Blockland - What's Changed, and My Thoughts
When I joined Blockland in V10 back in 2009, the game wasn't all that popular, but it certainly wasn't unpopular, people played the game more and more as time went on, new features were added, seeing as how I had joined just after the events update in V9, V10 being a Bugfixed version, eventing was something huge for me. Eventing is very much just simplified coding, so I, and many others, loved it. The game was skyrocketing people were playing with new updates, the physics update, the Halloween update and many more. Alongside that, community member Ephialtes created and hosted
Return to Blockland, a very organised and quality controlled addon arsenal, very similar to steam's workshop. As time grew so did this project. RTB would check addons for comparability errors and allowed for community ratings, So saying RTB was the backbone of any good BL server would be an understatement. But then one day, a forum User by the name of Kompressor announced the newest and latest update to Blockland.
V21 - The Shadows and Shaders UpdateThis update promised to add a new set of seemingly pretty shadows and shaders. Fantastic images along with promises came along with this announcement, but according to kompressor, due to the way the shadows and shaders worked, Maps had to be removed. He said that the idea of maps may have been cool once upon a time, but they grew ugly over the years. Alright, that is a fair point, I still seemed skeptical of this update, and so were many others, and a lot of people were outraged. But, I still didn't really like the idea of removing one feature to add another.
I certainly never agreed with the shadow and shader update, sure it looked nice, but trying to do this on an old engine like the torque engine was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Along with removing maps, the V21 update didn't work well with most people's PCs because, unless you had a high end gaming rig, you either had low or no settings enabled when it came to shaders. This was because either A. The higher settings just didn't work due to your Graphics Chipset/GPU or B. You're frame rate took a stuff. On top of that, even if you got the highest settings working at a decent frame rate, even if you could see the shaders and shadows, they look like stuff, and the only way to fix this is to use modified shader files that tax your computer's resources even more. This just seemed like a ham-fisted update just to meet some unknown quota, and it was more than likely for steam. Removing features is never a good thing, and your entire 'well maps look ugly' arguement flies right out the window because the shadows look like stuff, and B. The game is over 10 years old, the engine is older than that, I don't I know why anyone expected triple A quality from an indie game made in 2007.
Soon after the update a large chunk of the community jumped ship, including Ephialtes, along with his RTB service. This was devastating to the BL community, leading a few more people away from BL. On top of that in the following year BL was DDos'd, Keys were leaked and the BL Hack became widespread. And although almost all of these issues have been resolved, along with RTB being replaced with Blockland Glass, we still lost a large chunk of the community. And while we do have player jumps when we have steam sales, I'm not seeing the same creativity out of the community as I used to.
These are just my thoughts and views of what's happened.
Disclaimer: because I know someone will say it, no this isn't a 'Blockland is Dead!!!' Thread, so calm it.
