Stephen001's site

BYONDer Statistics

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:40:23 +0000

Just dropping some statistics I quickly gathered from Google Analytics, to allow developers to see what kind of specifications most current BYONDers have floating around. These figures are taken over the whole of 2011. It is worth noting, this is current website viewers only.

In each case, I'll offer top 10 results where there are more than 10.

Screen Resolution

1024x768 - 20.89%
1366x768 - 19.20%
1280x800 - 10.75%
1280x1024 - 8.85%
1440x900 - 8.00%
1600x900 - 4.92%
1920x1080 - 4.68%
1680x1050 - 4.30%
1024x600 - 2.35%
1152x864 - 2.09%

Screen Colours

32-bit - 59.18%
24-bit - 38.37%
16-bit - 2.27%
Other - 0.17%

Flash Support
Flash support is essentially ubiquitous in the statistics, there being an offering of flash versions as opposed to whether it's supported at all.

10.3 - 33.00%
10.2 - 25.88%
10.1 - 12.06%
11.1 - 6.61%
11.0 - 6.38%

Java Support

Yes - 90.32%
No - 9.68%

Operating System Type

Windows - 97.00%
Macintosh - 1.17%
Linux - 0.49%

And now a few demographics:

Country of Origin

United States - 52.07%
Brazil - 11.34%
United Kingdom - 5.91%
Canada - 4.98%
Netherlands - 1.48%
Australia - 1.46%
Poland - 1.46%
Germany - 1.03%
Philippines - 0.88%
Portugal - 0.87%

Hope this helps shape a few design decisions, for people looking to appeal to BYOND's existing userbase.

Any current open source games?

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:17:55 +0000

Does anyone know of or run an open source game they'd like to share with people?

I'm rather interested by the concept, how people handle changes coming into the project, bug tracking, the game's features and artistic direction etc.

If you know of any such projects or run one and would like to talk about it, please speak up.

F_Damage - Now with Alignment

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:04:42 +0000

F_Damage 1.1.0 is out!

Great! Wait, what?

Yeah, because F_Damage needed new features *eyerolls*. Actually, it did. SuperAntx happens to be using the library in Eternia: Prologue due to it's awesome performance. He liked it, he really did. But it was missing a certain ... someting.

Scientific notation kinda sucks

SuperAntx's first note was that scientific notation looks .... really odd in most games, if not all games. Although you can balance the numbers to avoid making big damage displays, the fact still remains: Scientific notation looks bad in games.

So what did I do? I added a #define flag, called F_damage_no_scientific. It turns off scientific notation, so instead of 1E+7, you just get 1000000. Simple.

Alignment is cool

Previously, F_Damage aligned the damage text in the centre of the target atom. So if you had a 96x96, it'd kind of just go middle-ish, centre aligning the text.

You do this by a new optional argument: halign. halign takes a new type of object in, an F_Damage_Horizontal_Alignment datum. F_Damage now also provides three horizontal alignment rules, called F_Damage.LEFT_ALIGN, F_Damage.CENTER_ALIGN, F_Damage.RIGHT_ALIGN. Being a datum, you can also implement your own alignment rules.

In summary

With the new release of F_Damage (1.1.0), you can do this:

F_damage(some_enemy, "#FF5603", F_Damage.RIGHT_ALIGN)

Pick it up here: http://www.byond.com/developer/Flick/F_Damage

Let's buy SuperAntx a beer

Sun, 08 May 2011 03:56:58 +0000

I think Antx is a pretty badass guy, with a pretty badass game there, that Decadence.

And what do badass developers with badass games get? Self-actualisa ... beer, and pizza.

If you agree, why not throw in a little, and we can all buy the man some Yuengling, and a monster of a pizza! What do ya say?

http://beermoneyantx.chipin.com/beer-money-for-superantx

Because I always find random donates to be dodgy, I used chipin. They make you set a limit, so you're not just raking in money you won't even use for your given cause. In this case, I don't reckon Antx needs more than $50 for some serious pizza and beer hijinks. I promise a short interview will go down on BYOND Journalism about the beer and pizza, if we meet the target. EnigmaticGallivanter doesn't know this yet, but it's happening.

