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Messages - M

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1
Off Topic / Re: Blockland Unofficial Discord Server
« on: April 19, 2016, 08:55:08 PM »
ayy fam got u some text

[autism]
Clockturn, BL_ID 4332, clockler#0291 on discord over here, just so you know who I am (forum account is less than obvious). Bravo on gathering this many wilful contrarians to the Blockland Discord. But IMHO I don't really think we need a Discord for a hundred varieties of off-topic chat, rather it's good for providing an actual community hub style dealie so people can actually talk about the game. So here's what I think you could do to make it a better *Blockland* Discord (in about a gorillion words):

Collapse text channels:
The #games-ylyl, #games-ycyl and #games-room can easily be merged to an #ot-games channel. This will increase discussion, generally, and if people want to talk in-depth about other games they'll probably go to a chat associated with those games anyway, ya see?
#bots-room is pretty much unnecessary (I don't see AIRHORN SOLUTIONS here, anyway). #code-room, #creative-room, #music-room can easily be merged to a single #off-topic section, possibly plus an #ot-work channel for people posting specifically about WIPs and discussing them (regardless of medium).
#dark-room is good. We call it a meme vent elsewhere, and it provably has raised discussion quality on all four servers I've seen implement it. We found its efficacy to be raised by using irony, so I propose removing #rp-room and renaming #dark-room to that.
#nsfw-room, on the other hand, has no place on this Christian LEGO building blocks chat. Sarcasm aside, that sort of thing should be kept to PMs. People who feel the need to publicize how totally cool they are by linking research or gore are the sort of people who raise average quality by being gone, but just not supporting that kind of behaviour is helpful enough. Basically: Blockland's community is a cesspool, don't let your server be one too. I'm not saying go full carebear, just don't encourage properly awful behaviour by providing a "safe space" for it.
So that'd leave you with #welcome, #blockland, #off-topic, #ot-games, maybe #ot-work and #dork-room - plus n different gamemode channels, if the authors would like to use them.

Make channels for popular gamemodes:
This means Boss Battles, CRPGs, probably Prison Escape I guess. On the note of my own disgust at these: being impartial is worthwhile, it makes people actually trust you to run things, and that encourages them to actually use them. Supporting discussion of gamemodes makes it easier for authors to coordinate with their players, and to gather feedback, which will help them to author better gamemodes. If people don't care about those gamemodes, they can just mute the channels - if that seems like an organization or bloat concern, this is how the Discord API developers' server is organized and it has channels for 14 different API wrappers. The day Blockland has 14 different reasonably well-developed gamemodes that are actively played, someone flag me on Discord and I will literally eat my hat.
At the same time, encourage people to share new gamemodes, and support giving authors their own channels so they can use them to disseminate information - like telling people when they're hosting, if their game is only periodically hosted, or answering common questions in the channel topic. Forums are a generally dying thing, and for good reason - they kill productivity while not even having the common decency to be a particularly good solution for communication. Not that Discord is much better tho amirite
If that seems like too much work, letting other people manage that is totally possible (manage server permission, obviously). I'd advocate for myself, of course, but you don't know me and I'd say you'd be in the right not to take that at face value; but I've been around for a while, my badmin days are behind me and I'm pretty much 100% divested from the actual Blockland community and its dramas - hell, I barely even play, but Blockland was too important growing up (sad lyfe) for me to ditch it completely. Or give up hope on it ever improving, apparently.
For gamemodes that want to use their own Discord, keep a list post of invites to those in #welcome so people can easily find them if they want to get in on that discussion. Like I said, acting as a community hub can help to make the community better.

Better voice channels, too:
Blockland has no inbuilt voice chat so having good support on a community server would be nice. Have two (maybe even three) general voice channels, so if someone puts a music bot in one people who want to discuss quietly can talk in others, or if just a few people are discussing one thing and a few another they can also split.
Extending a hand for adding a voice channel for different gamemodes would be nice, too. Two for gamemodes that are teambased, probably.

Sorry to wall you in, read at your leisure though. I'd just rather give in-depth feedback; I guess some little part of me just wants Blockland to clean up and get off the meth already. The community is a mess, and you've already got a little platform going to maybe fix it a bit, if that's something you'd like to do. Yeah, I'm a sap, sue me.

can't mention so I guess I'll flag you on discord
[/autism]
this is what happens when I get a surprise day off.


