the stagnation of blockland

Author Topic: the stagnation of blockland  (Read 18824 times)

hopium man. im not trying to stuff on brickadia or anything because if there is a will, there is a way. i don't particularly dislike brickadia either, it's just the lack of 'programming features' and basic mod-ability compared to blockland. brickadia is better for building in general, i was even more impressed with the save converter (not sure if that even works anymore though) ..if they can do that one could hope there is a way to add support for / parse some TS to Unity since they are similar languages. this takes much time and dedication, however. - Whichever way you look at it things are going to be different regardless. Different doesn't have to be bad, as long as it's done right.
the save converter still works
brickadia is made on unreal, not unity and either way they want behaviors to be the main scripting language for mods
also a save converter is not on the same level as a whole ass transpiler

ts isn't perfect by any means, but calling it garbage? that's harsh man. there is plenty of room for flexibility when it comes to mods and events imo. it almost saddens me to hear you say that when you've made so many great add-ons and an epic farming server along with coding for a.o.d and more );
there is nothing about ts that makes it capable of doing everything ive done in blockland - in fact, a *lot* of things i could have done better if it was literally any other scripting language besides ts. farming and aod were hard to finish and are buggy due to the stupid limitations of ts and tge. python or lua or js would have been far better in both forcing me to learn better design principles earlier on, and being less buggy and requiring fewer to no workarounds to do what i want to do
« Last Edit: February 21, 2022, 05:35:24 PM by Conan »

>freebuild
>exciting
lol!
By exciting freebuild I mean it is a 24/7 collab build with an interesting theme and a lot of people building really cool stuff in it. Obviously freebuilds in of themselves aren't exciting, you're not even attempting to see a middle ground here lol.

the engine may be garbage but blockland has easily some of the best mod support i've ever seen
You're mistaking "best mod support" for "no mod support". Blockland is a dead game. It is no longer being moderated or worked on. Mods are just left to their own free will. There is no outstanding support or tools providing by Badspot or anything. Torque script is a limiting and antiquated game engine. Source games have the "Best mod support." Source engine is so flexible that there are more than one occasion where a half life mod became a viable game in and of itself. Blockland mods are just that: blockland mods. Badspot only incorporated the idiot-proof-drop-a-zip-into-a-folder method because he was tired of answering questions about how to install mods. He was tired of supporting mods.. lol

i highly doubt its gonna be that simple
Why not? Hell, I bet they make it even more simple and implement an actual mod workshop of some kind. They've made way more smart design decisions than dumb ones with the game so far.

You're mistaking "best mod support" for "no mod support"
?
disagree, you'll be hard pressed to find another engine where you can just slap in new models, sounds, behavior, and mutate existing functionality at runtime. the ability to just arbitrarily spawn in objects, dump their attributes, access objects with container searches and raycasts, run functions from console, is something extremely rare which I've seen in maybe a handful of games. now add in how seamlessly it's integrated with multiplayer and you may find that blockland is completely unique.

source games aren't flexible. you have access to their filesystems which means you can change models and textures and sounds, and there's a level editor. people have been conflating level editors with mod tools since halo forge. if you actually want to modify the functionality of a source game, you literally have to compile it into it's own game. there's no need to do this with blockland because it already has a scripting language you can use to extend functionality.

the biggest drawback with torque is that you cannot conveniently distribute client code to end-users. probably because something like that incurs a serious security responsibility. but that was never the engine's problem, just the average blocklander's unwillingness to download client mods. badspot's poor participation in supporting mod developers doesn't change the fact that the very first versions of blockland from 2 decades ago were so moddable that they had competing total conversions, with almost no intervention on badspot's part.

