Whats up blockland?

[Colten]

Seriously Dumb-balls, GTFO.

Store that was very noble of you. :-)

Hey, wtf is that about?

U$R or something like that was the topic title

[Ad Bot]

[dUMBELLS]

Oh, probably in RTB when I hated it at some time for some forgotten reason.

[FlyGuy45]

Oh, probably in RTB when I hated it at some time for some forgotten reason.

That quote is like 2 years old....

[Nitramtj]

Blockland works fine on my vista laptop, I doubt it's vista to blame.

[Game master pro]

Hello, and welcome back to Blockland.

First off, when the first retail screenshots were released many of us, myself included, did not like the new player model. But after playing with it for a while pretty much everyone now enjoys it as much, or better than the original. It can be changed, I suppose, but it wouldn't be that easy.

RTB won't be a "change everything about the game" as it was in previous releases. RTB 2.0 will mostly be a client side mod that includes things such as download managers and other things to do with managing your add-ons, look on returntoblockland.com for more information. AiO mod is dead and will not be coming back.

Fall damage can be turned off through a Pref variable. $Pref::Server::FallDamage or something similar I believe, or you can get the IGSO mod (In game server options), although Badspot said it can be exploited. I think RTB will have options like this when it is released, not sure about that though.

And last, building restrictions. There are ways to get past these, but it's not recommended. The brick rendering system has been completely rewritten, they're rendered in quads instead of tris and non-visible sides are not rendered at all. As such, restrictions have been put in place as to not break the whole game, the "editor wand" of RTB is also now not possible, but don't worry. We all got over it and enjoy the game a lot more now with it's increased realism, I'm sure you will too.

[Poent]

Wow, thanks for the mass of replies. I didn't realize the community was this active.

I know that some of you are rather fond of the little limb-less block heads, but when i first started playing blockland it wasn't because it was a building game... it was because it was a lego game. Heck I have a clone trooper minifig I carry around with me sometimes at work just because it's so cool.

FrAgGEr, you mentioned that I could remove some of the restrictions "like falling damage". How can i do this? also is there a way to modify the thrusters in the same manner? Game master pro mentioned the IGSO mod but i'm a little concerned about how these exploits could effect gameplay if i'm hosting a server or if its something i should be worrying about.

http://www.blockland.us/smf/index.php?topic=29721.0 (That is Retail)

It's good to see it's at least possible, but it didn't explain how to actually perform the mod. I searched a little bit but didn't see anything about it under the mods section of the forums.

and finally another question about the building restrictions... As I mentioned I noticed the massive modifications that badspot made to the engine in terms of optimizing performance. but wouldn't the optomization still work if the bricks didn't line up 1 to 1 or even if they are overlapping? this is more of a direct question twards badspot i suppose.. but if the optomization works on a gid system only, why did he choose to do so?

Thanks again for all the replies., i'll keep checking back.

[Ephialtes]

Brick objects are locked onto a grid, so you can't actually move them in intervals of less than 0.5. I suppose it simplifies the face hiding system. By now most people are very much used to the building restrictions and I think that its great that its such a rigid implementation this time around. Making do with the bricks you have is one of the challenges of the game.

[Badspot]

Historically, the reasons that RTB and other mods added stretching bricks, floating bricks and build-through were to get around the limitations of Blockland v2.  In Blockland v2 you could only have 2000 bricks or so before lagging to hell, so if you wanted a city, you had to stretch bricks.  If you wanted a staircase, you had to have floating bricks because you just couldn't afford to have support bricks.  There was no means for creating bricks with complex collision, so if you wanted a castle wall brick to work you had to have build-through.  Now with the added performance and complex collision capabilities, none of these hacks are necessary. 


There are technical reasons why snapping everything to a grid is better.  It makes the face hiding system possible like Ephialtes mentioned but it also makes network transmission much simpler.  Transferring a single brick over the network went from ~250 bits down to ~65 bits - when you're talking about tens of thousands of bricks, that kind of reduction takes minutes off the loading time.  Rendering also speeds up because you can do some shortcuts on the matrix transformations if you know you're only going to have one of 4 rotation possibilities. 