For the rest of you bastards feel free to discuss how all my ideas are terrible, change is bad, improvement is overrated and how you'd rather just stuffpost and play prison escape for eternity I guess
or discuss other ideas for changes, that could also be a thing

2
What you really need to learn most of all is how to find stuff out.

Your new best friends:
/getid - Tells you the ID of what you're looking at, and its classname. Obviously requires that you're a super admin. Keep in mind this is a serverCmd so it obviously runs on the server; if you're not the host process, this ID won't match anything on your client (or worse, it will match something unrelated and you'll mess up).
<ID or name>.dump(); - Dumps out all the information on whatever object you specify - this includes all methods associated with it.
tree(); - Shows you a dialog with a tree view of all objects that exist at this moment. Want to know what GUIs are open? Look in GuiGroup->Canvas - it shows everything that's open, or GuiGroup is all GUIs currently defined. ServerConnection contains all the client-side ghosts that exist, including all bricks (I say this because it's potentially useful, and also because if you open it on a server with 60,000 odd bricks it's gonna be a long damn list). ServerGroup however is server-side, and contains some subgroups of different objects, including MissionCleanup which is everything that will be deleted when the server closes - ie every existing object in the game world, plus some other stuff like the chatlog. All bricks exist in ServerGroup->MainBrickGroup->Brickgroup_<BL_ID> where BL_ID is obviously their owner's ID.
trace(1); - Shows you everything that happens (barring certain things Badspot doesn't like players seeing) until you use trace(0);. To cut down on bullstuff happening around it, I recommend typing trace(0); into the console right after you start, so you can just open the console as soon as you've done the thing you want to deconstruct and hit enter. There could be a lot of other stuff going on in the background, which will be more you have to dig through to find what you want.

Start the game. Start a server. dumpConsoleFunctions(); and exit the game immediately. Now save that console.log, maybe trim all the game's startup crap - it contains tons of functions, and you can Ctrl+F through it to find stuff if you have a vague idea of what you're looking for.
Start the game again. export("$*", "config/globals.cs"); to get all global variables defined at menu time, if you're making stuff dealing with the menu. Start a server, do the same again to get all global variables defined while running a server. There's a lot of junk data in this but it's potentially quite useful if you need to find certain things. Save those globals files and that log of console functions - they might not be valuable all the time but they're quicker than asking the forums.
Ideally, you should do these with a clean Blockland installation to minimize chaff - you might end up using something only to find it doesn't work for users missing some other add-on.

The tutorials for anything associated with TorqueScript will be at best useless and at worst entirely misleading, since Blockland has its own functions you really need to know about and there's been tons of different versions of TGE (plus TGEA, T3D, T2D... there's often no way to actually tell what version of Torque a tutorial is directed at without just trying it). Knowing how to pull the game apart and get at its bits is a lot more valuable than Google for something as obscure as Blockland.

G O O D  L U C K

3
General Discussion / Re: Scenery's SUBURBIA
« on: December 12, 2015, 01:42:29 AM »
bump to let people know this isn't dead
there's a bit of a development hiatus at the moment because all my homework and projects are due next week and i need to work on them. i don't expect any work to be done on this until january
right now im making a .dll on the side that allows for client environments which im going to use for the coolest drug effects ever known to man
here's some pictures of me developing and these pictures are really interesting and i feel as if i should post them


be thrilled

we still need loops from non-mainstream music genres right now, we're being a little too liberal with the discos and we need other stuff to make the music more diverse
Note: Even if it's 100% benign and open-source expect an injected DLL to get your key(s) revoked, not to mention good luck enforcing it without having people whine endlessly about "muh serverside experience" (also, IIRC you can call secureClientCmds from the client side, you just can't fake them serverside, meaning you can probably cause clients to alter their environment settings with a regular client mod)

Notes 2-n: The basis of CityRPG is flawed and you're loving yourself over using it or trying to satisfy the people who play it; you're much better off designing a new game based 100% around the criminal enterprise thing that inevitably happens
No economic "simulation" will be good enough to justify how finicky it is, re: "government funds" and taxation
Open building makes the map terrible inevitably (and requires admin intervention to manage it, which has literally never worked, not since the original CityRP servers to Diggy's nor any other, due to favoritism and/or laziness)

* Build different businesses which are NPC-managed; separate gun stores, legit drug stores, hemp farms, even apartment complexes
* Extort businesses for protection contracts to gain money from their sales, forget over anyone who tries to muscle in on your contracts
* Rob banks, businesses, and unsuspecting schmucks for petty (or not so petty) cash - including cybercrime allowing you to rob other people's accounts if you can get the right information
* Steal guns and cars, sell them through import/export docks
* Embezzle funds from your group, screw your friends

4
Add-Ons / Re: Weapon: Sawn-Off Rifle and Server_PGDie
« on: December 07, 2015, 09:09:51 AM »
No, the problem is that you're doing it wrong. A TSStatic is an antiquated thing from back when we had maps and is basically useless now. You're not supposed to dynamically spawn these after people loaded.