Why not?

because UE4 is a historically bad engine choice for mod support, and it's not like moddable games are in low demand or something. the people working on brickadia are very proficient with UE4, and the nature of open source means anything is possible in theory, but what they are doing will be the first of it's kind, despite UE4 existing for almost a decade, supposedly accomplished by a team of 2(?) engine developers. you are actually asking for quite a bit here. even if the conditions for mod support are met early enough, there is no way around the fact that even if it does happen, it's going to take a very large amount of time. so why jump ship

Why not? Hell, I bet they make it even more simple and implement an actual mod workshop of some kind. They've made way more smart design decisions than dumb ones with the game so far.

nice fever dream bro

because UE4 is a historically bad engine choice for mod support
Historically UE3 and previous were bad engine choices. UE4 actually has okay mod support but has terrible (or really really complicated) MULTIPLAYER mod support. If you want to take the minecraft approach (all clients have the same mods) it might work. I dont think that blockland stood for though.

Either way not very hopeful about brickadia, just hope I can clear up dirt on unreal.

source games aren't flexible. you have access to their filesystems which means you can change models and textures and sounds, and there's a level editor. people have been conflating level editors with mod tools since halo forge. if you actually want to modify the functionality of a source game, you literally have to compile it into it's own game. there's no need to do this with blockland because it already has a scripting language you can use to extend functionality.
id also like to note that the hammer editor is the loving hammer editor and I'm pretty sure nobody at valve even knows how to use it anymore because they just grab stuff from the workshops of their games and hope the map works

there is a massive difference between that and people actually playing the game

I guess my point was that there's at least activity within the right circles if you look, but you're not wrong

there is nothing about ts that makes it capable of doing everything ive done in blockland - in fact, a *lot* of things i could have done better if it was literally any other scripting language besides ts. farming and aod were hard to finish and are buggy due to the stupid limitations of ts and tge. python or lua or js would have been far better in both forcing me to learn better design principles earlier on, and being less buggy and requiring fewer to no workarounds to do what i want to do

Most of what makes TS bad is what it does on the back-end. I'm actually kind of amazed they got it to run as fast as it does sometimes since it's a lot of string manipulation BS. The language itself isn't any worse an Javascript imo.
Blaming a language because you didn't learn or use different design principles is lazy. Programming languages are the tools, not the teachers. Newer tools like linters help us more now, but you're not just going to learn how to write correct, maintainable, and well designed code from just writing a bunch of code.
Probably most of your complaints suffer from that TS was made so long ago, with basically no updates. You'd also hate all of the old versions of your favorite languages too, I'd assume. I know I hated having to use C89 once, with its strict ordering rules and such.
The assumption the designers of TS made was most likely, if you run into a limitation, you're using the wrong tool, go do it in C/C++, so they didn't make it as powerful as they could have.
All of CSE is weighing the trade-offs, then executing on the options. Unfortunately, some of your options were excluded from use. c:

yeah ik its a dumb thing to blame it on ts, part of being a good programmer is having a drive to learn stuff and self educating. it just kills the drive to do more complex things when basic things like arrays, trees, sorting, dictionaries etc have to be manually implemented and debugged, while avoiding the use of too many objects/too long strings/numbers above 6 significant figures unless you bitwise or 0 the number every step in every math operation/modulo of negative numbers/recursion due to how slow function calls are/reliance on classes due to a really stuffty class system/all the other little dumb things in ts.

at this point im too blocklandpilled to really desire to code for anything but blockland as no other thing gives as immediate/quick results as coding for blockland. im really less of a programmer and more of a game designer since i dont find inherent joy in tackling complex problems - i only do so to make things i think would be cool to play with.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2022, 03:35:27 PM by Conan »

Blockland mods are just that: blockland mods.

not sure where you get that idea. they're pretty typical and tons of games afford mods way more flexibility
AND don't require you to learn a stupid little language that you will literally never use anywhere else before or after

How are they insane? They're just open.. Blockland runs on a garbage engine.

I feel like this quote from Crook sums it up pretty well:

disagree, you'll be hard pressed to find another engine where you can just slap in new models, sounds, behavior, and mutate existing functionality at runtime. the ability to just arbitrarily spawn in objects, dump their attributes, access objects with container searches and raycasts, run functions from console, is something extremely rare which I've seen in maybe a handful of games.

