Tom's site

Requesting help for people with hardware-mode issues

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:07:08 +0000

I would like to fix the elusive bug where hardware mode crashes or flickers for some users (we have a lot of reports telling those users to toggle it off). However, as I can't see the issue myself, I'm just grasping at straws. So if someone has the problem and is willing to spend a bit of time with me, I'd like to do a chat session and pass on some debugging builds.

Thanks!

Public beta testing

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 23:10:18 +0000

We have a new BYOND pager that will hopefully improve both the user experience and bring us in a bit of much needed income to salvage this product. If you want to try it out before we take it fully the public, venture to the new forums:

Beta Testers forum (get releases and discuss here)
Beta Bugs forum (report all problems here)

When this is stable, we'll put it on the hub and I'll make an official announcement (maybe a video) discussing the usage, as well as a long-overdue commentary about where BYOND stands at the moment.

Enjoy!

A few website-related updates

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:14:23 +0000

* The hub path variable cannot be edited after hub-creation (we can reset it manually via support if the situation is warranted).

* Hubs that are now owned by non-Member accounts can be freely edited/deleted.

* Hub-owners can disable their shoutbox and/or any or all of the BYOND forums. The default mode for new hub entries is to only show the shoutbox; forums must be enabled manually through the Options tab. We've disabled forums that have been inactive for a long time (hub-owners can re-enable them through the Options tab).

* Pager alerts for forum posts will only happen when the game author (or helper) makes a new post on a game you've favorited. This is how it was always supposed to work but we had a bug.

A BYOND game goes Green(light)!

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:52:38 +0000

As I've mentioned in previous posts, we've been using NEStalgia as our beta testing platform for some new BYOND features. We've worked with Silk Games to create the standalone installer and have done some tests with their team for web/Flash support. Our goal is to give BYOND games some more exposure by allowing them to be distributed outside of our dinky little website and on larger gaming portals.

As it so happens, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) gaming portal-- Steam --has just now decided to encourage this effort by "greenlighting" indie games. And NEStalgia (with its shiny new standalone installer) is one of just a handful of early candidates. If NEStalgia makes it onto Steam, it'll open the doors for other BYOND games and give some credibility to the system, as well as afford more opportunities for all you developers out there. This is pretty exciting stuff!

If you enjoy NEStalgia or just want to support a fellow BYOND developer, you can vote for it at its page on Steam. Silk has more details about the effort at PutNEStalgiaOnSteam.com and is running a promotional event on NEStalgia. He also did an interview with IndieGameMag.com talking about the game and the Greenlight process.

I believe that Silk will be merely the first of many users to embark on this adventure. In just the last few months, I've interacted with PrideRavanok (Rise of the Pirates), WritingANewOne (Eternia), and Kumorii (Feed) regarding their promising games and distribution outside of BYOND. Hopefully NEStalgia can pave the path for these and future efforts.

Check it out!

P.S. BYOND feature-creep news very soon.

Beyond BYOND: Standalone games and Flashing Forward

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 02:52:04 +0000

Here's a brief update on some things we've been working on.

Introducing BYONDexe

As of the recent v. 496 update, BYOND now supports "native" standalone games; that is, games that can be played without requiring the user to have previously installed BYOND. This replaces the older and clunkier "Make EXE" system previously bundled with Dream Maker.

You can generate a standalone version of your existing online or redistributable games via the new "BYONDexe" program found at the bottom of the Download page. Usage requires a product key attached to the game's hub entry. At the moment, we have activated these keys for all games that have a "Listed" status, but we will likely open this up further in the future. If your game qualifies, the hub editor will have a new "Distribution" tab from which you can retrieve the key and set various options. You can find further options and configuration details within the two README documents included with the BYONDexe download.

The idea here is to let you market and distribute your games just as if they were created in a more generic programming language; from the end-user's point-of-view, there is little difference. There is a huge audience of players outside of BYOND, and we encourage you to promote your games off-site in order to get them into your games. Off-site players benefit us in two ways. First, they bring more activity to games, which is beneficial to our on-site community. Second, they provide us needed income through the optional BYOND subscription service. You can charge for your game or for in-game benefits; BYOND handles the processessing and bookkeeping in return for a percentage cut (25% at the time of this writing). We hope this to be a mutually beneficial proposition. Some games have already made non-trivial amounts through this system, and this is with little outside exposure. With some actual marketing, the sky's the limit! Of course you can always make your game 100% free like the BYOND suite and live on Top Ramen like we have :)

We've been beta-testing these standalone features with NEStalgia by SilkGames. Silk has created an excellent page that is a great example of the off-site presence mentioned earlier. Check it out and try the installer to get an idea of what BYONDexe can do for you.

Flash Foo

As promised earlier, we'll be soon releasing a Flash version of the BYOND client. After a hiatus to create BYONDexe and deal with various website, community, and software issues, we're hard at work on it again and are shooting for a beta release sometime this summer. Lest you think this is vaporware, here's an example of BYOND Flash in action:

At the moment (and for some time), the main hangup is with the sound format, due to the fact that BYOND games stream resources and all the native sound support for Flash is with the proprietary MP3 format, but we've found some promising Ogg/Vorbis based-workarounds. The system also only supports a subset of DM, primarily lacking the 4.0 skin/interface system, although that may be something we can update over time. But, as you can see, keyboard, mouse, input, output, and map-based support all works quite well, and this should be a very exciting direction for BYOND games!

