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Author Topic: Any alternatives to BYOND?  (Read 10810 times)

Sowelu

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Any alternatives to BYOND?
« on: May 22, 2009, 09:23:17 pm »

Because after the "Got Juju?" thread, I'm thinking hard about reviving an old game idea I had a while back.  Something vaguely along SS13 lines.  I tried making it in Furcadia once, using a really bizarre solution with a program that ran offline and generated random maps to pass off to a bot that uploaded them, with another bot that sat behind the scenes and ran the magic system and handled spell components.

SS13 is laggy and annoying when moving long distances.  Furcadia is just clearly out for tons of reasons.  But I'd still love a simple, tile-based 2d multiplayer engine I could write a SS13-like game in.  Preferably BYOND-like in that I wouldn't have to distribute the game, just run the server and let people auto-download the resources.

Suggestions?
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ductape

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #1 on: May 23, 2009, 12:34:38 am »

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Tilla

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #2 on: May 23, 2009, 12:46:14 am »

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Broose

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #3 on: May 23, 2009, 12:49:40 am »

http://www.yoyogames.com/make

Seconded. Easy to get used to, simple, but powerful.
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Servant Corps

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #4 on: May 23, 2009, 12:55:44 am »

Please, please, make a SS13 clone out of BYOND. I have BYOND, but I refuse to use it. I would thank you if you did make a SS13 clone in some other engine.
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Virtz

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #5 on: May 23, 2009, 06:22:42 pm »

I don't get it, why not use BYOND? SS13 is laggy because it simulates a load of stuff in not necessarily the most effective ways. For example, gasses (possibly including oxygen) are mobile objects, moving around the place, causing lag. There are probably more such examples, this being the most visible. I remember the game lagging on an older computer even when running in singleplayer mode, I could literally see it pause once every "tick". I rather doubt you could do something that'd lag it up severely with a fantasy game.
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Servant Corps

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #6 on: May 23, 2009, 06:30:47 pm »

I have lots of bad experienceds with BYOND. It takes a long time to set up, then you have to hope it runs, and it wastes a lot of memory. I hate BYOND. I don't like it.
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Sowelu

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #7 on: May 23, 2009, 07:11:14 pm »

I don't get it, why not use BYOND? SS13 is laggy because it simulates a load of stuff in not necessarily the most effective ways. For example, gasses (possibly including oxygen) are mobile objects, moving around the place, causing lag. There are probably more such examples, this being the most visible. I remember the game lagging on an older computer even when running in singleplayer mode, I could literally see it pause once every "tick". I rather doubt you could do something that'd lag it up severely with a fantasy game.

Nah, not that kind of lag.  I run it very well.  My problem is that if you hold down an arrow key, you go blazing across the map, and items you were dragging lag behind you, you plow into people and push them down the hallway without knowing it, etc--and often when you press a button it doesn't respond for at least a 500ms window.

I'm pretty sure that its network code has a lot of latency built in, and that it doesn't handle large batches of actions being sent from the client at once.  I see the same problems on JapaneseName High, which has pretty much no background processes to speak of.  And you get the same thing on games like Furcadia, though not quite as badly...that was designed more to be social than to be a 'game' game.

I'm not sure how to prevent people from running waytoofast without making the controls feel responsive, but that's exactly the kind of problem I want someone ELSE to have solved, hence why I want an engine that isn't BYOND and that may have a good resolution for that.  It would be nice if holding down an arrow key made you move at a certain, constant, and sane number of squares per move, with low latency.  I don't know if BYOND can do that.  Aside from that, I love BYOND.


EDIT:  My fantasy-ish plans at this point are something like a Shakespearean fantasy game, somewhere around the sort of Midsummer Night's Dream or Macbeth, but with somewhat ubiquitous reagent-based magic.  A game lasts for seven 'days' which are around 20 minutes long, and each game focuses on a limited number of plots...a wedding, a coronation, something like that, while different groups have different goals.  Probably a lot of little subplots at once, but the big plot event always happens on the seventh day.  Who knows if I'd ever get around to really designing, but that's what I want the tools for.
« Last Edit: May 23, 2009, 07:21:50 pm by Sowelu »
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Some things were made for one thing, for me / that one thing is the sea~
His servers are going to be powered by goat blood and moonlight.
Oh, a biomass/24 hour solar facility. How green!

Virtz

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Re: Any alternatives to BYOND?
« Reply #8 on: May 23, 2009, 07:54:17 pm »

I'm not sure how to prevent people from running waytoofast without making the controls feel responsive, but that's exactly the kind of problem I want someone ELSE to have solved, hence why I want an engine that isn't BYOND and that may have a good resolution for that.  It would be nice if holding down an arrow key made you move at a certain, constant, and sane number of squares per move, with low latency.  I don't know if BYOND can do that.  Aside from that, I love BYOND.
Well, that's sort of a problem with tile-based games in general. You could quite easily give it a delay so that it would not respond to actions after a key-press for a little bit and let the character actually visually reach the next tile. And I think SS13 actually does have that, though only in walking mode (but then I never looked into its source code nor have I spent much time in walking mode, so I'm not sure).
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