This is the point I was trying to make in my earlier post.

All they'd have to do to match Blockland is allow people to mod it how they want and incorporate an easy system of mod installation.

"All they'd have to do to match Blockland's mod capabilities is match Blockland's mod capabilities."

I feel like this quote from Crook sums it up pretty well:
this. you can load in a custom model with textures by just dropping the .dts in the static shapes folder and load it in-game immediately with mission editor. of course doing that is extremely jank and unreliable online, but it still works and with that core customization in mind i cant think of another sandbox game with near-instant content importing like that.

gmod may come close, but even basic prop models require scripts that account for weight, buoyancy, etc. and they have to be packaged correctly to even physically load ingame afaik.
« Last Edit: February 25, 2022, 11:07:44 AM by mod-man »

blockland's been suffering from a negative feedback loop of there being no good servers so nobody's on and then people don't make good servers because nobody's on
the idea that i could be spending massive amounts of time on something only to have 10~ people playing on it is what made me stop for good

blockland's been suffering from a negative feedback loop of there being no good servers so nobody's on and then people don't make good servers because nobody's on
the idea that i could be spending massive amounts of time on something only to have 10~ people playing on it is what made me stop for good

That negative feedback loop is because of the inherent issue of Blockland now.

Blockland now requires multiplayer to be fun. Everything about Blockland is built to lean against multiplayer.
Back in the Pre V21 days, with all the maps, builds and content available, even if you were on the game alone,
Blockland could be fun.

Blockland became dependent on Multiplayer at a time when it should've leaned a bit further into Singleplayer.

When a game's multiplayer is dead, the singleplayer is all that remains.
If the game's singleplayer is worthless, and the multiplayer is dead, the game dies.

Maybe instead of nuking everyone because they disagreed with his decision making process.
Badspot should've taken his own advice:
"Might does not make right."



When V21 was announced, the community was divided, and most people at the time agreed that while the shaders looked nice (in the trailer)
it wasn't worth alienating map developers and people who liked playing on maps.

What'd badspot do? Called them all whiny caveman who 'no liked change'.
But it was an OBJECTIVELY BAD CHANGE.
v21 traded a gameplay feature for an aesthetic feature, that's a BAD TRADE.
The community was upset, and he decided to call them cave men, that's loving ignorant.

And every time ever since that update, whenever there's been an issue, his "fix" is to remove the
feature/make it unusable.

Keys, gone.
Forum registration, gone.

Maps propbably could've co-existed with shadows and shaders, but because he couldn't get it to
work they way he wanted, he decided to nuke maps.

also IIRC he claimed something about Steam GreenLight not accepting games that didn't have shaders,
which I'mma put a big X to doubt on that one, assuming I'm not mis-remembering this.


As I've said, the community can only do so much, but when the developer actively fought against keeping the game
alive, there's not much we can do.

The Steam Forums are basically worthless.
The BLF is inaccessible to most.

We lost RTB because we went to steam and Ephialtes presumed that meant
RTB was going to get replaced with the Workshop, as did most of us.
(Also behind the scenes stuff apparently happened between Ephialtes and Badspot.)

But basically (TL;DR), If Badspot really wanted to try to let Blockland float on it's own, He'd:

  • Set up the Steam Forums to be a Mini BLF, sans the insane BS that happens here.
  • Set up the Steam Workshop to allow COMMUNITY CONTENT FFS
  • Make an official Before v21 launch option to select between Blockland and Blockland Legacy (PreV21 features like maps)
  • Link Blockland's username system to Steam's.
  • Advertise the game.
  • Stop being so adversarial with the community.

What'd badspot do? Called them all whiny caveman who 'no liked change'.
But it was an OBJECTIVELY BAD CHANGE.
v21 traded a gameplay feature for an aesthetic feature, that's a BAD TRADE.
The community was upset, and he decided to call them cave men, that's loving ignorant.
On a related note, just how many updates did Blockland get that couldn't be done before v21 anyway?