You need to properly create a StaticShapeData datablock that references your model file and then spawn tracers using StaticShapes.
Oh, huh, I assumed he meant tracer projectile, my bad (this is what I get for not actually playing the game)

5
Add-Ons / Re: Weapon: Sawn-Off Rifle and Server_PGDie
« on: December 07, 2015, 08:09:22 AM »
what's happening is that quake-type weapons and the sawn-off rifle have the exact same tracer model so the file manifest doesn't have you download the sawn-off's model if you already have the quake-type's model, but the sawn-off rifle explicitly calls the tracer model from it's own shapes folder

problem is that the player doesn't like that directory because the tracer model it downloaded from the manifest was in the quake-type weapons zip

without the model the game instantly crashes

it's honestly one of those situations i could fix it pretty easily but then everyone would have to update everything and it's more of a pain herding cats to get themselves fixed then it is to just tell people to not cause the problem in the first place

i'll upload a quick fix though

Huh, no, that should be sent on to Bedpost as that's an engine bug right there. The filename of the resource shouldn't make a difference at all since the resources are stored based on a hash, so it's a little weird this can happen at all, but it's definitely a bug with the resource caching system.

6
Add-Ons / Re: Weapon: Sawn-Off Rifle and Server_PGDie
« on: December 03, 2015, 04:16:19 AM »

oc
that's clearly sawn-on saw what do you think you're doing

7
Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 09, 2014, 02:17:30 AM »

Speedkart and doors are trivial additions to the game, although Speedkart itself is a less trivial piece of work, at least. The release of the BLB exporter after I don't even know or want to contemplate how many years of people wanting documentation or support for the format is a much bigger deal than either of those things - in fact I'd say it's probably the biggest thing you've actually done for the modding community in the entire time I've been playing the game - and the gamemode system is definitely well-intentioned and I'd even go so far as to say I like it, although the lack of support for optional/allowed add-ons irks me since I don't like the idea of releasing something that would inevitably lead to more basically identical servers.

Much like the player persistence add-on - I believe I voiced a concern about the fact that you couldn't opt not to restore positions, meaning gamemodes that wanted to save arbitrary information about players but for whom it wasn't appropriate to rejoin where you disconnected had to either implement their own persistence (fragmentation/loads of files everywhere) or work around it, rather than taking two minutes out of your day - probably less time than it took to type the short response - to provide a potentially more useful piece of support to modders.

Also of note are the pieces of functionality which were locked down - the player list certainly didn't have much non-malicious use, however shapenames were potentially useful, the change to prevent their abuse also prevented them from being used for bots. The patch to prevent clientside access to player positions was also just a blanket ban, and I certainly remember thinking about (though I can't say if I posted about) suggesting some sort of server-side method for allowing one player to access another's position clientside; for example, to allow teammates to see one another's positions for a team radar system, or for a hunter in a one-vs-many gamemode to see enemy positions for some form of sixth-sense/tracking system. Simply sending out positions using clientCmds is certainly possible, but it's an incredibly suboptimal solution. Want a team of 16 players to be able to see each other's positions? 240 clientCmds per tick at whatever tickrate you want. Two teams makes 480. If you strip the co-ordinates to integers and don't send the Z co-ordinate, for a bare minimum top-down map and don't send their facing, that's probably 7 bytes of data plus overhead per clientCmd. At a tickrate of 250ms, or four times per second, that's 13.125 kilobytes of data per second, not counting overhead - data that those clients already have, to render the players at all. With clientside access, that could be... well, incredibly close to no data per second accounting for the sending of the packet to say they're allowed to access that, at as high a tickrate as the client likes, with a higher accuracy position and two more facets to it. But some servers might allow players to potentially use aimbots, and that's terrible.

Then there's my most recent pet peeve - not being able to directly open the events dialog for an arbitrary class. This would be a trivial change - a few minutes tops, probably possible with a find-and-replace in the actual source - but involves rewriting most of the dialog functionality or the entire dialog itself for a third party to do it, and even then there's some unavoidable bugs that require hacky workarounds that make it even worse to use for a third party to do it. I'm not even sure if I ever bothered posting about this, as it was something that occurred to me long after the point when I'd become entirely disenchanted with the game because of the feeling that the game's creator simply saw me as someone who just wanted to ruin all his hard work. Can I immediately think of an example of why that'd be particularly useful? No, but if it were possible, maybe someone would see some cool thing to do with it. At the very least, we could directly event minigames to configure them and allow the non-script-savvy among us (really, we're among them) to do cool things of their own.