Mainly, though, it's a design decision.  The interface for arbitrary movement, rotation and scaling of bricks cannot be made easy to use.  Especially if you want to maintain full control of your player at the same time.  Blockland v2 and it's associated mods had degenerated into a cruddy looking modeling program with a terrible, obscure interface.  I wanted to bring it back to it's most broadly appealing and fun state which is that of a building game that anyone can use.  I think I've succeeded - most anyone can figure out how to put a box together and the advanced builders can make some incredible stuff. 

Also it's now much more difficult to make something that looks like stuff.  Rotated and stretched bricks sticking through each other just looks bad.  For every decent RTB build there's a hundred that look like a field of play-doh with crayons sticking out of it.

Then there's the matter of "opportunity paralysis".  When you have the freedom to do anything, most people don't know what to do - but if you give them some restrictions their mind starts to go to work.  I would go as far as saying that what you can't do in a game is more important than what you can do. 


I specifically changed the jet pack code make it impossible to change the amount of force it applies.  One reason for this is that it discourages people from making stuff mods that attempt to change datablock values during the game which causes a network de-sync and makes the game look like it's broken (this is one of the banes of v2).  But the main reason is to maintain the significance of large builds.  When you build something so tall that it takes a long time to jet to the top of it, it's a significant achievement.  If anyone could just crank their jets up to 11 and get to the top in half a second, then it's nothing.  Also the simple benefit of having the controls be the same on every server is huge. 

[Poent]

Thanks again for the replies, especially thanks to you badspot, your response was very enlightening. I had missed most of the reasoning behind why you did what you did. just out of curiosity... does your rending system turn the blocks into a single rendered polygon with just a different texture? or is the biggest optimization not rendering the non-visible sides?

it's now much more difficult to make something that looks like stuff.  Rotated and stretched bricks sticking through each other just looks bad.  For every decent RTB build there's a hundred that look like a field of play-doh with crayons sticking out of it.

Absolutely, I remember some of the servers with some extremely over wanded` structures and it was terrible. Which brings my question into another direction... what about floating bricks? or at least creating some way to ignore the unstable surface. When playing on the slopes or really any map with gentle curves or rolling lands its sometimes very difficult to find a stable plot of ground to build. If this doesn't effect any of the other building restrictions I think it would be nice to lift the restriction in certain cases. or at least be able to have it as a map specific setting (understanding that some maps are designed to be built on in certain spaces.)

I also am finding myself agreeing with why you locked the jetpack thrust. There were quite a few times in v2 where i would build a pretty immense structure and it would feel rather.. small.. in the end.

Thanks again for bringing me up to date on whats happening.

See you on blockland!

[Jervan]

Floating bricks are unnecessary because building supports doesn't impede perfomance very much, and for Slate I usually have 4 2x2x5 pillars or 2x2x1 stacks plus a baseplate on top, since it's the easiest and cleanest way. Think of it more as a challenge :)

[WRB852]

You can use the Multitool add-on to "erase" bricks without destroying all of the bricks they support.

[Ladios]

Blockland runs perfectly fine on vista. You may need to tweak some settings whenever version 9 is release because vista does have a vendetta against Blockland updates.

As for the models, We all have gotten used to the new blockodudes and like them much better. There is nothing stopping the change of playermodels, and this can actually be done in game via the playertype system now included in the game. It is just that the people who are actually capable of doing this would rather not due to their fondness of the new figures. After a while the new characters will grow on you most likely.

As far as mods go, Blockland is now mostly add-on orientated; there have been several collections of add-ons released such as weapon or brick packs, but the new add-ons system allows for various induvidual peices of mods to be turned off or on to the host's likeing. The only real mods I can think of at this moment are Rotondo's Zombie Mod, and Spaceguy's Team Death Match mods which add new game modes themselves.

[Mr_Grinch14]

QFT

I know i sound like a newb, but what does "QFT" mean? I know it is something bad, but I don't know exactly what it means.

I used to think it was "Quit the forget", But its actually "Quoted from truth"
and/or "Quoted for truth".
NINJA EDIT: Onoes Bisjac beat meh to it D;

lol i used to think the same.

But, on topic. Buiding with restrictions is actually not bad at all. I mean, its really what makes the game now.

[dUMBELLS]

I used to think it was "Quit loving Typing".
It isn't hard to build without floating bricks.