Toddab503's site

Subscription Income Question

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:07:17 +0000

Okay, so this should hopefully be a quick and easy question to answer. When people Subscribe to your game, where the heck does the money go to?

I've checked my wallet, and I don't see anything there. I checked the Subscription page, and the Subscribers are listed, but nothing about the payments they've made to get them.

I could of sworn it all went to the wallet, and could be transferred to Paypal whenever you want, but one Subscription was bought several hours ago and hasn't shown up so I am doubting it's a processing delay.

Task Bar Order

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 02:21:00 +0000

I've noticed that whenever you are running more than one BYOND game window reconnecting to any one other than the most recent connection will result in a shift in the order of the games in the windows task bar so that the game you reconnected to is the last one listed in the task bar.

This did not occur in the old pager, and I view it as a minor annoyance; so any way we could get this changed back?

If not, it's no big deal. I just figured it was worth making a quick post because I find it kind of annoying.

Bookmarks & Recent

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:46:42 +0000

I'm new to the beta so please forgive me if I missed something, but I'm not seeing any kind of support for bookmarks. If there is any, it certainly doesn't seem clear enough for new people so I was thinking it would be really awesome if the game tabs Show drop down menu had an option for bookmarks.

I've also noticed that recent games don't seem to show games that have the same name, or something. I'm not quite sure what the deal is.

I have two versions of my unreleased game running, the one that has access to an unreleased hub and is set to invisible will show up if I joined it last, and the one that has the same hub but without the password or invisibility setting will also show up if I joined it last, but they will not both show up at the same time.

It's pretty annoying for me because since the hub isn't running yet I can't connect to whichever one isn't showing unless I look up the link, and copy/paste it into open location; I normally just used bookmarks before though.

Cross-Server Saving

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 05:39:20 +0000

I'm not sure I'll ever need it, but I've recently been looking into options for making it possible for players to use their save files over any hosted version of a game. It seems like a pretty useful, but difficult feature to deal with so far. MySql is probably the best option, but I don't know a thing about it and currently find it too overwhelming to try to figure out saving with it. I'll probably study that some day, though.

Then there's client-side saving, which seems like it might be a lot simpler, but it seems to raise even more questions than MySql does. I mean you cannot save when the player logs out, so how do you keep players from thinking they got rolled back if they're not in the same location? I figure resetting them to a spawn point might be the answer to that one.

Then another question becomes how to handle something like guilds? They're something you would need to save server-side, yet you can't have players log in to another server and not have access to their guild.

Originally, I thought MySql might have to do with how to handle this type of feature, but client-side saving wasn't on my mind. I figured it would have something to do with importing and exporting the saves between open servers anytime the player logs out of a server, but I haven't seen anything that really points to that being possible, much less it working without lag.

So with all that out of the way, I guess the main question is what are All the options? what are the main upsides and down sides to each one? and what would you do? This is something I really would expect to be more common by now, and if not now then sometime in the near future so I'd love to hear what all you have to say.

For the record though, I really have done my research. I read through the Dantom Database library, one other library, a couple developer help posts, an old post about multi-world saves by I believe Stephen001, etc. I just still have a lot of room to learn on the topic and plenty of questions, so I figured it would be worth opening this back up for a fresh discussion.

Hub Graphic Sizes

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:57:39 +0000

I was just working on a rough draft of a hub, and found out that the large icon is limited to 20kb, and the banner is limited to 50kb; why is that? I can definitely understand limits, but that seems to be way too low. I would of expected at least double that.

I'm currently trying to use some gifs, and the artist is having to try to lower the file sizes because even though they're pretty simple they're around triple those sizes. Hopefully it won't be a problem, but I was just wondering why the limits are so low.

Edit: Seems the file size isn't too tough to reduce, but the limits are pretty low so I am still curious about this.

Myhosting

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:23:04 +0000

Anyone familiar with using Myhosting.com with BYOND? I was just looking at this link: http://myhosting.com/linux-vps/

Seems to have some potential, but I never really know what is truly reliable for hosting games on BYOND. Virpus has plenty of the BYOND Community complaining, BYONDPanel isn't really what I'm looking for, dbzenhosting.com just seems like something old and/or for fan games.

I'm hoping Myhosting might actually be good. I'm also up for discussing other options, of course. I remember making a topic about shell server hosting a while back that had one or two other recommendations, but they weren't what I was looking for.

I know there has got to be something reliable the front page games use, but no clue what that might be.

Quick Subscription Question

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 06:57:29 +0000

I've tried finding more information about this, but I can't seem to find any topic with what I want.

In the reference for CheckPassport() it mentions "If the user is subscribed, the result is the number of days left (rounded up) on their subscription, or -1 for lifetime subscribers."

So, with that in mind, I am wondering if my code can check that number, and update my own vars based off whether the number equals (for example only), 30, 60, or -1 and such?

As you may be able to guess, I am wondering this because if that is possible I can reward people differently based off the duration of the subscription they bought. I'd find that incredibly valuable, in some cases.

I'm asking this for future reference, since it'll be important when I get to the release phase on a project.

Connection Issues

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 22:29:41 +0000

I'm having a pretty strange issue that up until recently I thought was a BYOND software problem, but now I believe it must be something to do with my game because if this were a BYOND issue there would be a lot of complaining around here over it.

Anyway. The issue is that various players at various times receive connection failed on a pretty regular basis. I think it may only occur when they're idle, but the player can be unaffected some days and affected on others.

It's definitely not related to their internet, and I've had it happen as well so in my experience there is usually no lag for anyone during it either. Everything just suddenly becomes unresponsive for me, and then after a while I either have to X the game out a re-open it because reconnecting is unresponsive, or I either get connection failed/timed out or super rarely the game suddenly catches up and becomes responsive again.

I've tried and tried to figure out what could be the cause of this, but I just don't know. The only lead I have is that, I think, emphasis on think that clearing the cache in pager can stop this problem temporarily.

I'm not sure what that would mean though, I think I read somewhere that corrupted files can get into the cache and cause issues, but no idea how anything corrupt would be getting generated.

So, I've come here hoping someone has come clue about how to fix this? I chose Developer Help rather than BYOND help, since it's likely an issue with my games source somehow.

Preload_rsc Problem

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:02:07 +0000

I've been trying to use the preload_rsc var to see if it would benefit a project I'm working on that is in alpha. I've tried setting it to a direct rsc, and a zipped rsc, with the latter being used exactly like the documentation in the DM Reference.

In either case, the game started in text mode, and I was forced to shut down the game and upload the .rsc to the shell. I'm not sure if it's a problem or related, but in both attempts I hosted the rsc file on my Byond Membership storage. I also had it set to hidden, but I doubt the hidden bit is important because I've used that before on other game downloads and it worked fine.

So, my question is simple; what am I doing wrong? what needs to be done to try this? Naturally, this is my first time using preload_rsc so please forgive me if my mistake is simple or obvious.

BYOND Update Question

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:37:40 +0000

I'm pretty inexperienced with Linux and only know some of the basics for BYOND hosting. I've updated BYOND on my server before, and I remember having a difficult time with it and fear it may have not been done the best way.

Considering the above, how long its been since then, and that I need to update the servers BYOND again I've come here with a question.

Can I simply delete the BYOND Folder on my shell server, and replace it with the one I get from the Linux Zip download to update? I'd prefer to do this rather than run some sort of uninstaller or installer on the server.

If I do need to run those, I'd really appreciate it if someone could give me a quick step-by-step on how. If I recall correctly my server is running debian 32 bit, if that has any impact on this.