And of course, RTB's been gone for a while now, and the current main avenue for add-ons to be posted is... one single sub-forum. That's right, all add-ons, all in one place where you can only see a small number at a time, there's no categories, the search isn't particularly useful and no hosting is provided. Support! Hooray!

What I'm getting at here is, of course, that "mod support" is kind of a misnomer. It's more "mods permitted, and if you don't like what you've got you can forget right off", which is what most of the modders have done over the years. For some, it was of their own will, due to disenchantment; for others, they did something that riled up the community and caused a lot of drama, leading to them being removed and whatever weird stuff they were doing being patched over for the temporary cessation of shrieking children. Even Ephialtes, the most dedicated member of the entire community, eventually decided to up and go with some evident bad blood.

The progress is forget it.  Believe it or not, programming is to some degree a creative endeavor and requires some motivating factor other than the temporary cessation of shrieking children.
This, however, is at least one reason I can get behind. I can respect that you don't want to work on Blockland all the time. But an hour a day on improving some stuff for modders could quite possibly produce a hell of a lot of content.


Much like Mr.Wallet I often hesitate to post here (the times I've wanted to, or even have written posts, far outnumber the times I've actually posted about things for very similar reasons to what he stated, and I've definitely become very pessimistic about the likelihood of getting a response at all, let alone a positive one). Certainly, it is worth saying that if I had to put up with half this much bullstuff, I'd probably have taken my toys elsewhere, so to speak. But I like to think that a little less negativity at the top might have resulted in a little less bullstuff down the bottom, and probably much too late for either of those, now.

Obligatory two cents, as this is apparently a "jaded people contribute their opinions on Blockland development and community structure" thread.


he directly targets Badspot and the lack of development every chance he gets. Look what happened to Sleven. Not saying I want him banned but he's pushing it.
Wait, what happened to Sleven? He was nice.

8
Modification Help / Re: Metropolis RPG Beta Bug Report Thread
« on: December 23, 2013, 03:19:28 PM »
More things to be looked at:
  • Axe cuts faster than chainsaw.
  • Players bricks are not part of the minigame when they are offline.
  • Assault and Grand Theft Auto don't rack up dems.
  • Fire needs to be fixed and enabled.

As far as other suggestions:
Personally, I don't like the Car dealership suggestion.(it makes it harder for me to do crime :P ) However, it is a good idea. If it does get added, there needs to be more than one dealership. As for recovering vehicles, I'm sure a tow truck service to your garage will work fine.

This one is a long shot. What would really be nice is if Trenton and Wellsk were refurbished and we used that map. Most of the players on the server have been original players, and I'm sure most would welcome that map back. Brick count shouldn't be an issue because computers haven't gotten worse since 2009. Keep in mind, refurbishing would include the further conserving of bricks. (If possible) In the long run it would be way less work. I also mention the old map, as it had a full underground and waterless sewer/subway system, which was one of the huge things that made the old map good. (actually, I wouldn't mind the whole old mod running on the server with the old map for right now while you work on the new one, but I figure that suggestion is a bit out of reach in the realm of possibilities.)
Axe and chainsaw speeds should be swapped and chainsaw be the buyable one, yes
Bricks being part of the minigame can be kludged via
Code: [Select]
package forgetMinigames {
    function minigameCstar fishe(%a, %b) {
        return 1; // ALWAYS MINIGAME, ALL THE TIME
    }
    function minigameCanDamage(%a, %b) {
        return 1;
    }
};
activatePackage(forgetMinigames);

Alternately, make getMinigameFromObject(%obj) always return the same minigame. Same effect, really. Goes without saying that you shouldn't use this code in add-ons that aren't designed to be the only thing on the server, and that it's just generally not a very good practice, but it gets the job done.
You could also make minigameCanDamage return false for bricks unless they're transparent or it's explosive damage. People sniping out bricks to get into houses is annoying as hell.

Oh, and for polish reasons, make it use the actual Blockland gamemode system so the server shows up as running Metropolis, rather than Custom?

The point of the car dealership is to make getting a vehicle actually part of the gamemode rather than just buying a brick and having every vehicle available to you. Even if it's not designed for roleplaying it's nice to have everything consistent and a little immersive. It wouldn't even make it harder to be a criminal - people will probably leave them laying around all the time anyway.
Of course there'd need to be more than one dealership. In fact I'd like it if each dealership sold different vehicles - one out in the country/industrial area might sell Jeeps but the inner-city one would sell more urban vehicles.
I don't think that planes should be available, though. Boats maybe, if other islands get added, but not planes.

