I made a map in V20

[Blockomaniac]

Back in 2012, mere months before the fateful V21 update, a middle-school-me joined BLF to make a map.

I never figured it out, and gave up. Then V21 hit and I never tried again.

UNTIL NOW.

I finally did it, and it was really fun. Makes me miss the good old days, and imagine how fun they might have been as a mapmaker. I followed Ostinyo's old map tutorial, as well as got help from Ostinyo himself over discord. There's still some issues however, and I doubt anyone active here knows the solutions anymore.

Known issues:

The size of the map's detail texture is really small ingame for some reason. This causes them to look very tiled and repetitive.

The water looks fine in the main area of the map. However, since the terrain repeats, it means the lake and water repeat as well. If you go to one of the looping portions of the map, the water suddenly has a messed up surface texture where it's almost invisible in some areas:



I don't know how badspot feels about sharing add-ons for a prior version of the game, so I'm gonna play it on the safe side and not post a download link here. If someone wants it, you can find me in a lot of the blockland discords as Blockomaniac/Lego lad, and DM me from there (or just PM me on BLF i guess)

CREDITS:

me obv
Bomb Kirby and Ostinyo for help
Jaydee0004 since I used his skybox from slate_aurora for the map
VerticalHorizon since I used the grass texture from their map "Mountains of Excalibur"

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[Dr.Block]

Immaculate vibes. I hope the lost art of map making has a resurgence.

[SBG]

reminds me of Amade Isles but at night time

[Blockomaniac]

reminds me of Amade Isles but at night time

goated map, lotta island rp memories there. I wonder where Amade is now

Immaculate vibes. I hope the lost art of map making has a resurgence.

Same! BL maps have such an atmosphere that brick-built ones just dont achieve imo. Brick maps are great, but since it's all bricks they lose the charm of feeling like you're a little lego guy in a human-sized world. Take bedroom for instance: we have a brick-built version, but to me it always felt less like being a little toy man in a human bedroom, and just simply "bedroom but bricks". The immersion isn't there.

Things like textures can be replicated with prints on modter bricks, but you can only go so far with that. They can't get quite the shapes map interiors could, and can't make infinitely looping terrain like maps can (a feature that greatly added to the sense of adventure to me as a kid).

ik im going into rant territory here, but I think V21 was kind of a let down. This is because two of the critiques used to justify removing maps were:

A: they were ugly

B: they were hard to work with and removing them would speed up development of future updates

The issue is, the shaders we ended up getting are also kinda ugly (unless you install something like soft shaders), and V21 was pretty much the last big update anyway. So those two points justifying the removal of maps didn't really pay off in the end imo. No hate on badspot or kompressor though, I'm sure they were doing what seemed the most logical choice for the game's future at the time.

[mod-man]

A: they were ugly

B: they were hard to work with and removing them would speed up development of future updates

i would just like it noted because this never gets brought up: 90% of people at the time that decision was made were hosting on slate and plate edits. i distinctly remember trying to find map hosted servers and it was like 1% of the list. that definitely played in a little bit

[Conan]

although valid (ive known that argument since v21 came out and have mentioned it myself a few times to others), that argument also ignores the whole "new player who doesnt know what to do but has a cool map to explore and find secrets in" aspect of onboarding. with just slate people quickly lose interest if they didnt get the game specifically for building, and there also happens to be no interesting servers up/with players.

[Blockomaniac]

i would just like it noted because this never gets brought up: 90% of people at the time that decision was made were hosting on slate and plate edits. i distinctly remember trying to find map hosted servers and it was like 1% of the list. that definitely played in a little bit

thats fair, i remember someone taking a screenshot of the master server list in the V21 development thread and making the same point.

I imagine Badspot probably wanted to pretty up the game, and figured shadows/shaders were the way to do that. But then realized it was really hard to do with how interiors/terrain were to deal with. I'm sure he was aware of how slate was more popular than maps, so he made the decision to remove them for the sake of the game's continued future. It made sense at the time, but my issue is that it didn't really age well. That bright future sadly never came to fruition.



I just wish that we got more major updates following V21 to make losing maps more worthwhile, at least. Here's some points kompressor made in a QnA


He talks about how staying on torque and removing maps would have given the game a brighter future (even bigger than a new engine, due to the cost of time). I'll admit I don't know very much about game development, but it feels like this statement has not aged very well. Unity continues to expand today, while torque is totally forgotten. Not sure how Torque 3D is doing though. Maybe there's something unique about Torque that warranted Blockland staying on it, I don't know. I have no idea if porting games to other engines is even possible. I imagine it would basically just be remaking the game from scratch, add-ons included. So, not very feasible. I doubt any game dev wants to have to attempt it.

But I can only imagine how much better off blockland might be nowadays if the switch to an engine like Unity or Unreal was made back in 2012.

Komp also mentioned things like an official heightmap generator using bricks, or official BLB tools being possible due to the time saved from not working on interiors/terrain. We got default modter, but I think GSF ghost made those instead of badspot/komp/rotondo, so the "development time saved can be spent on other things" argument doesn't really work there I think. We did get public bricks though, which are cool. But again, blockland didn't really see much content additions to make the removal of maps pay off. There were a lot of patches since then, but not really new content that I can recall.

Again i'm not a game dev, so it's totally possible there's more to this argument that i'm just ignorant of. I hope if badspot ever sees this thread, I'm not annoying him lol

[Goth77]

I actually do miss maps, by the time I started getting decent with torque constructor and mission editor maps went poof D:

I would be totally cool with sacrificing shadows and shaders for maps with terrain and interiors - I usually keep them disabled anyways