What features do you plan on implementing in 4.1 and/or in later versions of RTB?
V4 will be containing RTB Connect (the friends list/chat system) as well as a few bugfixes for things and possibly the steam overlay to make it easier to chat in-game.
V4.1 is going to contain a total re-write of RTB to re-organize the code and optimize a bunch of it - this takes significantly less time than it sounds and is actually half-way done. There's a design fault in the current RTB networking which causes your client to open about 3 connections to RTB when you open your game which I couldn't avoid without an overhaul of some sort.
I think I listed it out somewhere, but roughly it was:
V4 - Chat Client
V5 - Gallery/Save Repository
V6 - Clan Manager
V7 - ???
The RTB Gallery. Almost as important as the chat client.
This is going to be v5 of RTB. A gallery is pretty simple so I don't foresee v5 being very far behind v4.1 but it will include the following awesome things:
- Browsing of the gallery in-game as well as downloading save files if the submitter attached them
- Saving blockland saves to your RTB account (online)
- Loading saves directly from the RTB Gallery into a server
- Backing up your save files onto RTB automatically so you can load your saves on whichever computer you're using, wherever you are.
Another cool thing is that since RTB keeps a catalog of datablocks and uiNames used by add-ons, it can also provide a list of the custom bricks/weapons/vehicles/colorsets you'll need to load the save file correctly.
It'll be an interesting one to develop because according to some research I did a while back - save files are pretty big. So managing those on the backend will be an exciting task. I've got a secret weapon, though.
my chat client that was similar to RTB
RTB Connect is pretty different to what everyone else is making, given that it's based around a friends list. I guess the fact that they can both be used to chat is the only similarity.
When I suggested this to him, he said he would probably work on this, and I would like to see how far he has come to do this.
This has been put on the feature backlog, so it'll get done eventually. The backlog is prioritised though so the more exciting things are going to get done first. You may not seen this added for a while unless I come up with a nice clean way of doing it.
Also, love the idea for the IM system. However, for chat rooms, how could that be setup so if you need to kick someone out of a chat room, it could be done?
When a chat room is registered, the registrar is given ownership which permits them to give admin rights to other users. The owner and admins can then kick and ban from their chat room as they please.