And on Trenton/Wellsk, I may not like the current map all that much (early days, but mostly I just hate how tiny the roads are) but I also don't think we should be trying to pull out the whole old map just because nostalgia.

9
Modification Help / Re: Metropolis RPG Beta Bug Report Thread
« on: December 23, 2013, 12:16:50 AM »
Thoughts on security cameras and possibly being super badass heist teams:

- Security cameras placed on lots require an active Security Console on that lot
- Someone with a Hacking trait can click on a security console and as long as they don't move from where they were when they clicked, it won't report any crimes for up to ten seconds (with a 20 second cooldown)
- Lots can only have one security console
- People with the hacking trait should be able to rob ATMs for cash too, but this is obviously illegal (but if you disable the security console first...)
- I dunno if they already do (they should) but police officers should count as cameras for crime and tracking

- Every minute or 30 seconds, all wanted criminals should broadcast a check to all cameras within the max range (or perhaps all cameras should search for players within range - depending on the number of players/cameras and positions, either approach is potentially quite slow) and check line of sight. If a camera can see them, it should broadcast a waypoint to all policemen as to their positions.
- Perhaps allow someone with the hacking trait to view this information themselves from the demerit terminal or whatever

On vehicles:
Vehicles should be purchased from a dealership, which spawns the vehicle manually via code instead of via a spawn brick. To keep your vehicle safe you need a garage brick, which you park the vehicle on; when you disconnect, it despawns your vehicle if it's on a garage brick with no associated vehicle, and respawns it on that garage brick when you reconnect, so your vehicle is safe as long as you're offline. You could probably make it so only one vehicle can be active per player at any given time, or so a player can only own one vehicle.
If you disconnect when the vehicle isn't on a garage brick, it should still be accessible. And destroyable. And if it's destroyed, it doesn't respawn, so keep your car safe.
Non-explosive damage should do significantly less damage to vehicles, though. So they should be fairly hard to actually destroy.
If your vehicle is stuck and needs to be recovered, you should be able to recover it via a terminal at the dealership or something like that, for a nominal fee (like 5% of its value or $100, whichever is higher) which will return it to that dealership in its current condition.

Also, you should totally ask Hata about the climbing playertype he was working on a while ago. That'd be totally badass and a way better thing than the grapple rope (because it's about grabbing ledges and stuff rather than swinging around, and it also is significantly less handicapped with latency, plus holy stuff it's so coooool)

10
Games / Re: Minecraft; Version 1.4.5 Officially Released!
« on: December 13, 2012, 03:20:53 AM »
loving redpower 2 come out so I can play

god



DAAAAAAAAMN

Looking forward to getting a server together (with a bunch of ausbros, sorry literally everybody else but you can't handle our latency) with TC3/EE3/RP2 and probably forget all else, but still waiting on redpower and aaarrrrgh

11
Games / Re: Minecraft; Version 1.4.5 Officially Released!
« on: December 10, 2012, 07:25:03 AM »
I don't think Thaumcraft is SMP-capable, unless it changed.
It's been used in Direwolf20's SMP play from the beginning.

Making a mod with compatibility beginning post-1.3.2 that isn't SMP compatible one could safely infer you are a terrible designer or a beyond terrible programmer, or both.

12
Off Topic / Re: Metal Music Thread - Mashup time
« on: December 10, 2012, 12:40:36 AM »
Probably dragonforce. They suck in my opinion.
Actually that'd be Machinae Supremacy, they use the sound device from a Commodore 64 for synths

Dragonforce is just power metal with emphasis on POWER, and they are seriously loving awesome simply because of how over the top they are. Their newer stuff is less weebly and more good composition, and there's a new singer who has a somewhat lower voice, too. Still really good vocals.

13
Games / Re: Minecraft; Version 1.4.5 Officially Released!
« on: December 06, 2012, 06:26:50 PM »
That is probably why they didn't want to help.
Are you kidding? They have one of the most-downloaded mods behind an adfly link and a custom adloader page.

They don't want it to become vanilla because of that sweet, sweet ad revenue, even if it's only maybe 40% of users seeing them at best.

14
Games / Re: RuneScape - If I gave you my loving, would you take it?
« on: December 06, 2012, 12:25:55 PM »
This new update is dragging my leg back to playing this game. *sigh*.
I feel blasphemous for saying it but overall the game is about as interesting as GW2 with the new combat system

If you're a member anyways

15
Games / Re: Legend of Dungeon
« on: December 05, 2012, 08:30:52 PM »
4 player

online play a stretch goal

man nobody wants to get four roguelike players in a room together
jeez

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