Blockland v18 Suggestions

[The Titanium]

posing blockheads

THIS ISN'T GMOD

[Ad Bot]

[heedicalking]

posing blockheads

This is a horrid idea. Then you just get
"LOL BLOCKHEDS HEAD BIG FUNY LOL UTUBE TIME!!!!!"
and all of those crappy valve spawned memes copied into blockland.

[The Titanium]

they're not crappy D:
they don't belong in blockland

[Venson]

they're not crappy D:
they don't belong in blockland

They're not crappy. They don't belong in blockland.

My head hurts.

[The Titanium]

Elaborate on this.

[phflack]

a way to have things DL into the client while ingame and then send a check to the server saying that they have the files, which is a model which is a buildable vehicle?

[brickybob]

Not possible without engine changes.

Explain why we had that in the original RtB?

[The Titanium]

They're not crappy. They don't belong in blockland.

My head hurts.

Explain your sarcasm.

[Peejster]

Explain why we had that in the original RtB?

Because there were engine changes

[M]

Explain why we had that in the original RtB?

Because in v0002 and RTB and all those other mods, bricks were shapes, not a custom brick class.

Because Torque's rendering isn't exactly the fastest, having 1000-2000 of these shapes at once killed the engine. That's just not satisfactory, so kompressor wrote some optimization code that culls faces of bricks that are touching. Due to the way this works, it's impossible to have bricks arranged in arbitrary units - they have to be locked into the 'brick grid' for the engine to be able to tell what faces to cull to speed up the rendering.

Because of this, moving bricks on an arbitrary grid is impossible. This is why we can't rotate bricks to 45 degree angles or make stuffty brick vehicles. On the plus side, we can have more than a thousand or so bricks without dying horribly.

You asked for it to be explained
I'm pretty sure Badspot has already no'd brick vehicles basically every update anyway.


As for things I'd like to see made as part of v18:
A clientcmd to open the events GUI for a specified class, to allow us to actually use input events on things other than bricks
I'd like to see this to allow minigames to be evented directly, as well as other things such as using events to control systems in other mods

Increase mounted image count to 8 or so rather than 3
If we could have 8 or so images mounted I don't think that would be so many as to cause them to lag behind the player as I've heard they do sometimes, and it would allow us to do things like new "pseudo" avatar pieces (not nodes in the player but using them for mounted images)

BLBs included in resource downloading
I believe I have discussed this one before, would involve resource manager rewrites, lots of work apparently. Should be obvious why I'd want it though, even though I don't make bricks.

Host name/BL_ID shown as separate fields on master server output/serverSOs rather than the host name being part of the server name
Would pave the way for server favourites, in fact the whole server favourites mod with this change would probably only be twenty lines or so counting adding a button to JoinServerGUI

[Wedge]

Buildable vehicles are definitely possible. However, in the current version of Blockland you would need to make a model for every single brick in the game, and even then, it's be buildable in the same sense that RTB's vehicles were buildable: there would only be a couple of slots where you could fit bricks at certain rotations and they would float several feet behind a moving vehicle on a server with even moderate latency.

A far more promising and interesting way to do it is to give people a choice of wheels, chassis, engines, etc, and snap the different items together kind of like turrets on a tank. You'll also be able to individually break different parts of the car this way, and it could lead to awesome things happening when someone blows up your car, like an engine flying one way, wheels rolling another, and your seat flying straight up into the air. You'll also be able to paint each part individually. You could also snap more parts on for different effects, like snapping in a set of two seats vs snapping in a turret vs snapping in a boat that you can eject from the car and sail away in, etc.

[Flush535]

Being able to sort your events into "groups" or, "folders" would be nice.