Next year the Shaders Update will be 5 years old

[RTBARCHIVE]

I was so dad I nearly quit the game.

so dad

[Ad Bot]

[Rally]

Yeah, no stuff. It's a sandbox game. That's why I said its main function is building. Everything else revolves around people building stuff. Boss Battles, CityRPGs, TDMs, Slayer games, Left 4 Block or ZAPT etc.

99% of the time all interiors and terrains did were provide "pretty" physical backgrounds for everything.

Everyone here loves to loving insist that they were the greatest thing ever, but refuse to explain why they were so loving important and special other than something for you to pretend to be nostalgic over and prance around saying "I remember when terrains and interiors were a thing!" I've seen handicaps pull up the classic "Shaders = Graphics; Gameplay > Graphics" argument.

So please, I'd love to hear what sort of innovative things you people were doing with interiors and terrains, because obviously you guys were cut short just before revealing your game-changing ideas for interiors and terrains, and never got to tell people about them - because the same servers and gamemodes that people would host before the shader update are still around.

Yeah, obviously Slate was the best map for building, nobody is arguing that. But I was a 1k, I played this game in loving '07 before wrench events were around, and I can tell you that in what I would consider to be Blockland's prime, nobody gave a stuff about building anything. Nobody had the patience to learn how to make suepr awsum bildz so long as it served it's purpose. Heed's TDM's were loving god-tier compared to any of the modern TDM's (which I might add: no longer exist). All those camping RP's and all those military RP's had something to do with custom terrain and the mission editor. There were tons of cool custom maps made by different people with new stuff to explore. Nowadays sparking up some of the most basic game-modes requires an IMMENSE amount of effort in building. Back in the day making a trench was something you could do in 5 seconds with the mission editor, now it requires hundreds of bricks to be hand-placed individually. Nobody is going through this effort besides the absolute elite and they do it to wave their rooster around in the Gallery or to turn a profit like Tezuni. The amount of effort required to have fun in Blockland skyrocketed so everyone left and took their servers with them. Now you get to play the same 10 3 minute long speedkart races in a circle because nobody can be forgeted to make more. We used to have entire cities, wildernesses and islands instantly accessible to anyone who had an idea of what to do with it.

I was okay with shaders because in the original screenshots Kompressor showed us they looked really cool. He promised us a bunch of awesome updates. Then shaders came out, and they were a buggy ugly mess, the community had to put up a bunch of guides to teach people how to make their shaders not look like loving garbage. 5 years later and we still aren't far past that. 5 years later and we can still only render 8 lights at a time, we still have stuff vehicle physics, we still can only render shadows from a single light source, shaders still can't be run by the majority of the community, we still can't force darkness for gamemodes. Dunno about you man, but shaders didn't do loving squat for me.

I'm not blaming Badspot or anyone for the direction he chose to take his game in. I get it. When it comes to marketing, graphics prioritize over gameplay. But I personally think that the change of direction killed the creative spirit of the in-game community.

[Sitrus]

I don't understand why people think that the fact that people HAVE to build now leads to a better overall game.
It used to be that any old Joe could easily set up a very fun server.

[Flamecannon]

I think the biggest reason why maps were charming, at least to me, stems to the bedroom map itself. When I was younger and still had ample Legos to play with I would create this entire world within my own bedroom - my bed would function as a vast cave underneath the sheets, my desk would work perfectly as a city as it was a flat surface I could build things on, the entire floor was typically a desert or an ocean, etc. - and sometimes I would extend this world I've made outside in my backyard, which would function as a large scale forest or jungle. And what's better than creating a world and playing it with friends? Of course, playing with Lego minifigs and such has huge limits, like everytime I would try and make my character swing his sword his hand would fall off and I would have to pick it up and stick it back on and such, and furthermore like my friends would leave Legos like everywhere so that wasn't fun, picking up all those tiny Legos out of trees and underneath the bed.

Before I found Blockland, I played Roblox, but I don't think it quite captured my heart as I thought it did, rather, when I played the demo of Blockland I was ecstatic. I could actually PLAY as my character without his arm falling off, in a bedroom, albeit without a desk, with a vast outdoors to expand to; I could create this world and share it with friends much easier than I could in real life, but still have that feeling that I did when I was 5. I think what Bedroom really did was create this kind of nostalgia and that really hooked me into Blockland. Zoom like 6 or 7 years later and now shaders has been around for a while and I have yet to enjoy a single fruit of its labor since I've had somewhat lower end computers ever since. Not to say I don't think the game is fun anymore, I really enjoy these new builds that have been emerging which go hand in hand with a lot more effort, and I applaud everyone who's able to do these well, models as of late have been really killer the past few years, and environments really help in making those builds become more immersive as, instead of having to change to like a rainy map or like skylands you could just do it without reloading, I just feel like that kind of childhood nostalgia that I once had has faded ever so slightly.

[Alkatjo]

I think both of those paragraphs accurately sum up what's been going on with blockland as a whole lately.

[UnRegistered]

I just remember hosting for Blockland really late at night on Slopes and forgetting I have school the next morning so I leave my computer on (it was a non-dedicated server) and I would go to sleep with this noisy ass computer next to me because I was worried people would be mad/sad that I shutdown the server. I would play for 5 minutes in the morning before school and then head off. In the morning or after school I'd notice hundreds of random builds, pretty or ugly, made by people I'd never met. I'd read the server logs seeing how everyone got a long and had crazy fun. Every time I'd start a new server, themed or just Freebuild, I'd remember that I fueled the fun and love people had for the game. After the shader update I didn't feel the same about the game anymore. I don't prefer terrain over shaders, or even the other way around, I just see a dying game.

Every once and a while, I remember all the fun I have with this game and I try really hard to host a server (dedicated). I just can't replicate that same old feeling, part of that is no one joins anymore because these servers are old and unappealing. I'm not going to blame shaders for anything, but it seems that these events all evolved around the same time.

[JumboMuffin]

I joined 2 months after the shaders update.

[Tunderous]

Eric fartman is dead you scrub

[Swollow]

I have to say I only liked the maps for nostalgia purposes I tended to play slate anyway, so the adjustable slate environment is godly