Or ... you could buy a year's subscription to Decadence itself, at $5.00! You get .... FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUU AWESOME ARMOUR COLOURS.

Thank you for reading.

May Workout

Tue, 03 May 2011 13:30:39 +0000

For reasons I can never quite fathom, May always sits on BYOND as the month people do stuff, or try to do stuff. Last year we had IainPeregrine's delightful "Get Something Done" contest, spanning over May-time. So in the absence of that, I figured I'd list what I will be doing in May:

F_Damage
First up is my adopted son, F_Damage. SuperAntx came to me recently to 1. say thanks for my updates and 2. cleverly ask for enhancements.

Like all good programmers, I'm vain and like my ego massaged. So his enhancements are top priority. They are:

A compile-flag to turn on/off the display of numbers in scientific notation. By default this will be on, to maintain current functionality.
A compile-flag for textual alignment of damage. The alignment would work from left of icon, centre of icon, or right of icon. The default would be centre of icon, to maintain the current functionality.
Improved documentation on use-cases and compile-flags. This goes to explaining how F_Damage works, and what you can do with it.

Event Scheduling (Optional)
This baby mostly needs improved documentation, and more illustrated examples.

Savefile Transfer / Web Processing? (Optional)
This is kind of what SilkWizard asked after, although I suspect he's resolved his particular issue already now. The concept interested me though, so I'd like to explore possible solutions to the problem of transferring saves between servers, particularly in cases where the saves were obviously not designed for it in advance.

So, what will you guys be doing in May?

Where do you chat?

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:47:28 +0000

Where do you kids all chat these days? When Chatters moved to the The Saloon, we seemed to lose visibility of a fairly well populated chat program, and with it quite a few regular chatter types.

In particular I'm interested to hear where you guys would go (aside from the usual forums etc) if you needed a quick bit of help debugging something, some design philosophy talk, discussions on which library is better etc?

Lurkers like me gotta lurk, and have no-where to do so that has new developers popping in and saying hi now. =(

A short guide to being freelance

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:33:22 +0000

Link below:

http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2011/04/ fck-you-pay-me-great-video-for-creative-agencies-and-freelan cers/

For me, I know a lot of this stuff has applied to my freelance work in the past, even if the lawyer wasn't always present. Importantly for BYOND programmers and artists I think, is the mindset this guy is showing you.

Anyone fancy a programmer?

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:37:26 +0000

I happen to be idling currently, and could use a little something to keep my design skills going, so I would like to join a project for a short while.

About Me
To give you an idea of who I am and why you might want me, here's a pretty weak self-assessment. I have been programming for 9 years, starting very casually with DM and DarkBASIC. From this I moved through PHP, Perl, C++ and into Java when I joined university.

At university I studied Software Engineering for 4 years, giving me a great opportunity to learn not just programming languages (Java, C, C++, Scheme, AspectJ, ... ), but how to program, and hopefully, design a system and program it well, test it etc. Similarly, this allowed me 60 hours a week to practice my skills for the full 4 years.

Upon leaving university I joined a small British company called Graffica Ltd, working for the past 2 years on one of their new operational air traffic control projects, called LARA. Under this role I took on development of safety assured software, and all the design back and forth that goes with it. I sign off test readiness reviews as part of the safety testing and release process.

An important thing to note is that I don't actually write DM very often, so don't know the whole of the DM reference and procs off by heart, for instance. However in my experience of helping out people's game designs, good logic is fairly universal. So I don't think my lack of experience here will be a burden to anyone who'd like me to work with them, it just slows things down a little.

Regarding work to show off, I only really have a collection of blog posts and my library Event Scheduler. The library has been used well by a few people, in particular Valekor used it to increase his RPG game's server capacity from 50 - 70 players to up to 150.

About You
Unfortunately, I can't really work for Anime games. Aside from a personal opinion that we have quite enough already (but I'd love to see a really good one), I do really struggle to muster the motivation to work on them, even for the challenge of the complexity of the good project people were running.

I will happily work on most other things though, including improving libraries with you, if you'd like. Another area I'd like to work in is existing games, that have been released. I do like the idea of improving a game with a community, no matter how big or small, so that players can see the benefit.

