I posted this on the RTB forums some time ago, and left the thread open for questions. People submitted 4 or 5 questions, then ran out of things to ask. I'm counting on you guys to come up with interesting questions.
The article is written in the editorial we.
A tag looks like this: [3n2g]. Select it, press ctrl+F, and search for it to skip directly to the question.
Contents[17jj] Why will there be no editor wand?
[83j3] Will there be any movers in RTB2?
[8nnn] Have you even been working on RTB2?
[lkn7] So what have you actually made?
[mm30] So when is it coming out?
[njlp] Can I beta test?
[m001] Where can I buy Blockland?
[33n2] Why should I pay money for something that I previously had for free?
[1jhh] How much will RTB cost?
[11hh] What are you guys going to do with all the stuff you've made for RTB1.5?
[HK47] What are some of the new features that Blockland has that the old version does not?
[p2b9] How does the Mod Downloader work and how is the content stored/installed?
[99kk] Can you download and install mods while hosting a server?
[ttf4] Could you not resend the datablocks if it contains any new ones?
[17jj]
Why will there be no editor wand?Retail uses a new brick rendering system.
First of all, it renders in quads instead of tris. Traditionally, bricks were rendered as a series of triangles arranged in a cube shape. Now, the bricks have each of their faces rendered as a cube. This effectively doubled performance. Instead of lagging at 900 bricks, the game began to have performance issues at 1800 bricks.
The editor wand was originally an old work around for this problem in Vanilla. With the release of Retail, it is being dropped from the game.
There is another side to this story though. If you have seen some of the videos or images from Retail, you will notice that it can handle a lot more bricks. This leads into the second reason why the editor wand is being dropped.
To further increase performance, Badspot created a new rendering method. Bricks were no longer models. Instead, a series of angles and textures were fed into the engine, and boom, a brick appeared. No more model. This resulted in a huge change to the game.
Bricks could now effectively have parts of them completely hidden from view.
Previously, if you viewed 2 bricks next to each other, you would be looking at both the visible
and invisible portions of the brick. In Retail Blockland, the invisible parts of the bricks, that is, the parts of the bricks touching each other that you will never see from any angle, are
gone.
The effect of this on performance was huge.
This had one draw back though. If the bricks were taken off of a grid, rotated, or resized in any way, they would break.
However, all hope wasn't lost. The new brick system allowed for custom brick sizes to be defined easily. You can create rectangular bricks of almost any size by punching about 2 lines into notepad. See Badspot's tutorial for more information.
Modifying bricks, at least through scale and rotation, was over.
Eventually, some guy named Kompressor joined Badspot's project and coded an even more efficient rendering and optimization system which allows you to get decent performance with about 30,000 bricks on average or below average computers.
I've seen better quality systems run around 50,000 or even 100,000 bricks. Just recently, Wallet's server has a 100k brick build up, and most people were able to run it fine, after loading.
Finally, this system allowed for the undulation, glow, blink, and other effects you see.
[83j3]
Will there be any movers in RTB2?Well, the purpose of RTB has greatly changed now. Rather then focusing on new content, we are focusing on new features. We plan on having RTB2 be the debut of our new content, communication client, and server manager, RTBConnect.
That being said, movers with bricks are impossible, due the the modifications stated in the previous question. However, they aren't entirely impossible. Trader has made moving doors and elevators. Other people have made animated bricks serving similar functions, pending announcement or release.
[8nnn]
Have you even been working on RTB2?Yes.
[lkn7]
So what have you actually made?We recoded the IRC client for a start, it actually supports tabbed messages now. You can receive and send messages to people out of the channel, although you can't actually go to other channels yet. We've got a new mod manager, which lets you download and install mods while you play the game, and without even bothering to extract them. If you look at the Who's Online section on the website, you can also see that we have integrated RTB connectivity with the website- you can now see who is online from the website.
[mm30]
So when is it coming out?We are aiming on releasing it along with Badspot's Blockland update 9. Chances are that the update will break something though, so it will likely be a few days or so afterward. That's what we are aiming for, but before you hold us to it, consider our record on releasing stuff on time in the past.
[njlp]
Can I beta test?Don't call us, we'll call you.
[m001]
Where can I buy Blockland?You can buy it
here.. It is priced at $19.95 USD.
[33n2]
Why should I pay money for something that I previously had for free?Well there are several reasons. You've been playing his game for free for a while, and if you liked it, you really should support him. It cost a lot of money to make the game and run the website. It's also a great improvement over the previous version.
[1jhh]
How much will RTB cost?Nothing, it's free, just like it's always been.
[11hh]
What are you guys going to do with all the stuff you've made for RTB1.5?We don't know yet. We don't need suggestions either, we can make the desiscion ourselves, thank you.
[HK47]
What are some of the new features that Blockland has that the old version does not?Brick effects, mini-game system, custom brick palletes, easy brick customization (anyone can make bricks now), water specularity, more stable vehicles, add-on based mod system, Mac support, and much more effecient brick rendering. We've also upgraded from Torque Engine 1.1 to Torque Engine 1.2, so the full changelog between those versions also applies here.
[p2b9]
How does the Mod Downloader work and how is the content stored/installed?When you are in-game, open up RTBConnect, go to the downloads section, and click the mods you want to install. The game will do the rest for you, including installation, since we require all mods to be contained in .zip files now. This makes installation easy, and keeps people from making /add-ons/add-ons/base/blockland/client/models/stuntbuggy folders. Since we haven't released yet, this stuff may be somewhat different by release, but this is what we are planning on having at the moment.
Content is stored on our server.
[99kk]
Can you download and install mods while hosting a server?No.
[ttf4]
Could you not resend the datablocks if it contains any new ones?We won't be supporting it, it makes things less stable.
