What are you think of brickadia

Author Topic: What are you think of brickadia  (Read 19270 times)

its the beta so we dont have to do any work to fix the bugs in it and we blame all mistakes on it

I mean big props to the brickadia team for trying but none of the devs have any experience coordinating such an ambitious project to begin with. eventually the lack of funding will show as more of the team members become less interested in the project or more preoccupied by actual real life obligations like rent

-snip- 😔



Don't worry guys, mod support is coming at the end of the development cycle
Hello!

This is not a brickadia anim state machine. I have no idea where this is from, it looks like it's from someone's minecraft clone or something. Brickadia's character state machine looks like this:


Sentiment in this thread is strange. The game is absolutely being designed around mod support. Everything is modular, which is why you can already very easily add content as a developer. What we have deferred is preparing an actual mod editor to add content until the "game" is done.

There are a couple of other things we want to do as well:
- Add a scripting engine that people can use instead of blueprint (we've heard that tim sweeny is going to add one at some point within the next few years but assuming no meaningful movement on that we're probably going to have to integrate our own into unreal - which I've done before, by the way, but everybody told me they hate lua)
- Add an object extension mechanism, so that something akin to Torque's packaging system is possible. This would allow you to stick new variables, functions and overrides on existing classes without modifying or replacing the original asset.

These are both large jobs, which is why modding has its own entry in the road map. It just isn't a priority when you have the rest of the base game to build. Hope you can understand.
« Last Edit: May 20, 2019, 01:11:07 PM by chrisbot6 »

So basically mod support is being added at the end of the development cycle. Gotcha.

So basically mod support is being added at the end of the development cycle. Gotcha.
epic roast

The game is absolutely being designed around mod support.
It just isn't a priority when you have the rest of the base game to build.

Like I understand you have a game to sell here but this is why "sentiment is strange". You people need to hire a PR guy or something so we know what is actually happening

just like explain everything on a faq website or something

Like I understand you have a game to sell here but this is why "sentiment is strange". You people need to hire a PR guy or something so we know what is actually happening
You're probably right, we'll have to get something sorted when we're ready to market later.

The distinction I was trying to make was between mod support (building the game in a modular way well in advance) and actual modding tools. Tools and systems that non-developers can use, such as what I described above, don't require work in advance, but do take time to come up with.

yall gotta realise theres no wonder why the devs and br community are ignoring the blf and talking down to it - when your legit complaints are being posted in a forum known for constant stuffposting and being filled with autistic rejects, theres no wonder why theyd be ignored

post your complaints on the discord or through their email on the website. if youve been banned from the discord then damn you must be an actual idiot, glad youre banned

My likes about this game:
There are multiple devs, so this version of blockland will be actively updated. I also like sideways building which always a huge issue without hackplant. The graphics is a major improvement even if it does like look a default UE4 shader, and finally I adore the fact that this game has gone on so long with criticisms and has not been abandoned.

My dislikes:
Despite being reportedly non-toxic, users are split between beta testers and non beta testers. The beta testers in actuality are not actually good people - more likely the first person to ask for a key or friends of developers. Then you get people, like in this thread, insulting people over not having a key and disliking the currently ambiguous goal of being 'Non-Toxic' in the community -
Because it's on UE4, mods will presumably be in C++. Not only is c++ insecure as a modding language, it also has garbage garbage collection. This will lead to anomalous ram spikes, and judging from Blockland's history of addons, we're not going to have immaculately coded addons either. A lua modding language would fix this issue but would take alot of Extra time to implement.
My third issue - The Community. The blockland community is a diminished husk of what it was when I first got the game, standing at 120-30 users per day. Currently, the best place to discuss this game is here, where everyone can see it and people who are banned and people who refuse to use discord can give their input instead of a moderated selection of people who are restricted by the creators and Moderators of this game. When this game likely gets done, and if the creators do not give up on it, it is likely this type of game will have Extreme difficulty finding users as the market for this type of game is less open - only open for games such as Roblox.

I stand to believe that this game could make a reasonable impact, but only after a private means. The developers are proven to be very capable people - despite complaints and borderline tomofoolery from our community and seemingly attacks on blocklanders from their side of the community.
« Last Edit: May 20, 2019, 08:09:51 AM by Unova2 »

I'm gonna try and address all the posts here at once.

It is important to realize that Brickadia was not started with the goal to become "Blockland 2™". Originally it was intended to be a building tech demo that's nice to look at, a hobby project for just me to see how far I would get. Along the way, more people joined, and with their contributions we got much further than I originally expected, so far that it now has the potential to become a real game.