I will not join a team or project for any great length of time. I would imagine that at best, I would probably spend 3 months working with you on particular systems you'd like developed / improved, improving the overall performance and design of your code, improving it's robustness or whatever else you feel would benefit from my skills. It may be less, depending on how I feel. I'll agree a leaving date in advance with you, so you can plan okay.

Compensation
This one is easy. I would quite like with being credited for my work, in whatever way you usually credit people who helped your game out. Just a little something somewhere that says "Yeah, Stephen001 did X, cheers" will do me fine.

I would like to retain some ability to blog about and show examples of the work I did for you. So if you're really paranoid about your source code, we can't really work together. I believe that people learn best through real world examples, so I'd like the option of using my work to teach other programmers, if I feel like doing so later. I will discuss this before doing it, and give your project / game due credit and mention in my blog.

Contact
Let me know what you think, and drop some contact details in the comments if you need to speak with me one-on-one. I'll probably choose the people who are most open with me about the work they want doing and what their project is.

So for example I will view someone posting a quick description / link to their project and telling me what they'd like me to work on in the comments to this blog as very good. A simple "MSN me" with no explanation is something I would probably look at last, if I get a few replies I may not even look at it at all. I like people who are honest and upfront with me.

Of course, maybe everyone is okay for programming help at the moment, which is cool also.

Free Game Promotion

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:23:06 +0000

A fairly straight-forward deal going on here I think. I want to promote your game.

You (Mr. Reader) have a BYOND game. I (Mr. Poster) talk to ducks in the street. Clearly this is the beginnings of a long and successful business relationship, yes?

... he talks to ducks in the street ...

What I'll essentially do is this: Have a look at your game, perhaps make a few recommendations for helping you improve the game's ability to be marketed, then I'll market it for you.

What do I want? Well, I quite fancy steak, or pizza, or a cat. The cat is not for eating though. These things cost money, as I understand it. If you have a subscription model on your game, we can discuss a means of deriving cat-funds from that, in a manner that rewards me for my work, and doesn't just give me money for sponging off your existing marketing efforts. Don't have a subscription model? No worries, maybe I can just rent a cat instead, off a friend.

... he rents cats ...

Interested in trying this out? It'll be ... an experience, I promise that much. Describe your game in the comments, and we'll get chatting about it.

Thanks for reading.

Updating libraries

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:52:22 +0000

I've just recently been in discussion with Toadfish and Alathon separately on BYOND currently featured libraries. The discussion essentially centered around how "healthy" our current library set is, do any need replacing or extending and so on.

The conclusions have been very mixed, with interesting points brought up by both sides in the case of particular libraries and the general state of affairs. So just before cracking on, I thought I'd put the question(s) to you: Are the current featured libraries any good? Do any need replacing or extending? If so, why?

Another interesting and open question is of course: What libraries are we missing?

It is probable that if I see a good need off the back of the comments, or an idea just interests me, I'll engineer a library for it.

On a related note, a game called Dragonball Phoenix recently picked up my Event Scheduling library to help them better organise their project and improve performance.

The results have been very positive, as before it's use they would just about fit 50 players on their test server and it would be really hammering the CPU. They made some early use of it to de-couple a few game mechanics, and managed to push 75 players before any CPU use started to come into play, and ~100 players was about their limit, as it was killing their CPU.

I'd done a quick review of their code and their use of the library, and there is plenty they could do to improve further. However regardless of how you cut it, managing to double their workable capacity was a nice boost, and a good proof that the library 1. improves performance for big games and 2. encourages you to program cleanly.

I'm still looking to improve the library itself, and add a thorough demo to the download. The current implementation is actually pretty naive and could be made to be more efficient without harming the functionality or API.

In other news, watch out for a DevTalk from myself and Alathon stepping through his recent Telnet input snippet, discussing the process of going from good idea to good library, including the kind of things he and I consider when doing this process, and problems we design for in a library. If you're keen to make top notch BYOND featured libraries, this will definitely be a good blog for you!

Thanks for reading. Do share your thoughts in the comments, and ROSES.