Wear sun-screen. in Off Topic

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May 24 2009, 10:01 am
Alathon's recent post had kind of prompted me to get something out of the way I'd had on the cards for a while I think. Now that a lot of my actual obligations to BYOND have been tied up (although not in the way I'd hoped, bless), I'm probably about ready to swim out into the deep internet and join the god-head etc etc. For a pretty good while now, BYOND and I have had some difficulty in the bedroom department. DM is an easy language to do certain things with, and unfortunately I never much wanted to do those things it seemed. The stuff I did want to do mostly didn't involve DM directly, and as it goes, the process was a little too masochistic, even for me. So I've kinda run out of drive for BYOND. I was never really a game making sorta person, bit of a handicap for a place like BYOND. Never been a huge community guy, which is probably a little ironic, considering my role at BYOND. Most of what I digged about BYOND was technical. DreamDaemon is cool, how does it work? Could I perhaps contribute to it in the future? Maybe I could improve the site? etc etc. All technical stuff really. Unfortunately I think the way it panned out was, BYOND needed community guys, people who moderate new areas, who promote BYOND to the wider world etc. While I can kinda do that, it wasn't what I was coming to the site for really. So I think we'll just see other people now. But anyway, pushing "me me me and my terrible CSS" to one side, there are some bits and pieces that I and a few other people have observed and discussed about BYOND, that may be of interest to others, so I'll share that.

They split into two parts, "do less", and "do more". The first three should be done less, the latter three should be done more. The most general one is perhaps the one we discussed least, and is most personally felt. You get the community you expect. This is kind of a community management thing, but at just about all levels. It seems like there is a few particular fixations that people really love to throw around, and they compound because we let them.

It might be a trap!

At a higher level, there is an "oven-mitts BYOND" issue. That is, a great deal of BYOND's decisions feel as though they are unduly bubble-wrapping people. From a technical point of view, stuff like "unobtrusive interfaces" stopping the developer from force-ably setting the screen resolution of the client in a full screen scenario. Unfortunately because of that desire to protect against what I guess some feel is mucking about with the client's PC; if only temporarily, has made interfacing very tricky. Because there is no scalar vector support AND no resolution setting functionality, you can't make any interfaces that use images that act as nice pretty chrome, because you'd need to build an interface for each resolution you expect with appropriately scaled images. That's obviously a whole heap of effort, so you don't bother, leaving you with either fixed size interfaces that look daft on big resolutions, or properly anchored scalable VB-esque "application" interfaces, instead of anything you'd attribute to a modern game. So you've shot complex and visually appealing interfaces through due to a worry about something users expect games to do to your PC anyway.

The DLL calling permissions were another one. Because calls within the same folder require trusted mode execution, you end up with one of two things. Either people run in trusted mode regardless to properly use the DLLs, and trash the whole point of having the permissions setup, or there is a long and unfavourable "install" process for games with DLLs to allow you to run in safe mode, shooting your "just host it an go" thing. Similarly, you cannot bundle and use DLLs in your game download, because it'll not throw the DLLs into the "trusted folder" and the standard execution mode is safe mode. All of this because "someone might make fork-bomb DLLs". I mean come on, really. There are considerably better ways of being malicious with BYOND, and people are already probably too trusting of random stuff to make this extra precaution worth even 1% of the benefits it's thrown out of the window. I don't doubt that DLL use would still be kinda niche even if this was corrected, but it's made an already niche feature practically unworkable for most sane usage scenarios, all for some paranoid "what if" case.

This general thing tends to permeate not just through BYOND technical decisions, but community discussion about features, AND the way the community is managed. And why not? The decisions encourage similar crazy discussion in the future, if you don't put reasonable context on the security and usability decisions you make. Which leads me nicely onto the other higher level fixation that tends to grate me, censorship and parenting.