Since then a community of over 1000 people has been gathering in our Discord, and we are taking their feedback to heart by massively expanding the scope of the project over time. Going from the little tech demo to a real game that fulfills your hopes with weapons, buildable vehicles and brick physics, ingame visual scripting for bricks, and to top it all, modding, is not easy. It takes up an extreme amount of our free time, and you're going to have to be patient if you want us to succeed with this.


from what i was told the mod support in brickadia is going to be extremely limited since mods will have to be curated directly through the moderation team

What you've been told is not true. We are planning to host a curated mod portal, but that does not mean it is the only possible way to use mods. It will be possible to load unapproved mods directly onto your server.

and the game won't support certain types of mods

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Nothing supports "every type of mod".


-snip- 😔



Don't worry guys, mod support is coming at the end of the development cycle

I don't see what this image has to do with anything. It's not from our project, the blueprints we have don't look like this either as we follow our blueprint coding style when using them.


It's not impossible to predict where the game is going based off what we know about Brickadia and what the devs have said and compare it to Blockland. Just because something has mod support, doesn't mean it will be good. Good mod support is something that's taken into account and maintained from step one. The Brickadia devs have already admitted many things won't be possible on Unreal, and that mod support will only take priority at/near the end of the development cycle, which means that they're going to be implementing mod support on-top of the spaghetti ramen bowl blueprints I saw earlier today. That's never a recipe for success.

Mod support is not planned for the end of the development cycle, more like somewhere in the middle, once we've got a few other things out of the way. I know we don't have much to show for it yet, but there's no need to worry, it'll become a priority soon enough. The order in which systems are implement doesn't matter all that much as long as you always keep in mind that mods are things that will exist.

Mod support is the core of Blockland's success, without a doubt. Afterthought mod support will never compare to Blockland. You're going from Torque, an engine that was designed from the ground up with polymorphism in mind, to Unreal, which, uh, wasn't. Saying Unreal doesn't have mod support is an exaggeration but it will never hold a candle to what we have with Blockland.

There are several ways to approach modding. Torque is pretty much a wild west, where everyone arbitrarily hooks everything else and hopes that it works in the end without everything exploding when you add a second mod.

Unreal actually comes with most of a useful modding framework. You have the really fancy editor for developing, iterating and testing your content. You're able to add arbitrary assets (including blueprints) to the game from mod packages. This allows you to add custom maps, tools, weapons, bricks, ui, etc. which the game then automatically discovers and makes available. Clients connected to the server load the same mod packages so the extremely annoying server/client mod split we're used to from torque is not a thing and you can create real ui instead of relying on crap like center print. As an added bonus, these content packages can theoretically be hot loaded on a running server.

The second half of the modding framework, which is extending or replacing the behaviors of existing content, is indeed somewhat lackluster (that means, it pretty much does not exist). We are aware of this problem and already have several plans to address it. Obviously, modding for a game using a different engine will be different than what you're used to. This does not necessarily mean it will be worse in the end.

I can't pull direct sources from the developers because they hide

We aren't hiding? We have a public Discord server linked on our website that you're free to join and talk with us.

but how many months did it take them to make a shotgun and pistol lol? This is an engine that comes with FPS templates.

Such is life when you can't work on a project full time. By the way, the FPS template is honestly quite terrible, it does not compare at all to the weapon system I've been working on that supports client prediction/reconciliation and latency compensation, and extensibility so you can create mod weapons that I've never even imagined.


mod support, like netcode, isn't something you just stick into your game at any given point in time and expect it to work. mod support needs to be the primary focus from the start of development cycle to finish, and the game needs to be built on its own mod support system. this is how torque and blockland were built. mod support is a scalability problem and if scalability isn't the primary focus of all of your design patterns then eventually the project will reach a point in its lifetime when the programmers will be forced to remake everything in order to have it scale to the bigger scope.

No one is expecting to be able to stick mod support into the game and it works. Much of what we've made so far was designed with it in mind, sure a few things will need to be remade, but that's the point of prototypes. It's really not as much of an issue as you're making it out to be.

games like minecraft are a prime example of how mod support as an afterthought results in a terrible modding pipeline with multiple incompatibilities and poor debugging because everything was designed and coupled together as-is without the intention of there being external logic. it took the devs until 2017-2018 to design a consistent mod support system

Minecraft was (is) the most successful moddable game of all time so you bringing it up as a negative example makes no sense at all.

given that the brickadia devs are all unpaid adults, the poor planning will eventually catch up to them and they'll have no choice but to just cut their losses and stick with unreal's built in mod support. at that point its safe to say the game will have no mod support because unreal's mod support is a trainwreck. you, as a modder, will have to choose between writing hacky dll injections that root around in and change the virtual memory of the game, or using scratch level blueprints that will only afford you 1% as much control over the game's logic as dlls

First you talk about mod compatibility and debugging and then you present dll hacking as if that mess was somehow something to compare with. Honestly, your whole post seems to me like just trying to come up with reasons why the project can somehow not work as if you'd personally lose something if it does. That's sad.

