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 kilo
bytes 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.