'The man' knows what's best

If you use BYOND, you have at least three parents. A mother, a father, and BYOND. I appreciate I am quite liberal, but my general attitude towards what is acceptable is a matter of "Is it safe for work?" and "Is it at least respectful or tongue in cheek?". I like to think that people are socially mature enough to filter stuff they don't like on their end and to shrug off things they could see as insulting. BYOND is a lot more conservative as a parent than I would be, apparently. A lot of the complaints about adverts are things I wouldn't have serviced. The two that come to mind is the Swoopo "scam" adverts, and the "sexual" game advert with a woman in a loose fitting shirt. Apparently people missed "knuckle-shuffling skeleton monster", "open-shirted busty Anime 10 year old girl" and "monster wearing a giant phallic attachment", all of which I felt like highlighting for the sake of noting how daft playing nanny on adverts on BYOND is. But of course, I'm not wearing a serious face enough to be taken seriously I suspect. There is this little school of thought that says BYOND must be a happy sesame street land, otherwise we'll lose users. However in the process we not only blow tiny issues horribly out of proportion and waste serious effort discussing the morals of the potential lesbian kissing scene in Mass Effect like a bunch of stuffy old housewives who need a better hobby, but we treat the wider community like a bunch of 10 year olds. And that's who we continue to get. It's a little reverse logic, but I think what happens is that you treat people like you yourself would like to be treated and it pays back in kind. I personally wouldn't want to be bubble wrapped by a site, I'd want to be treated in a manner that considers me mature enough to use my brain and take stuff with a grain of salt. Once again, the decisions encourage similar crazy discussion in the future, if you don't put reasonable context on it.

You have huge guts, rip and tear!

Here's a wider one, and the last of the fixations I'd like to make a note of. Rips, rippers and sound-biting. Just ... drop it, really. It's not so much about that people find rips to be bad, that makes perfect sense. It's that all they do is find rips bad, and so the entire deal is "I'm not a ripper, I don't make rips.". No, I'd hope you're a game developer, and you make games. Let the guildmasters and guild staff handle rips and rippers, and move on to actually making games, instead of "original, not a rip"s. The most important thing in BYOND is not that you aren't the bad guy with the rip, it's that you're the good guy who makes games that are interesting, fun and try new stuff. I could make a turd out of a BYOND world, hold it up as an "original Naruto game" and have a small mountain of praise for it. It is still a turd. Check out Acebloke, IainPeregrine and Foomer a bit, people who make games (you can play them, they're at least complete in that sense) and try out new ideas. You should be going "I want to be better than those guys with the interesting and fancy games" not "I don't want to be as bad as those ripper guys, haha look at them". Positive reinforcement, don't get stuck in the same old negative cycle. Let the rip thing go, let the people with the power handle that, and play some new and interesting games. Also, please, reason over what you're going to say on forums and blog posts. I appreciate it takes more effort than just firing a canned response at people, "use boolean logic", "rippers are dumb", but if you do, the community as a whole would be so much more intelligent, and attract new intelligent people in return.

Whew, we've covered the fixations. I wanted to cover those because they need moving away from. I don't have answers on what you move toward, but those things need to go. Now comes the "how can I improve my BYOND" bit, or "things to move toward".

Act now.

This one is mostly about getting stuff done, be it a game, an interesting idea for promoting BYOND, or improving the site. There seems to be a thing for "I'll let the other guy move first" around BYOND. I know, I fell fairly foul of it too. Generally speaking, you don't need the nod from the BYOND staff or your fellow BYONDers to try an idea out. Just implement something, throw the idea out there, and roll with it. Similarly, if you see something neat, roll with it, add to it. This is how change happens, with less qq, more pew pew. People have been feeling like we needed more contests and competitions, but no-one went and tried one out. Hat's off to Iain, for getting something done this May. There's a guy who's won his own contest by just making a contest! I mean really, how sweet is that? Even if the contest fails badly, and everyone bails before release, Iain got something done AND turned qq about contest into pew pew. You should try it too, just about whatever you'd like to see more of in BYOND.

