Return to Blockland v3

[Ephialtes]

Yeah you can't do that though. Restarting involves severing connections to clients.

[Ad Bot]

[Digmaster]

you could do some hacky way where it severs the connection to the client, then once the server starts back up it reconnects them. In the meantime they get a nice picture of "Server is restarting, please wait"

Of course this would only work if you have the mod.

[MetalMario]

I think it's a great idea.

[Ephialtes]

We don't do hacks here at RTB. I think the amount of work necessary would outweigh the benefits.

[yuki]

It's probably my inexperience, but it doesn't seem implausible when I draw up a neat chart. Anyway, I won't dwell on it any more.

[Ephialtes]

As someone mentioned, non-rtb users would just be thrown off the server and that's not cool. If people like your server they'll happily rejoin if you have to close for a minute to enable an add-on. I don't think you'll find many games that allow you to drop online content into a networked game live.

On another note; I've been watching the RTB usage stats:

http://forum.returntoblockland.com/graph.php

As you can see, there's quite a gap between "Total Players" and "RTB Players" at peak usage times - the same goes for servers although to a lesser extent. I believe the problem with servers is just that people don't know how to enable their dedicated servers to use RTB but this will be highly automated and idiot-proofed in v3.

Anyway one of my main targets is to increase RTB usage generally so I plan to implement a recommendation system. Users may recommend RTB to friends and if that friend joins RTB and specifies your ID as the recommender, you'll earn something special. Since this is a system we have total control over and would be very hard to cheat (if not impossible), we can afford to reward our users with something desirable (unlike 5 rep points or something which are essentially worthless) but I have yet to decide what that might be. Any suggestions?

[Azimuth]

Send them an official RTB pen whenever they sign up 5 users.

[random ram]

how about the abilty to do something that other normal member couldn't

[Ephialtes]

how about the abilty to do something that other normal member couldn't

Thats generally what "something special" would involve, yeah.

[Nitramtj]

Maybe the ability to beta test Ephialtes' RPG ;)

[Ephialtes]

Maybe the ability to beta test Ephialtes' RPG ;)

I think people would pay $20 just so they could refer themselves to try it out, so that'd kind of void the system.

[Space Guy]

If you give people something valuable that they'd want then they'll try and cheat the system...

Referrals usually mean people spamming servers to get maximum rewards. "HEY GET RTB _{AND ME FREE STUFF} http://spam http://spam http://spam"

[Chrono]

Oh and back onto datablock discussion, some notes to those who are unaware.
There is a built-in function called transmitDatablocks(); which will resend all datablocks to all clients. There will be some lag during this process but no freezing.
However, if you execute an add-on that contains files that others don't have, and do need, they will get some sort of error and most likely disconnected from the server. Particles also will not load the image, and instead just simply show up as squares.

About the referrals, if they pay $20 just to see something nice, then that's more money for Badspot. Some time ago Mr.Wallet had said that users with multiple IDs are allowed to use that to an economic advantage in his RoB because buying multiple IDs was supporting the game.

[AGlass0fMilk]

I know what the reward should be! You should give them a virtual high five :D

[Zenthos]

Blockbux!