V12 ExplainedThere seems to be a lot of confusion over some of the changes in v12 and why they are necessary. Contrary to popular belief, I am not some ape changing code at random for my own amusement. All of the changes address specific problems which I will now illuminate for you.
The problems listed here are problems in v11 that are now fixed in v12V11 Problem 1: While using the wand, you can accidentally hit a baseplate and destroy huge parts of your build
V11 Problem 2: While using the hammer, you can break a supporting brick without realizing it and destroy huge parts of your build
V12 Solution: The real problem here is that in v11 you need to use the wand all the time because the hammer can't make holes in walls. In v12, the hammer can now destroy any brick that won't cause a chain reaction. That means you can go nuts with the hammer and rest easy that you will only break one brick at a time. The hammer now meets all of your normal building needs and the wand is only used for clearing large numbers of bricks.
V11 Problem 3: You give someone full trust, thinking that they are a nice person, and then they immediately wand your baseplate and destroy your whole build
V12 Solution: Bricks can now only be wanded by their owner. Even if your "friend" has full trust with you, he will not be able to wand your bricks. This works out because the hammer meets all of our building needs now. He could start hammering your build, but the damage would be limited.
Side Effect: This was done by moving the wand to trust level 3, which is a new trust level that you only have with yourself. The side effect is that some add-ons were hard coded to check for trust level 2 instead of any trust level greater than 2. Notably the duplicator, fill can, and JVS doors have this problem. The fixes are simple and they are already available:
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=70770.0
V11 Problem 4: The minigame gui is extremely crowded. There is no room for expansion. Many of the labels have to be abbreviated making it difficult for new users to figure out what they do.
V12 Solution: The minigame gui has been retrofitted into a scroll box. This provides infinite room regardless of what resolution the game is using.
Side Effect: Add-ons such as TDM which rely on hacking up the old gui will not work with the new gui. This has already been fixed:
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=70829.0
V11 Problem 5: Numerous people have reported not having a crouch button. The tutorial tells them "Press to crouch". Having them re-apply the default controls fixes the problem, so I can only assume that they are screwing up their controls before starting the tutorial.
V12 Solution: The game checks that you have all of the default game keys bound whenever the play gui wakes up (ie whenever you first enter the game). If you don't have all the necessary keys bound then it prompts you to reselect your default control scheme.
Side Effect: Complete nightmare. Apparently tons of people are running around with half their controls not set. The problem here is that I am extremely intelligent and the people having this problem are morons. I simply can't relate or get any kind of useful information out of anyone who is having this problem.
I am giving up and have removed this feature. If you are having this problem you can re-download the game to fix it:
http://blockland.us/index.asp?p=Download
V11 Problem 6: From a clean install of the game, it can take literally
hours to connect to a server because of all the crap you have to download. This is a major blow to the initial user experience.
V12 Solution: There are now numerous downloading options in the network settings tab that allow you to choose which things you want to download. For example, if you have weapon model downloads disabled and connect to a server that uses a weapon you don't have, you will simply use the default gun model. There are some clever bits of code in there that will choose a suitable default model - for example, anything with a "melee-like" name such as "bronze sword" or "axe" will use the sword model.
Side Effect: When you drop an item there may be some slight prediction errors (warping) because the weapon model you're using might not be the same size as the one on the server.
V11 Problem 7: It is possible for certain event loops to max out a client's event quota such that they can't create any new events and are spammed with the "Schedule Quota Hit!" message.
V12 Solution: If you hit your event quota continuously for several seconds, all of your currently active events will be cancelled. This never happens with properly functioning events, so this is a 100% change for the good.
V11 Problem 8: People don't know what "Schedule Quota Hit" means and ask me about it all the time.
V12 Solution: The message text has been changed to "Too many events at once!". This is purely a cosmetic change and does not affect gameplay.
V11 Problem 9: After you connect to a server and spawn, you must download the bricks from the server. While this is happening you may see some strange things like players stuck in mid air. This happens because you are using all of your bandwith to get bricks and don't have enough left over for player updates. There is also no indication as to when this phase of connection is over.
V12 Solution: A visual "ghosting" indicator now appears when you enter this connection phase. This reassures the player that something is in fact happening and gives them feedback as to what is going on with their game.
V11 Problem 10: Certain less sophisticated users abuse other players on the basis of their numerical ID.
V12 Solution: Since the ID numbers are a necessary part of the game, we can't get rid of the entirely. In v12, they are hidden by default. They can be re-enabled in the advanced options menu. The theory here is that the sort of user who is likely to abuse people based on ID is unlikely to explore the advanced options.
V11 Problem 11: Certain less sophisticated users repeat themselves in the chat over and over again using the up arrow.
V12 Solution: The "press up to repeat last chat message" feature is now optional and off by default. Again, the same reasoning as problem 10 applies. The sort of user who spams the chat annoyingly is unlikely to explore the advanced options.
That covers all of the major confusion that I have encountered so far. If you have any questions about the changes from v11 to v12, ask here and I will try to answer them. Unless they have already been answered in which case I will curse at you.
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