It's a big blue world out there

Don't like the players BYOND has currently? Get new ones. This one is more about inbreeding than anything else. BYOND provides you with an audience of 10,000 10 - 18 year olds, mostly with an Anime interest. If these people aren't really your target audience, but you want to use BYOND for your game anyway, advertise. This is exactly how browser-based games get players, and is altogether not an unusual thought, but it pretty exclusively non-existent. Apparently the BYOND ranking is the be all and end all of your advertising by common BYOND logic. The world doesn't have a ranking system, go drop some messages there. Find communities that may like your game, politely ask someone running them if it's okay to advertise, then put the best darned advert you can together and intelligently present your game to people. At the least, 5% of them will try your game, and 10% of those that try probably like it and grow into proper BYONDers. 0.5% of the people you advertise to is not bad, if you are hitting a bunch of communities that collectively have 50,000 members. Let's face it, it's way more than BYOND's ranking system logic got you. This will make BYOND more diverse, bring in new ideas for games and how to improve BYOND, and raise the bar in BYOND. I don't buy this notion of "they'll be scared away by the Anime", because you are just bringing them there for your cool, new and interesting game that beats Acebloke's cool, new and interesting games.

What do you think?

Back up to the dizzy heights of BYOND staffing, and there is one particular approach to things that could be so much better. On the whole, BYOND operates behind closed doors. Perhaps it's the liberal in me again, but it seems to work horribly. As far as most users see it, new features just "appear", change stuff with no apparent logic and seem like they were pretty carelessly put together. BYOND misses a real important trick with improvement, they don't speak with their customers, you. I know why, it's because of that bedrock of BYOND wisdom, "Don't announce anything until you've done it", closely coupled with "Around the corner." when they do. Improvement involves a two-way process of communication, which BYOND just doesn't do. For instance, the BYOND staff want to improve the layout of the site, to make stuff intuitive and easier for people to use. Seems reasonable. Where's the announcement of "Help BYOND improve the site!", that asks people what they feel works well currently, and what doesn't work well. Where's the "How would you like X?" announcements, that gather user ideas. Go in for a little consultation, it would help save you a certain degree of headache. It's obviously no silver bullet regarding change complaints, but it would help so much. In BYOND's defence, they do kind of do this currently. But they ask a sub-set of the community, who conduct business according to fight club rules, and in an ironic turn just seem to fight for the pleasure of fighting, like a fight club would. In the cases where something doesn't go wrong, it's usually not advertised. How long has the client.computer-id functionality been around? I'd guess a little while to say the least. There really should be more dialogue on this stuff, a news article per release of BYOND that is made, marketing the new features. Kind of like there was with medals, but every version. I could only assume one in ten releases are just bug-fix releases. If they're not, you're fire-fighting and have issues that swishy interfaces and marketing cannot fix. I'd also suggest ditching fight club, but that's more of a private matter between you and Tyler Durden.

This essentially makes up a selection of points myself and others have considered regarding BYOND in the past. Hopefully within that text, is some advice about how to improve BYOND in a lasting way. It's all about approach and way of reasoning really, aiming for fresh movement, new ideas, an open approach and a more mature mentality. There are invariably many many more things I could mention, but now isn't perhaps the time or place for them. Relevant parties are welcome to chat with me about it though via IM. I won't be addressing comments on this post nor will I be particularly monitoring them, but you're welcome to discuss this in the comments section with your fellow BYONDers. I hope this was an interesting read, and remember, wear sun-screen.
#1 May 24 2009, 11:05 am
uh huh
#2 May 24 2009, 11:10 am
tl;dr

I read like 1/4 of it, then I realized how big it was, and realized that I probably didn't have enough time to read it before my friends get here.
#3 May 24 2009, 11:28 am
I read the whole post. I agree with most of it, but the majority of it is out of my hands. Although it just occurred to me that you're contradicting yourself a bit by saying that we need "less qq, more pew pew", and at the same time complaining that BYOND's Staff doesn't spend enough time getting feedback before implementing new features.

