reconsidered. Unlike games, the listing of demos and libraries are more to the benefit of Byond than they are to the benefit of their creators. Making them any less visible because of membership status is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Also, because developers don't benefit as much from any demos or libraries they make, their purpose is to facilitate other developers, and the quality of a demo or library is not as opinion-based as games, this means that you should feel free to have a heavier hand against demos and libraries than you do against games. Don't be afraid to keep a demo or library from being featured if you decide you don't think it's good quality, or to promote others because they are exceptional quality. The publicity they get should be based primarily on their quality and usefulness, because these are tools that help other developers to succeed and therefor Byond to succeed.

LinkedIn sillyness and a lesson learned

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 13:32:33 +0000

It seems to me that LinkedIn is a type of service that Byonders might find useful, especially if they are hoping to develop their creations here into a business portfolio. Do many of you use this website?

I just logged into it again today to accept my boss' boss as a contact. I think this is only the third time I've ever logged into it. Recently I have been taking it less seriously and wondering if anyone else is finding it lacking.

I keep getting emails from Linked-In stating We think you might know these people! Would you like to add them to your contacts? and I never know any of them. Most of them I would have no reason to know, and I dont know how the heck it comes to the conclusion it does. So I went to find a way to contact the LinkedIn administrators to give them advice, and the only way to do this appears to be a Send Feedback form for suggestions. It has a character limit of only 141 in the feedback text area! Instead of sending my original thoughts, since I couldnt, I sent them this

Subject:
Improvement that would make this feedback form actually usable
Feedback:
Max-length feedback 141 characters. Go over, get error. Cannot make real feedback with 141. Not usable as-is. Look how ridiculous this messag

What the heck!? I think we have a lesson to learn here about what not to do in a business environment from a website that is geared toward business professionals. Actually, on second thought, maybe it would be fun to tell everyone that calls my desk phone, Thank you for calling! I will be counting the characters in the words you speak and will hang up on you when you get to 141 characters, so make it count! Now, what can I do for you?

"bad output" error outputting to savefile

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:13:16 +0000

Has the way savefiles are used changed, or do I just really not remember how to use them properly?

Even just the following simple example isn't working for me.

var/savefile/S = new("savetest.sav")
S << "hi?"

S << "hi?" throws the bad output error, as does anything else I try to output to the file.

What am I forgetting?

Blogs for non-Members

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:54:23 +0000

LummoxJR wrote:

He does have blog space, though not a membership.

ID:731867

How does that one work? Do non members have a way to get a blog now? Do all accounts, member or not, now have blogs?

Program design with an eye on best practice

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:42:01 +0000

Note by moderator:
This thread spawned off an reply to id:723781 in Developers How-To and was moved here for the sake of arguing without cluttering up the help provided to a new programmer.

Kaioken wrote:

Shame on you for saying this while that code uses direct modifying of loc (and nothing else) to do movement!

I prefer modifying the loc variable directly instead of using Move() for relocation. I don't think density should play a role when you just want to move a player's mob to another map.

Granted, I could have either modified Move() to take a parameter that tells it to auto-success, or made a new function. I have done this at times before, but for most applications it has seemed a waste of time since there is no distinction unless Entered()/Exited() needs to come into play. And even when you have overwritten Entered()/Exited() it still doesn't matter unless the location that teleports you or the location teleported to themselves require special movement attention. Either way, I have reverted to just setting loc in recent years unless I have reason to do otherwise.

However, to make you happy...

Any place you would do "loc = whatever" instead do one of the two following things.

atom/movable/Move(atom/newLoc, newDir, autoSuccess = 0)
    if(!autoSuccess)
        return ..()
    turf/oldLoc = loc
    oldLoc.Exited(src)
    loc = newLoc
    newLoc.Entered(src)
    if(newDir)
        dir = newDir
    else
        dir = get_dir(oldLoc, newLoc)
    return 1

// SuccessfulMove() is the same as Move() except that it's always successful!
atom/movable/SuccessfulMove(atom/newLoc, newDir)
    turf/oldLoc = loc
    oldLoc.Exited(src)
    loc = newLoc
    newLoc.Entered(src)
    if(newDir)
        dir = newDir
    else
        dir = get_dir(oldLoc, newLoc)
    return 1

Still, as long as you don't override Enter()/Exit(), then modifying loc directly is fine. You can argue programming best practices against that if you want, but Byond itself makes it impossible to follow programming best practices in many cases (such as no class privacy!). But, as long as you have half a brain and you use at least half of that, it doesn't really matter too much, especially in Byond.

Forum format upgrade

Fri, 29 May 2009 22:30:53 +0000

ID:701324

There have been numerous times when stuff like this happens.

Could we eventually have a system like some message boards have where at least a small amount of every post shows by default, so that you can at least get an idea of what is going on elsewhere in a thread even if you don't read the whole thing?

Make world.log variable readable

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:07:26 +0000

It would be nice if we could check to see what world.log was set to.

I almost never bothered changing world.log in the past, so I just noticed for the first time today that world.log is not readable.

In case this is not intended behavior and it's more of a bug than a lack of feature, the following is how I noticed it.

world/New()
    log = "testLog.txt"
client/verb
    test1()
        src << world.log // outputs nothing
    test2()
        src << "- [world.log] -" // outputs "-  -"

Icons size larger than 32x32

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:25:24 +0000

I just tried to use this newfangled ability of icons to be sizes larger than 32x32. I imported a 200x200 pixel image, and the icon now shows, in DreamMaker, that its size is 224x224. I make a new object, put it in client.screen or on the map, and the icon is still shrunk down to 32x32 pixels just like it does normally when you don't specify the icon size.

How do I make the icon show up at its proper size?

Setting Topic()'s hsrc in HTML form

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:07:32 +0000

Code:
The following is the code that does work, but not using a src object like I'd like.

client
    Topic(href, href_list[], hsrc)
        src << "hsrc = [hsrc]"
        src << href

// and in another spot...
src << browse({"

Problem description:

I'm trying to make what I thought would be a simple browser popup with nothing but a textarea and a submit button in it for the user to just type something in and submit it.

I want to set hsrc so I can have a specific object's Topic() handle everything for it. I had it working with client/Topic(), but I can't figure out how to set hsrc doing things the way I'd like to.