Featured Games

Recently, LordAndrew has been on a quest to bring some regular game reviewing back to the BYOND community. His plan is to feature a new game each month; so far he's reviewed Alchemist (June) and Epic (July). To support this very cool effort, we're linking to these reviews from within the BYOND Pager news (which you should have seen if you got to this post via the pager). Hopefully we can get an active team of reviewers to help out in this effort and encourage the play of these fine games, old and new alike.

Beta Testing

We are going to be making a policy change of releasing developmental versions of BYOND daily when new fixes or features are added. Each new release will have a new (minor) build number. When we are satisfied that the builds are complete, we will mark the version as "stable" and release to the pager. You can get view the latest beta and stable releases from the Download page as well as from within the pager news.

That's all for now!

Useful resources for your artistic needs

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 05:21:03 +0000

To the BYOND Art Society

Site Update Trois

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:07:35 +0000

Greetings, fellow BYONDers,

This iteration of the latest site update is mostly behind us, and (if all goes well) we will be focusing on the software for the remainder of the year. Here are a few final notes on the new site:

Due to popular request, we've reinstated the Developer Central page. There is a new section at the top for new users, including some writeups about the software and site. In particular, the BYOND Whitepaper by Forum_account fills a much-needed void of information for prospective developers.
We've consolidated similar forums. Code Problems + Dev How-to == Developer Help, and we merged the gaming forums into a single section, which will be aggressively moderated for lack of content and spam. We've added a new read-only Announcments forum for posts like these, and moved the bloggy community forums back to the bottom where they belong.
We've updated the search to use a more intuitive system. Instead of a global search bar (which previously returned ambiguous results), there are individual search bars in the games, dev, and forum pages, whose scope is restricted to games, resources, and posts, respectively. The forum search searches over everything in the current forum group (eg: the entire BYOND Forums) by default, but you can override this on the results page to only search in the current forum (eg: "Developer Help") or across all posts in the entire BYOND space (which includes visible hub forums).
We've changed some minor site behavior, colors, and layout. Notably, we've gotten rid of the subforum headers in favor of the older-style "all forums" listings. We replaced the pager-popup system with a direct link in many places. We updated the web pager to allow paging to non-friends, and also changed the styles of the pager discussions.

So hopefully this is "good enough" for now! We've put a heck of a lot of work into the design and implementation of this new site, and think it will be a big improvement for new and old users alike.

Now onto the backlog of bugs and fun software features!

New site colors, minor layout foo.

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:03:09 +0000

Much thanks to Aaiko for the mockup.

We're live! Sort of...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:01:03 +0000

As expected, we ran into some problems, but in theory the new site is up & running. It will most likely have sporadic issues and possible further downtime, but I expect that we can iron these things out over time.

Read the various stickies in the forums to get a gist of how things work now. Feel free to let us know about any problems (we've already found a few). Please avoid the temptation to bash everything immediately.. it's a big change and maybe a bit underwhelming, but we think it'll work out well for the long-term. It's also a work in progress as we have a few perks we want to add in, and there will be inevitable usage issues that we can attend to as they crop up.

The main issue you may encounter is with the DNS not updating fast enough-- that is, with your machine seeing our old IP address for various urls. We did not have the foresight to correct this ahead of time nor the insight to correct this now, but it should resolve itself by this evening at the latest. The way to test if you have the correct server info is to do the following calls (on windows; other platforms are similar):

Start->Run->cmd
ipconfig /flushdns
ping www.byond.com
ping secure.byond.com
ping files.byondhome.com

Those will return either 67.228.127.155 (old) or 50.22.142.18 (new). If they all return the new server, you are updated and in good shape. If not, most likely it is only files.byondhome.com that isn't resolving (since you are reading this at www.byond.com on the new machine already). That is only used for Member file uploads so just avoid doing those for a day and you'll be fine. If you are really impatient, you can correct this by editing your 'hosts' file. On Windows 7 and related, this is in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts . You would just add the following lines:

50.22.142.18 www.byond.com
50.22.142.18 secure.byond.com
50.22.142.18 files.byondhome.com

Ideally you'd want to pull those out in a day or two after the DNS properly updates in case we change our IPs at a later date.

Feature creep

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:05:57 +0000

We've had some comments regarding the neglecting of the Feature Request Tracker. Truth is, we do look at that often but due to various things (time commitments, under-rating workload) a lot of stuff is not do-able at this time. We will try to provide better feedback in the future (we'll spend some time going through this and the bug tracker to sort things out).

We have come up with a compromise based around the ways some others sites do things, and that is an upvoting system where you can promote the suggestions you think should be given high priority. BYOND Members each get 5 votes that they can allocate as necessary. Votes will be returned when an item is resolved in any way (either by us stating it isn't going to happen or by accomplishing the feat). We will prioritize those suggestions with the most votes (although others may get attention if they seem especially appealing or easy for us). At the very least, we'll give feedback on those first.