Question for Badspot: Will you add Steam Workshop support for addons?

[Planr]

I just read this post by Badspot here and got curious. Will there be any future support for Steam Workshop for Blockland? You expressed clear interest for it in that post but that was more than a year and a half ago. Are you no longer interested in that? Scout31 and friends are trying to develop Blockland Glass as an alternative mod manager replacement for RTB but it is garnering very little interest/attention in the major/non-forum community.

Also another question, one that I am interested in a lot. What are your plans for sandbox games in the future? I know this has probably been asked before but do you plan to make a Blockland "sequel" type game on a newer engine maybe in 5-10 years from now? I would buy the stuff out of that game if it ever happened.

[Ad Bot]

[Xphifre]

Theres no point in a workshop. Just install addons

[Duck Quackington]

Theres no point in a workshop. Just install addons

this

[Masterlegodude]

Theres no point in a workshop. Just install addons

Having a workshop would download the add-on straight to your Add-Ons folder

[Pie Crust]

Having a workshop would download the add-on straight to your Add-Ons folder

Enabling Firefox's "Ask me every time" in the downloads tab will allow you to save the add-on directly in your Add-Ons folder. Besides, if Steam Workshop ends up being a thing, the forums would probably migrate to Steam and not everyone has full Steam community features (like myself) so we wouldn't be able to participate.

[Element]

see another point is that there's the coming of Blockland Glass and potentially other add-on hosting and distribution platforms, so really steam workshop isnt necessary

we've made our own version

[TheBlackParrot]

i would much rather prefer steam workshop, y'all saying "lol configure ur browser to download it here!" can screw off lol, that's a terrible idea for those of us who actually use the internet outside the forums

some also don't realize how much having a good auto-update system would be, Support_Updater repositories are still a very manual process to update.
workshop would be to just upload it and be done.

from an addon dev standpoint: this would be great

[TheLeaderOfTheRebellion]

workshop = add-on forums used less
this means
workshop = people don't really discuss the add-ons much


workshop = Badspot can't easily failbin bad/broken add-ons
_{RTB alternative (download through ingame client) = great}

[The Resonte!]

workshop = Badspot can't easily failbin bad/broken add-ons

this is an interesting point

[TheLeaderOfTheRebellion]

this is an interesting point

i mean he can crc them but its workshop that he doesn't entirely control rather than forums which he owns or rtb which ephalties owned

[Shift Kitty]

workshop = add-on forums used less
this means
workshop = people don't really discuss the add-ons much

People discuss workshop content all the god damn time. There's comments and I'm pretty sure each workshop item can even have it's own damn subforum. Which by the way, if you've played any steam game with a good modding community, actually gets used.
I would really really really prefer an organized workshop that you can actually properly search in rather than some clusterforget "whatever people posted in last" add-on board with no categories and a search that's meant to be used for searching for generic posts rather than content posts.

workshop = Badspot can't easily failbin bad/broken add-ons

this is an interesting point

i mean he can crc them but its workshop that he doesn't entirely control rather than forums which he owns or rtb which ephalties owned

Where do people even get this idea from at all? Any Blockland Steam community moderator can remove bad workshop items with probably one button. If anything it's easier because it's a separated report/space from all the generic stuff he has to go through on here.

And if anyone for some reason believes it opens up more exploits, I'd like them to elaborate how. Things can just as easily be removed from there as they were on here and RTB. RTB even had a filtering process and backdoors still got through.

[Planr]

Some things to take into consideration. A larger proportion of Blockland users now come from the Steam side of things . I don't know numbers here but I am willing to bet that not many of them even know about this forum. Where do you think they are going to expect to get addons from? By making an account on an old forum just to dig through pages and pages of bad search results and broken download links to finally find the addon they were searching for? Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is to find addons nowadays? "Just download addons" is total bullstuff because you have to find them first, and finding them is the hard part.

Several reasons why the Steam Workshop is better:

• Reach a much larger group of people. Much easier access to addons for people from "the Steam scene". Addon popularity will skyrocket even more and thus further prolong the life of this game's online community.
• Finding addons is much easier for everyone, especially for users from Steam sales. They are all in one centralized place with a potentially (much) more streamlined and easier-to-use search process. See also the Gmod workshop compared to getting mods from GarrysMod.org. It's not hard to figure out which is easier.
• No more relying on people's own unreliable third-party file hosting. Finding addons on the forum these days is hard enough when half the addons are from old topics where the download links no longer work or their filehosting was taken down. See the Old Addons archive for a perfect example of this.
• A rating system so that communities can vote on the quality of mods. No more having to guess and risk it if you haven't downloaded the addon before.
• Additional addon satistics such as how many people have downloaded the mod, related authors, etc. It also lets you easily find the author on steam which is in most cases a much easier way of getting in touch with them if something goes wrong with the mod.
• A dedicated screenshot system that is much easier to use than uploading images to imgur/tinypic/puush/photobucket and then adding them in to a forum thread
• The interface and everything else is already out there. No having to wait on development of someone else's own obscure filehosting manager. All that would have to be done is for Badspot to get the scripting done so mods downloaded on the Steam Workshop go straight to the addons folder. That's literally all there is to it.
• Reaching a much larger userbase will result in attracting new modders to the game. Would you like some cool new addons that have never been done before?
• Make your own custom addon collections so people can more easily download the content you use on your server.

[Trogtor]

I love the idea of steam workshop except there isn't any quality control like rtb had

[The Resonte!]

Where do people even get this idea from at all? Any Blockland Steam community moderator can remove bad workshop items with probably one button. If anything it's easier because it's a separated report/space from all the generic stuff he has to go through on here.

true true

lets hope that that happens

[Planr]

I love the idea of steam workshop except there isn't any quality control like rtb had

Users can rate mods. It'd be easy to figure out which mods are stuff and which aren't if one has 4 and a half stars and the other has 2.