One of the biggest hurdles in allowing ingame forum access is showing emoticons/images/text formatting and all those other things people use quite excessively. Torque doesn't have the power to do advanced text formatting and downloading images to then insert into the text would be a pain in the ass. As I've always said, the time it would take to implement this would not bring as big a benefit to users as other things I could be spending time on.
Status updates wouldn't be too bad for things like the messenger service, just not a page displaying our history of them. Also, will our minifig's avatar be integrated with this service? I think that would show to be neat.
I lied, there are really basic status updates but they're only "is on a server" and "is not on a server" so it's quite limited.
With the avatars, what I would ideally love to do is be able to generate an image based on the appearance prefs sent by the user. This is do-able to an extent if you had a bunch of transparent images of body parts that you could lay over eachother for a final image. A problem arises when the user is using a custom face/chest decal - if it's on RTB they'd expect RTB to be able to display it on them which is a pain in the ass because we store them all in zip files.
My lazy plan was just to setup a server that checks a queue of avatars to be generated, downloads a list of about 20 appearances, loads each one into blockland, takes a screenshot and crops it down then SCP's it back to the RTB server for display. The benefit is that in terms of maintainability it is 0 - if new avatar parts are added then all I need to do is update that copy of Blockland and it'll keep going. However obviously this would be slightly slow and couldn't produce realtime rendering on request since it's all about HTTP polling.
I'll take a look at the first option, it might be that I can put together some sort of export script that will generate the transparent part images for me and crop them down - either way this is definitely something I'm looking to add.
