Two YearsToday is the two-year anniversary of the release of Blockland Glass. To say the least, we've come a very far way. The very first topic was posted
two years and four months ago. Just a little trip down memory lane...
The Blockland Glass we have today isn't always what it's been. Over the past 5+ years, I have named a few different (but similar) projects by the same name. The name was originally derived from the core functionality of allowing servers to interact and control GUI elements while you play - a sort of "Glass" screen over your display. This is dated back before Google Glass, so the name was indeed original at the time.
This post primarily focuses on this Glass, though. In the summer of 2015, after the absence of RTB was taking it's toll, there were several projects in the works to put together full replacements. Some were mere reskins, such as oRBs, and some were large group projects intended to replace RTB from the ground up. Many of these projects were stagnant, and given my prior experience working with system-level Blockland mods, I wanted to put together a mod manager. I envisioned an open source project, open to input from all and that relied on users to mutually control content as opposed to a series of nameless reviewers.
Pre-ReleaseThe website came along first, before the add-on. It was very rough, and working alone I tried to bring about a new way of mod management, relying on a team of reviewers to collaborate and automatic file scanning. I worked with a (very excited) community to implement features and standards they were interested in that I was oblivious too due to a long absence from Blockland. The project used standards like Support_Updater from the beginning.
The add-on followed four months after my initial posting of the site. At the beginning, it was only supposed to be an in-game interface for the website. Below is the first image posted to the development topic, with a very crude add-on view in the first generation mod manager.
Version 1.0Unfortunately I don't have any pictures laying around for version 1.0, and I'm slightly concerned about going back through GitHub and downloading it. Our API
should still support it to some degree.
Version 1.1After the initial release, Glass expanded to have server preferences. We initially began to implement the system independently, but the idea of a common preferences platform, Support_Preferences, became popular with a group of developers. I dropped the Glass system and decided to move toward an open standard that was being developed.
Version 1.1 also included our first iteration of the Required Client system, which recommends client mods to download before joining a particular server.
Version 2.0Next, the website was rebuilt from the ground up, and it's the same website that's up today. To match the changed website, the mod manager was entirely remade as well. This was also the introduction of the Glass theme that is still used, although modified.
There weren't really all that many new features, as this was essentially a rebuild of the service. Notifications were introduced, and the Mod Manager activity feed made it's first appearance under the slave labor of GlassBot.
Version 2.1 brought back some of the original features from the first version of Glass that didn't make the initial release, such as required clients and RTB imports.
Version 3.0 - Glass LiveBefore version 2.0 had been released, I was already working on the framework needed for our social platform, Glass Live. Originally, I planned to release (or more likely the first beta of) Glass Live without any prior notices at Blockoworld 2016. Clearly, that never happened, so I moved along to develop it at an accelerated pace. The first images posted of Glass Live were very crude
Development went along pretty fast, and Paperwork/Shock became a very prominent beta tester, to the point of joining the team. Many more early development pictures can be found
here.
Version 3.2Next, Glass Live saw a huge face-lift. We introduced icons, Crown joined the team after creating the Icon Selector, and the Glass Live server was rewritten. GlassBot was officially promoted to full-time chat moderator, we got our first logo thanks to Jam Jar, and the status system was implemented. Unfortunately, development wasn't documented well between the release of 3.0 and 3.2 as I was pre-occupied with Glass Hosting, leaving us only with this early-development image:
Version 4.0Our most substantial update yet, Glass 4 retouched everything we had made yet. We rebuilt the mod manager yet again, introduced server previews, added the ability to track your favorite servers, allowed server administrators to set custom loading screens, and added avatars to Glass Live. You could now see where your friends were playing, as well as invite and join them.
Version 4.1Our most recent update,
The Stability Update, featured our a much needed refresh of the preferences system, which we are still working to expand, as well as numerous small improvements over all systems. Server control was redesigned, and the graphing system was implemented.
Today marks two years since the release of version 1.0. As of now, we have accumulated a total of
211,578 downloads delivered by the Glass Mod Manager, with
51 percent of those downloads being delivered in-game. We have
670 verified website accounts, and
1072 active weekly users, and
5646 total. At any given moment for the past few months,
over 50 percent of Blockland players in servers are running Blockland Glass, and likely more; Right now,
88 percent of online users are running Glass.
I cannot begin to express how thankful I am for the support of the community, and especially those who have contributed to the project. It would not be possible without them. I would like to thank
Crown,
Shock,
Greek2Me,
TheBlackParrot,
Nexus,
teozkr,
Jam Jar, and
McTwist for their direct contributions to the project.
We have some exciting stuff coming up in the future.
The Creators Update should be out in a few days, with a load of new behind-the-scenes work and features that make life a little easier for developers, and after that we are going to begin work on our biggest update yet.
Cheers to two years.