Replacements for DashingDon/Moody.ink

Game Development
1

Hey, all!

If this is a topic that is overstepping, feel free to take it down.

I noticed that roughly 23 days ago, DashingDon admitted that he wouldn’t be capable of further development on either the DashingDon or Moody.ink platforms, but would do his best to keep them in current condition.

Given that many of us are developing WIP’s and that it is a requirement of the Hosted Games platform to have public beta’s, do we have any movement on a suitable replacement should these go down?

I’ll admit, I myself cannot contribute in terms of code. I’ve learned ChoiceScript, but I don’t have the wherewithal knowledge needed in order to produce a replacement on my own. I could do my best to assist financially, but my primary concern would be that if these platforms went down, how this would be handled especially in terms of posting our WIP’s and garnering feedback.

If there’s any ongoing discussions I’ve missed, feel free to link me! I tried to use the search option and failed to catch any beyond the thread itself where it’s mentioned, but it seemed largely unnoticed.

Thanks,
~Zach.

14 Likes
2

I’d imagine it’d be the same as it was in the past which is to say terrible with a mishmash of a whole lot of different ways none as good or clean as dashingdon, I’m honestly surprised COG doesn’t buy dashingdon or make something similar on their own, because it is the lifeblood of both their forums and hostedgames in general and it does seem a little absurd that they don’t have something similar. Especially now that the person who runs both dashingdon and moody won’t be able to do anything besides simply maintain the hosting and even then who knows how long they will do that for.

23 Likes
3

I think the best option besides dashingdon (and moody.ink) itself would be itch.io. But honestly, any place where you can host html would suffice, such as neocities.org.

In these cases you’d have to compile your game and upload the html.

11 Likes
4

If you’re uploading to itch or neocities, is there a way of using CJW’s save system?

5

It’s been a while, but I think compile.js will extract it correctly (if it was included in the uncompiled index.html).

6 Likes
6

Given that games have to go through a beta testing process via this forum, this seems like a moment for CoG to create a permanent, in-house hosting solution.

16 Likes
7

Odd, I found myself, just a little bit ago, wondering who owns Dashingdon. I’m honestly surprised CoG/Hosted haven’t done their own thing or bought it out. It’d be nice to have some true integration between the forums and the betas.

12 Likes
8

I’m not sure CoG, as a for-profit company, would be allowed to keep DashingDon going with the same rules if they bought it out. I’m not sure any amount of disclaimers would absolve them entirely of responsibility for the content of games on that platform. In particular, I don’t know if copyright holders could go after them for hosting fanfiction.

I am definitely not any sort of lawyer (I don’t even play one on TV) and this is all pure speculation. But I’m pretty sure there’s a reason CoG hasn’t bought out DashingDon or hosted a similar platform of their own.

6 Likes
9

Generally content hosts are not liable for content hosted on their platform though they do have an obligation to respond to certain things like dmca takedown requests. This is why platforms that host pirated content can exist.

15 Likes
10

I’m in agreement here.

Given the requirement for Hosted Games to be on the forum, it would seem like solid idea for us to have some form of ‘official’ way to host our titles and play it. Now that Don is done, it’s completely possible the sites go down at any given time.

Add to the fact that Moody’s using the latest CS version but still has bugs and incomplete features, and you have an issue potentially headed up.

Honestly, like Don said, it might be best to try to open-source Moody and then work towards completion/fixing it up. However, that’s much easier said than done of course. The most I myself could do is attempt to contribute financially to the best of my capabilities.

8 Likes
11

Just saw this post, but cannot seem to find the link to where Dashingdon said this? Could you please point me in the right direction? For me dashingdon is great (cannot overemphasize how much I just it when making and playtesting games). I wonder if we could buy him a few ko-fis in appreciation (we did this at some point in the past…)

4 Likes
12

Hey Adrao!

Link is here. Moody.ink - New ChoiceScript Game Hosting - #47 by dashingdon This specific post.

2 Likes
13

Why dont COG buy moody instead? Would be way easier to manage a new site than try to manage a site with hundreds of WIP already uploaded. Besides would love for Moody to completely replace dashingdon at some point because it supports the new CS version and also saves can be accessed by another device via account

3 Likes
14

I think it is more useful to consider different potential options for future proofing rather than speculating about company decisions, which we don’t have any influence over.

I quite like the idea of using itch, since you can enable comments, so players with an itch account but not a forum one would be able to give feedback directly. That has the disadvantage of splitting comments into different places - but then that is also happening a lot already, with people needing to click through to different places to discuss.

That said I do love Moody and it’s a fantastic refinement of dashingdon - which itself has been extremely solid and of incredible value to the community. If there were programmers with the bandwidth to help maintain it that would be amazing.

9 Likes
15

It’d be a massive shame to lose DD/Moody and without a similar replacement, but I understand if dashingdon needs to move on.

Compiling is fine and has its advantages, but it’s not easy to code dive into compiled games. Beta testing without code diving will be a lot harder I imagine, so I hope an alternative comes up if DD and Moody are discontinued.

7 Likes
16

The problem is that it’s a really consuming and mostly thankless job. Despite being a programmer with some free time, I would never offer to take on that responsibility and I believe it will be a long time before another dashingdon (the man) appears.

It’ll be more difficult, but not impossible. But for the ordinary player, probably yes.

I just thought about this, and I’m writing from the top of my head, so there may be some mistake. If you want to deliberately allow code diving in a similar way that dashingdon does, then I believe your best option would be neocities.org. Create the following structure:

mygame/
├── index.html
└── scenes/
    ├── startup.txt
    ├── choicescript_stats.txt
    ├── chapter_1.txt
    └── ...

Where index.html is your compiled game.

17 Likes
17

Would GitHub work? My CSG code is repoed there anyway and I know they have a project site feature, but I’ve never used it.

Otherwise linking to the compiled HTML on Google Drive/Dropbox/Notion/etc. is probably the best alternative if you, like me, really dislike Itch’s interface.

18

Github is a good idea if you know what you’re doing. Github pages can only be static, so you’d have to tweak ChoiceScript’s uncompiled index.html to fetch and process the scenes text files dynamically, or use the compiled html anyway (which you’ll have to keep updating anyway). You’ll also have to make your project public so other people can look at the source code.

2 Likes
19

This. Especially where it concerns online accounts and hosted content. There’s a whole bag of extra trouble in the form of security concerns, content moderation, hosting woes/uptime. Needless to say there’s a reason I’ve never thought to add any online “CSIDE Account” like functionality to that tool. I imagine for similar reasons CoG would never want to commit to the responsibility, even if they were willing to put money towards it.

Maybe one option here is to find a technical compromise. Perhaps build a very basic/simple facade atop a more reliable hosting mechanism (like GitHub), so it’s more accessible, but there’s little for the community to actively maintain (just updating the CS version occasionally).

13 Likes
20

That’s an interesting idea, and a sensible compromise :thinking:

2 Likes