Stargate_Offic wrote:

I have been wanting to self host my own games on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ for a while now but every post I see states that BYOND's libraries are not compatible with ARM. The posts go on to say that it is unlikely that ARM will get any support moving forward due to a "Small user base".

Well since ARM is being used more and more in a lot of hardware the "small user base" has grown quite significantly, So I for one Would love to see some sort of port that either adds a compatibility layer or outright adds support for the architecture.

I know I am not the only one crying out for this. I don't know how difficult it would be or how fast it could be released but I know its something that would benefit a lot of people.

Arm's userbase itself has grown, largely due to the raspberry pi and companies like Amazon and Ampere (2 of my servers in london run on ARM cores), but for BYOND the market is also somewhat niche and will require a lot more work and maintenance for very little game.

I am not lummox nor do I know the inner workings of BYOND, but given that a lot of BYOND's micro-optimisations rely on inlining assembly (according to many people), an ARM port is very difficult, if not impossible.

A Raspberry pi would also not be good for hosting a BYOND server unless your game is incredibly small. I run a moderately sized SS13 server (Averaging anywhere from 50-130 people at any given time), and we need a RYZEN 9 5900X to sustain those player counts with single thread speed, as BYOND isn't threaded.


TLDR: Its almost certainly not worth it. Lummox is one person, and effort would be much better spent on projects like moving to WebView2 or CEF, or moving to OpenGL or Vulkan (whichever one the linux fanboys nut over) instead of DirectX.