Personally I just do my own thing nowadays. I get feedback from Single Player Games when I want it, and I ask programming-related questions on the forums when I'm having trouble. If I could find any other communities that were interested in my games, that would be cool, but so far I haven't found much.
#4 May 24 2009, 11:36 am
Foomer wrote:
I read the whole post. I agree with most of it, but the majority of it is out of my hands. Although it just occurred to me that you're contradicting yourself a bit by saying that we need "less qq, more pew pew", and at the same time complaining that BYOND's Staff doesn't spend enough time getting feedback before implementing new features.

Personally I just do my own thing nowadays. I get feedback from Single Player Games when I want it, and I ask programming-related questions on the forums when I'm having trouble. If I could find any other communities that were interested in my games, that would be cool, but so far I haven't found much.

Time to contradict another part of my post. I am essentially contradicting myself with the less qq, more pew pew thing, mostly for the reasoning you've hit on. "It's out of my hands". The majority of what would motivate me to help BYOND is real under the hood technical stuff that I can't touch. I also fell foul of waiting for the nod to do stuff in a communal sense, because fight club creates an environment of fear of backlash regarding trying new stuff out. We've had so many seriously intense fights over things in there that you end up thinking "If it's that much hassle to me, why bother".

I could've maybe set up a regular feedback thing via news posts, but my position wasn't actually community manager, so it felt wrong of me. Doubly so is the issue of myself and Alathon had little more clue than anyone else in the community about what the staff were working on next.

I suppose my role here is the heroine addict telling you not to do drugs.
#5 May 24 2009, 11:41 am
What kind of "real under the hood technical stuff" can you do?
#6 May 24 2009, 11:43 am (Edited on May 24 2009, 11:50 am)
Foomer wrote:
What kind of "real under the hood technical stuff" can you do?

Well, given a paper-clip, rubber band ... hang on. Well, something like the DreamMaker IDE could've been happily handed off to say ... myself and Hiead to progress according to that long list of nice features people wanted. That was both technical enough in itself for me to get rolling on and non-troublesome to BYOND to unload onto me. But that avenue was never really going to be open, I think.

Although slightly less personally interesting, some site overhaul with myself and Papoose also could've been good for me (and hopefully BYOND), however I think that treads to close to areas Tom has particular feelings about, stylistically.

It was probably little known, but myself and Hiead were both ultimately itching to get into the VM itself and make improvements. I appreciate that area is something of a minefield that has broken past volunteers, however some assistance would be better than the groping in the dark we were both doing, with grandiose dreams of alternative VM implementations.
#7 May 24 2009, 12:03 pm
Stephen001 wrote:
But that avenue was never really going to be open, I think.

Have you asked?
#8 May 24 2009, 12:13 pm
Foomer wrote:
Stephen001 wrote:
But that avenue was never really going to be open, I think.

Have you asked?

Not specifically on that. I had previously asked about just maintaining the Linux build (basically regular compiling to match the Windows one, a couple of "nice to have" Linux DreamDaemon features), and Tom gave some good points on my "nice to haves". The general response I got though was "Is it broken, what needs doing? I'll go do it.", which kinda missed what I was pitching for.

The general feeling was that something had to be thoroughly broken and outside of their power to fix before I could help. Kind of "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

This came along again with the bug tracker. Even without the bug situation Alathon highlighted, a bug tracker represented a much smarter way of working and managing those issues, such to the extent that Mike had basically implemented the current tracker before life threw him a curveball. However after discussions about it, it took a very clear listing of the failures of the current system to actually get a switch over, and in that case the solution was basically already there.
#9 May 24 2009, 12:33 pm
*puts on sunscreen*

On a more serious note, I think a visible lack of enthusiasm is a large killer for motivation. If the general train of thought tends to be, 'Why bother?' then thats what you get - Nothing.