By the way, have you used blueprint? It's actually a quite competent scripting language with more features than torquescript. The real problem is how it has so much visual noise compared to text, making it pretty inefficient to use.


its the beta so we dont have to do any work to fix the bugs in it and we blame all mistakes on it

We are usually quite fast at fixing any game breaking bug reported by our players.


Despite being reportedly non-toxic, users are split between beta testers and non beta testers. The beta testers in actuality are not actually good people - more likely the first person to ask for a key or friends of developers. Then you get people, like in this thread, insulting people over not having a key and disliking the currently ambiguous goal of being 'Non-Toxic' in the community -

You can rest assured that the testers are not only our friends. We simply gave everyone a key who was in the (public) discord at the time we released a big update. Naturally, access will become more open in the future.

Because it's on UE4, mods will presumably be in C++. Not only is c++ insecure as a modding language, it also has garbage garbage collection. This will lead to anomalous ram spikes, and judging from Blockland's history of addons, we're not going to have immaculately coded addons either. A lua modding language would fix this issue but would take alot of Extra time to implement.

C++ can not be used for modding. C++ does not have garbage collection, Lua does.

My third issue - The Community. The blockland community is a diminished husk of what it was when I first got the game, standing at 120-30 users per day. Currently, the best place to discuss this game is here, where everyone can see it and people who are banned and people who refuse to use discord can give their input instead of a moderated selection of people who are restricted by the creators and Moderators of this game. When this game likely gets done, and if the creators do not give up on it, it is likely this type of game will have Extreme difficulty finding users as the market for this type of game is less open - only open for games such as Roblox.

Of course the best place to discuss our game is not the forum for another game. Brickadia is not Blockland, and we are building our own community. We use Discord as it was preferred by most of our community when we set it up and it makes it easy to keep everything in one place.

Minecraft was (is) the most successful moddable game of all time so you bringing it up as a negative example makes no sense at all.
just piping in on phantos' behalf here - the issue he brought up is not that a game that had terrible mod support tacked on as an afterthought/mod support completed way after release can't be successful, but that it takes years (nearly a decade for mc) for modding support to actually be fully integrated when treated as a "feature" of a game rather than as the foundation of it.

im guessing the difference you missed is "lets make a game with modding support" vs "lets make a game using the modding framework we developed". the first will take a lot longer to reach full moddability state while the second is moddable out of the gate. there's definitely downsides with the second approach (much harder to add core features, optimize engine, etc once the modding system is locked in), but the foundation of moddability is how BL has always worked and attracted developers despite how stuff the engine is, so you should keep that in mind.
« Last Edit: May 20, 2019, 10:59:53 AM by Conan »

i like the ragdoll physics

im guessing the difference you missed is "lets make a game with modding support" vs "lets make a game using the modding framework we developed". the first will take a lot longer to reach full moddability state while the second is moddable out of the gate. there's definitely downsides with the second approach (much harder to add core features, optimize engine, etc once the modding system is locked in), but the foundation of moddability is how BL has always worked and attracted developers despite how stuff the engine is, so you should keep that in mind.

"Out of the gate" as in "when you finished making another game engine after years of work that's still 50 times worse than what unreal already provides", sure. Technically, using any modern game engine is already like your second method anyway: we load all of the content from a pak file using the same systems a mod would use. With unreal we also get access to the full source code, allowing us to bend some of the engine systems around and improve the modding capabilities. It's not like this is all a big black box.

"Out of the gate" as in "when you finished making another game engine after years of work that's still 50 times worse than what unreal already provides", sure. Technically, using any modern game engine is already like your second method anyway: we load all of the content from a pak file using the same systems a mod would use. With unreal we also get access to the full source code, allowing us to bend some of the engine systems around and improve the modding capabilities. It's not like this is all a big black box.
fair. my only concern then is unreal as a modding tool - from what i've seen when trying UE out, its really heavyweight and doesnt like to play nice with laptops/non-powerful rigs. gl with getting it to work!