aside from a few graphical liquid effect limitations (although ShadowDarke's Blob (http://www.byond.com/games/Shadowdarke/Blob) shows that 'blob-like' can be done well), this is little more than a physics-repsonsive game like 'The Incredible Machine' or 'Armadillo Run'. BYOND should be able to do something similar, if a developer is comfortable with working on the physics/math parts.

That is one of the best games I've ever played.

Jeez though, play it for an hour and try going back to browsing the internet and everything looks like its bouncing around!

* Lots of cute little animations which reward you for success

Has less to do with BYOND and more to do with people being willing to draw all the cute little animations.

* Smooth pixel-by-pixel scrolling

Its fairly doable in single-player if you reduce the world.tick_lag significantly and make sure all of your delays are < 1 tick (usually sleep(1*world.tick_lag) works). You can even use client.pixel_x/y to make things smooth now.

* Full-screen immersive environmentat?

Perfectly doable IMO, see my other post. Maybe I'll put together a demo/tutorial on this someday.

I see what you're trying to do, but I disagree.

World of Goo seems to me like a game that ought to be entirely within BYOND's realm to create. No 3D graphics, multiplayer capability, fairly straightforward gameplay with a lot of fun twists and puzzles.

A game of "catch" is obviously outside the scope of BYOND, as is Call of Duty, and Madden or other sports games, and Need for Speed and other racing games.

What I'm saying is, there's a huge market for these fun, fairly simple games which BYOND ought to be able to fill beautifully yet fails to deliver on a few key points.

I'm eager to see if Foomer can prove me wrong, but even if he does, I bet it'll require some unruly hacks to subvert the natural order of BYOND's system, whereas in this day and age BYOND ought to offer some sort of baked-in way to make this sort of magic happen.

PirateHead wrote:

I'm eager to see if Foomer can prove me wrong, but even if he does, I bet it'll require some unruly hacks to subvert the natural order of BYOND's system, whereas in this day and age BYOND ought to offer some sort of baked-in way to make this sort of magic happen.

(Well there goes my incentive to try! Although I'm not sure using a resolution control, an ArrangeInterface() function and adjusting world.tick_lag can be considered "unruly hacks".)

Action and glitz have never been DM's strong points. If that's what you're looking to achieve, there are other game design systems and languages which are better geared for it. While I think DM is capable of more than you're giving it credit for, you still have to be considerate of its limitations and design games that are suitable for the system.

What DM lacks in regards to building games like this is built in movement and collision detection stuff. I remember using Klik & Play 15 years ago, and it had better movement and collision detection than BYOND does - but if you wanted to make anything besides an action game, you'd have a really hard time of it.

So if you're going to use BYOND, concentrate on taking advantage of the strong points. (What those are can be debated somewhere else.)

Hey VolksBlade, I assume you mistakenly just replied to the bottom post, so I also assume you meant to direct that comment at the root. So, here's my reply:

I've been making games using other software toolkits since BYOND doesn't run very well on Linux. (There's some movement there now, but it's still far too buggy.) I've also been playing many more indie games outside of the BYOND realm.

What I see everywhere is that toolkits which facilitate creation of the types of games people want to make are getting lots of business. Flash, SDL/pygame, Quake, and JavaScript/HTML are all booming hugely right now, even though BYOND has had such a huge head-start as far as technology and maturity goes.

Why is that? It's got to be a subtle difference. It's got to be the fact that, though BYOND can do a lot more than most people do with it, it makes you hack around with the engine to do so. It doesn't make the easy stuff easy; it makes some of the hard stuff, like networking, easy, but these days other game engines are doing the same.

So I could, if I wanted to, shut up and go make some BYOND games. I have access to Windows machines, and to friends who are good with art, story-writing, sound production, etc. However, the game I'm working on right now will be done with an open-source mod of the Quake 3 engine, and other games I've made have been with SDL. Those engines are better suited to what I've wanted to do.

The reason I made this post in the first place was because I ran across that game, World of Goo, which I think is entirely within BYOND's capability to run, but which isn't as easy or as nice a platform. I brought up a few reasons why I perceived that disparity and asked for discussion as to how BYOND might serve developers of that sort of game better. And, what I got was a sort of depressing but familiar refrain: "BYOND can do that. We don't need to change."

The answer is BYOND just isn't suited for single-player platform games, action games or anything that you might point to in Flash or a 3D engine like Quake's, as you yourself just pointed out. Saying "You can't do this" isn't really saying anything. We know BYOND isn't suited for that sort of game, and I don't think anyone has any illusions that it ever will.

I don't see the point of the thread.

Hi Piratehead, no i read through the whole topic and replied to the whole posting audience; byond had limits, most people havent even gotten 30% close to those limits, there is a LOT byond can do, i havent tried any other engines and i doubt i will (unless if you know a real easy to learn one then i MIGHT check it out) im just saying, that if there is a will there is a way, and for the most part Byond can stand up to that way and provide it for you.

There are litterally thousands of idea's coursing through my brain right now for this text based game i want to do, and most of i dont think 'I' will be able to do because i wouldent know where to start coding, but i know that BYOND would be able to help me with making my thousands of idea's into a game which some will play in the future.

*OFFTOPIC* Yo whatever happened to that D&D game you was working on, i miss playing it :(

yeah that would be fun :)

Kaiochao wrote:

Gotta 100% destroy the tile-based system. That's pretty much it, I guess.

And while you're at it you should go ahead and enable 3D mode and let us play BYOND on our Xbox 360's.