Fight club ceased to be a productive avenue a long time ago, somewhere along the line with too far between updates and quality games. It was also always its own biggest enemy - Sealing away the more valuable members from the rest creates unneeded segregation, something especially noticable with a smaller community such as BYONDs. And yet something profoundly integrated into it at every corner - From guilds, to the hub, key system, pager, etc.
#10 May 24 2009, 12:34 pm
I agree with everything you've said, but this in particular strikes me the most:

On the whole, BYOND operates behind closed doors. Perhaps it's the liberal in me again, but it seems to work horribly. As far as most users see it, new features just "appear", change stuff with no apparent logic and seem like they were pretty carelessly put together.

It'd be so much nicer if there was an appropriate, well-received venue for providing feedback or opinion on changes in BYOND, whether it's reactive or proactive. A lot of good has come from these constant hidden changes, but a lot of the old good things were also ditched in favor of new ideas that panned out horribly.

If the community had at least some method of providing their opinions on changes other than whining on the forums/blogs after it's already happened, a lot of the bad wouldn't have happened, and a lot more good would have happened.
#11 May 24 2009, 12:36 pm
"...the Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates who are only looking out for themselves and their home sytems. There is no interest in the common good...no civility, only politics...its disgusting."
#12 May 24 2009, 12:39 pm
Foomer wrote:
"...the Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates who are only looking out for themselves and their home sytems. There is no interest in the common good...no civility, only politics...its disgusting."

You win the internet, you really do. It's also refreshing to have some constructive discussion on what we can do as individuals, and the situation as a whole without it all falling into the old bickering. Gotta thank you got starting that in these comments.
#13 May 24 2009, 1:35 pm
Zaole wrote:
If the community had at least some method of providing their opinions on changes other than whining on the forums/blogs after it's already happened, a lot of the bad wouldn't have happened, and a lot more good would have happened.

On the other hand, if you saw what happened with Master of Orion 3, they spent like two years gathering feedback from the Master of Orion fanbase and implementing suggestions, trying to create an ultimate game.

The result? Game sucked, horribly. Sometimes the fans just don't know what the heck they're talking about.
#14 May 24 2009, 1:41 pm
I suspect a happy medium could be sought. At the least, some prior flow of information would be good. As a stand-in for community manager, I was having to actively draw out the information from the staff for digests, Alathon had the same situation. It wasn't exactly a well oiled machine. BYOND labs seemed like it was popular when it was around too, even if it didn't generate too many replies.
#15 May 24 2009, 2:15 pm
I think we solicit plenty of feedback, both before and after implementation. Most of what we do is based off of suggestions in the forums. Sometimes we have to take a contrarian approach in the interest of finances or behind-the-scenes efficiency. For example, the initial site revamp last year was motivated by the fact that our web code base was a hybrid of different implementations and was becoming very hard to maintain. Overall, although our changes are often not immediately well-received, I do believe that they only make the site & software better. Could we make better use of our time and users? Probably. Although taking away some of our own free-spirit in guiding this project would make it less fun for us.

We don't do regular news posts on every little feature because most people don't care. Something like world.computer_id will only be appreciated by a small segment of users, and I expect them to read the notes. When we do make big changes, we do plenty of announcements. We aren't hiding anything from our users; it's just that a lot of what we do (bug fixes, optimization) is just not that exciting. I think most of the exciting stuff is really outside of our hands-- things like contests and events. I've tried many times to solicit people to run this kind of stuff but it has never taken off (motivating others is likely one of my many failings). If it does, I am more than willing to publicize it on our site.

I have explained many times why BYOND isn't open-sourced, but it mostly boils down to the difficulty in maintaining poorly written code. I also feel like the current software limitations aren't nearly our biggest problems. I made the statement once,

Everyone needs to stop worrying about what we don't have and start focusing on what we do.

and I stand by it today. Good games can be made in BYOND right now.

