I love how the BLG topic is now a battleground........
Any topic that Ephi and Lub get involved in becomes a battleground
I have around a 8 hour bus ride up to Atlanta today, so I've done some thinking about BLG. Its focus is really mucky and unclear, so I've been doing a bit of big-picture thinking. Copying RTB is definitely not what we want to do. We do however have similar motives as to RTB. We want to make the Blockland experience more wholesome, user friendly, and clean. We have a lot of small features here and there, but nothing big that benefits the community. What were working on is pretty mucky too. It's like we're just trying to cram a bunch of APIs and tiny features into a package.
Remote control is a neat idea and all, but not exactly appropriate for Blockland at the current state. All the hosts have their own means of management, and everyone else usually has access to the device they're hosting on. So, that's suspended indefinitely.
I've come up with something big we can do. I've already hinted at this, but it involves better tying together different installations of Blockland, and bringing together all of it as the identity of the player. There isn't one huge feature that can do this, but it can be acomplished by a set of features with a similar goal. The first feature in the group is something equivalent to Apple's iCloud. It automatically transfers saves, avatars, and more between installations. There will be an API available to developers to utilize this too. Expanding on existing technology, upon downloading an Add-on via RTB, it will prompt other installations wether to install it too. The second feature has already been mentioned. Users will be able to download and update RTB add-ons to their server directly.
In addition to extending the personal account, the feature set will include sharing of saves and a social system. This will include long term groups (Clans, Servers), personal messages, and save sharing.
Instead of just calling it "the set of features", I'd like to come up with a name for it. My current ideas are "BLG Link" and "BLG Unite". If anyone comes up with something better, I may use it.