It is true that BYOND is not for everyone and I think that's the big issue you are having, personally, regarding technical stuff. We are not a game engine but rather a game platform. This is a big distinction. Security, in particular, is essential in platform which is why we obviously can't just allow open DLLs, as you allude. I am always open to suggestions for improving the software features and restrictions, but realize again that, as a platform, we have some built-in cuffs.

Of course outside of technical stuff we could use a lot of help. Most of this can be done independently of approval or what-not, just by people making good games and publicizing them. I have tried to solicit help from volunteers but that is always a sticky proposition. Volunteers are fickle; they generally want to work on stuff that interests them (but may not help us) and tend to disappear when real life priorities take over. I completely understand that-- but it makes my job difficult when I can't rely on tasks being completed. I'd prefer paid personel to volunteers 100% of the time, but until we get the revenue rolling here, the options are limited.

Thanks for the feedback.
#16 May 24 2009, 2:22 pm
I'd like to advertise BYOND and some of its quality games out there in the big wide interbutts, but there are a couple things that are personally holding me back.

Mainly, I feel like such a douche if I advertise "hey you guys, come to this site, it's super cool" somewhere else where people are content in their own niche.

Additionally, I'm not sure what games to suggest to them that are both fun to play and very user-friendly, such that outsiders would find it easy to jump into and addicting. There aren't really any BYOND games that come to mind that fit both qualities.

I'm open to suggestions concerning how/what to advertise, though!
#17 May 24 2009, 3:18 pm
Tom wrote:
I think we solicit plenty of feedback, both before and after implementation. Most of what we do is based off of suggestions in the forums. Sometimes we have to take a contrarian approach in the interest of finances or behind-the-scenes efficiency. For example, the initial site revamp last year was motivated by the fact that our web code base was a hybrid of different implementations and was becoming very hard to maintain. Overall, although our changes are often not immediately well-received, I do believe that they only make the site & software better. Could we make better use of our time and users? Probably. Although taking away some of our own free-spirit in guiding this project would make it less fun for us.

The fun factor is definitely important. I do feel that you've lost a lot of direction out of having to juggle the business vs platform vs personal needs, but a man's got to eat and a man's got to take an interest in his work. However, for instance I wouldn't be adverse to paying for a slick MSI installer application to help me distribute single player games without BYOND itself being obviously involved. That type of game doesn't really contribute back to BYOND as a site, community or business I think, until the medals come in to the mix and your isolated players register their high scores etc. Just because they don't see it as the suite of software we're used to, doesn't mean you'd be missing out on traffic or the $$$ that keeps you fed. Doubly so if I as a developer have paid for a per-hub licence to produce an MSI for distributing my game with swish shortcuts, program files entry, uninstall entry etc. That's essentially one time work followed by muppet's work support in a technical sense, while giving single player game developers this freedom in deployment that I think they'd want, AND helping contribute to filling your business needs. You win if they buy, and win again if they are successful at marketing and integrating medals. It seems low effort for respectable gain. If it doesn't pan out or sell in a manner to cover it's costs, shelf it and move on, much like you've had to with Linux DreamSeeker. Stuff like this seems like the little evil that helps you keep the main bits of BYOND fun for you by shifting the "gets you fed" work, while also enriching the platform for us.

We don't do regular news posts on every little feature because most people don't care. Something like world.computer_id will only be appreciated by a small segment of users, and I expect them to read the notes. When we do make big changes, we do plenty of announcements. We aren't hiding anything from our users; it's just that a lot of what we do (bug fixes, optimization) is just not that exciting. I think most of the exciting stuff is really outside of our hands-- things like contests and events. I've tried many times to solicit people to run this kind of stuff but it has never taken off (motivating others is likely one of my many failings). If it does, I am more than willing to publicize it on our site.

I think you'd be a little surprised about what interests them. I had a similar feeling with the digests, but Aaiko pointed out that digest mentions drove an increase in Feval play, so he was thankful for it. Similarly it gave Acebloke motivation to drive Wargames updates more regularly. I think if you highlight the little features regularly, some people will at least pay attention and consider them, even if they don't go and post about it. client.computer-id is an interesting case, because all the people I've spoken to about it where most surprised that there hadn't been mention of it. It essentially went under the radar. I get the feeling the release notes are something you read while waiting on a particular fix. What little I've seen of people reading it seems to fit that.

I have explained many times why BYOND isn't open-sourced, but it mostly boils down to the difficulty in maintaining poorly written code. I also feel like the current software limitations aren't nearly our biggest problems. I made the statement once,

Everyone needs to stop worrying about what we don't have and start focusing on what we do.

and I stand by it today. Good games can be made in BYOND right now.

I feel like my reply to this can only end badly for me. I don't like to belittle people's work, and my reply may just do that. The open source thing is something I think we agree on, in that you seem to be generally fine with it in the ideal case concept, but it's just not a pragmatic approach to the suite as it exists today. I think with my comments I was pitching more to do with "Could we make better use of our time and users? Probably." than anything more drastic. Continuing the fight club notion, make them into an extended work-pool as Tyle Durden did with making them into his little civil disobedience group. Open source is another thing in itself, we won't touch that. I don't doubt that good games can be made in BYOND, but I wonder why Crispy migrated YAGSACG to another platform. While I'm not really meant to share this (sorry guys), I know Verm and Tayoko have being looking into other platforms for Efencea. I have no information on why, this is something you'd have to chase up with the respective developers. I get the feeling a lot of our better games have stuck with BYOND for reasons other than they feel it's the best platform for their concept. Loyalty to where they started, casual developer interest (don't much fancy learning a new language, I'm good with DM), the project is a dead and done thing now etc. It seems as though BYOND just doesn't quite cut it for the kind of games you're after. The annoying bit for me personally is I don't even make games with BYOND, I'm not a game making person. So obviously my opinion doesn't hold much weight, and I feel pretty bad for saying it. But seen as we're doing "caring is sharing", I decided to put it out there.

It is true that BYOND is not for everyone and I think that's the big issue you are having, personally, regarding technical stuff. We are not a game engine but rather a game platform. This is a big distinction. Security, in particular, is essential in platform which is why we obviously can't just allow open DLLs, as you allude. I am always open to suggestions for improving the software features and restrictions, but realize again that, as a platform, we have some built-in cuffs.

Yeah, BYOND isn't for me really as a platform, that's been pretty apparent for years. But I do strongly recommend you re-think the ramifications of some of your previous security decisions, screen resolution setting and DLLs in particular. The former is pretty much the reason Alathon shifted his game to XNA, along with that series of link() issues you and he worked through. It was apparent to him that he was bending the platform in ways it wouldn't go with regards to link(), but the resolution setting for full screen stuff seemed very reasonable to expect. DLL calling is mostly a matter of what I feel is heavy handed-ness, to the extent that you ruin the practical use of the feature. Alathon brought up a similar issue with link() and the user dialogs associated with that per permissions level, and I feel you made a very measured and pragmatic decision in favour of usability that didn't cause the platform to explode with used exploits. I have to urge you to ask yourself, "How often do I think this will be abused?". Nuclear power plants have a pretty catastrophic worst case failure scenario, but the likelihood is so low that many countries use them. DLLs seem similar in BYOND, particularly given the interface they use (which is functional enough, as it goes).

Of course outside of technical stuff we could use a lot of help. Most of this can be done independently of approval or what-not, just by people making good games and publicizing them. I have tried to solicit help from volunteers but that is always a sticky proposition. Volunteers are fickle; they generally want to work on stuff that interests them (but may not help us) and tend to disappear when real life priorities take over. I completely understand that-- but it makes my job difficult when I can't rely on tasks being completed. I'd prefer paid personel to volunteers 100% of the time, but until we get the revenue rolling here, the options are limited.

Thanks for the feedback.

No problem. I appreciate it's a little far reaching and could come across somewhat stern though. I would reconsider certain sections of the staffing hierarchy though, as I alluded to previously. Don't be afraid to drop volunteer and site mechanisms that aren't working for you anymore.
#18 May 24 2009, 4:05 pm
Tom once wrote:
We don't do regular news posts on every little feature because most people don't care. Something like world.computer_id will only be appreciated by a small segment of users, and I expect them to read the notes. When we do make big changes, we do plenty of announcements. We aren't hiding anything from our users; it's just that a lot of what we do (bug fixes, optimization) is just not that exciting. I think most of the exciting stuff is really outside of our hands-- things like contests and events. I've tried many times to solicit people to run this kind of stuff but it has never taken off (motivating others is likely one of my many failings). If it does, I am more than willing to publicize it on our site.

@Bold #1:
Maybe most people don't care, but I don't really find that to be the point. Announcements are meant to inform, and draw attention to something, right? If you don't make an attempt to draw attention to anything, you can't expect it to get much reknown, I suppose.

@Bold #2:
Similar to Wesnoth, I suggest making two sets of release notes. One, I suggest the "General Usrs Changelog" -- The things most people will see and use, similar to their "Player's Changelog." Second, the nitty-gritty "Full Changelog" which, at length, mentions everything that occured from build x to build y. It's not hiding anything from users, it's about the information it can provide, and some people might want to know those things.

Just my $.02
#19 May 24 2009, 5:14 pm
There are two sides to this: The technical side and the community side.

A few points on both:

* Communication which occurs but is not seen is the result of one of two things:

A) Its not tossed into peoples face with an easy to understand, simplistic header.

B) Its not brief enough in summary form to describe its purpose.

* Regular, official updates ala Tech Tree are the way to motivate online communities. De-centralized updates that you have to search for or have know-how to find do nothing for newer users. One of the primary intentions of the proposed web design T3h B4tman and I designed was to centralize information like that.

* Inbred advertising is BYONDs worst enemy. It stunts growth. To get rid of it, you need to take away its advantages and more importantly offer better alternatives.

* You reel in the community you bait for, usually. If the website appears professional, intuitive, conforms to normal web standards, has stuff that people expect to find on a website
dedicated to a programming language (tech docs, official tutorials/showcases, videos / testimonials, etc. etc) then you'll get suitably professional individuals. Likewise, if you're not out
fishing for outsiders and your community isn't either - You get a community with very low growth. See above.

* If features necessary to make what the internet at large figures for a 'decent looking/playing game' are much harder to work with, then the ease of the language means nothing. A lannguage
is as easy as its hardest feature to get a game properly published, for a game developer - Especially an indie developer who will most likely work solo or in a very small team. I'd wager that
in most finished games on BYOND with a 4.0 interface, over 50% of the time was spent meddling with grids or trying to twist the interface into doing what someone wanted.

* The end result is what matters. I have great appreciation for the amount of work it takes to create something like this, but its the end result and effort required that matters to the developer.
I seriously disagree with the assessment of whether certain features are dangerous and how much they hamper or don't hamper development, pretty much in accordance with what Stephen has already said. I don't find any other VM-based languages imposing similar restrictions to such a degree that they damage their own appeal heavily.

Can good games be made in BYOND? Yes, definitely. Do I think the current website and feature set of the language promote good game making? No. There is an inconsistency between the design of the language and the actual difficulty in producing a polished game, that has nothing at all to do with the design prowess of the individual - And no more to do with the programming skill than the persons ability to twist features/issues into a game that is functional and feels complete.
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