So, The RTB3 Forums & Download System are live and minus numerous small bugs, there have been no system-crippling issues (yet). The RTB Mod Bot has also not hijacked the forums yet so I’d call this release a smooth one. I’ve also noticed there is much confusion over RTB3/RTB2 and all that jazz that I will try and sort out. First off, it was just the RTB3 Forums & Download System that were being released on Saturday - not RTB3 itself. Secondly, the RTB you use on Blockland right now uses the RTB2 downloads system which people have stopped submitting things to, and RTB3 uses the RTB3 downloads system. It makes sense really, but it can be a little confusing.

Anyway obviously this is a bit of an awkward interval between RTB2 and RTB3 since nobody is submitting stuff to the old system (and rightly so, once you go v3 you don’t go back … generally) and honestly, RTB3 won’t be “ready” for a couple of months so here’s the plan:

Despite you guys voting that you wanted a full RTBv3 release I have decided that you really don’t want to wait for it and instead I am going to wrap up everything, get it tested speedily and release it lacking quite a few minor and a couple of major features. Once this is out I will be attempting to add these minor/major features on a weekly basis. That way you can enjoy the new system sooner, and still get everything promised in v3. Feel free to criticise my violation of the system of democracy (like politicans don’t do that every day!) in the comments section or the RTB Development Thread.

Oh and just to put the pressure on, Lets set the RTB3 release date for … July 25th, 2009

Yep, the forums and download system for RTB3 are now open for you to register and upload your add-ons to. Please report all bugs in the Helpdesk forum, and enjoy toying with the new system.

http://forum.returntoblockland.com/

http://mods.returntoblockland.com/

So, the new RTB forums are planned to be released this coming Saturday, thats only two-ish days away now. We’ve been ramping up the testing and found quite a few bugs so far, which have all been fixed.

You may have noticed recent RTB downtime which has been a problem. I investigated this today and discovered a problem with a php5 install we’re using so thats recompiling at the moment, but I also found a serbian IP that was accounting for over 15% of our traffic and I have blocked this from accessing the server now, so maybe things will be a bit more stable.

Anyway, we’re still on target for our saturday release and thats all that matters!

As some of you may know, the RTB Downloads System and our new Forums are going to be opened on Saturday, June 27th. You’ll be able to register a new account on our shiny new forums and more importantly you’ll be able to upload your add-ons to the new Downloads System in preparation for RTB3. I’d like to remind you to resist the urge to “help other people” but submitting their add-ons for them - Initially we won’t be accepting any submissions if the person submitting the add-on did not make it. With regards to the old downloads system, we will be leaving this running until RTB3 is released (and maybe a month beyond to encourage people to move their add-ons to the new system) at which point it will be shut down, destroyed and finally buried at the bottom of the ocean. This gives you plenty of time to download anything you want to keep off the system before it closes.

Finally, if you’ve been keeping up with this blog you’ll know all about the RTB Mod Bot but for those who haven’t, I’ll explain. The RTB Mod Bot is a robot who automatically creates a thread for any add-ons you submit to RTB in a new child board of the Add-Ons forum called “RTB Listings” which will be visible to everyone on Saturday too. The RTB Mod Bot also posts into this thread when you release updates for your add-on, and edits the thread when you change details. Overall she is a very handy robot.

Now, if anything should go wrong on Saturday (errors and such) please report them to support@returntoblockland.com so we can sort them out quick and make sure everything runs smoothly. Feel free to post questions about the system and how to do things in the Helpdesk of our new forum, which will be located at http://forum.returntoblockland.com/

See you guys on Saturday.

Hi.

So, as you know - v12 is out and it is good. It introduces a couple of things that allow RTB to run nice and smooth, namely the ability to tell the game that files exist without having to force the game to re-check the entire Blockland folder for new files. The second is a bug fix for the fileDelete command that actually forces the game to forget the file existed (otherwise things would mess up).

As for progress on RTB, I’m sure you’ve seen a few of the pictures lying around - obviously things are getting done, just not at a very speedy pace. I’m going to just whack out a list of items I have left to complete before we can happily release, the ones with a star mean high priority.

• In-game Comment Submitting/Viewing *
• YourMods “Group View”
• File Update Checking *
• Overhaul RTB Options GUI
• IRC Bugs
• Server Control Bugs/Suggestions *

That is essentially the list of things left, minus a bit of testing here and there. Now given that RTB is taking such a long time, I’ve been considering releasing it with a few features missing (such as IRC Fixes, the YourMods Group View) to speed things along - and these could then be released in a smaller patch along the way. The second thing holding us back is our new forums. I haven’t actually finished the reputation system yet so it’s somewhat broken, but if we were to push for an early release I could disable this and get it working after RTB3 at some point.

Now, incase some of you haven’t seen the new Mod Management view, check it out now:

View of the "Your Mods" category

So what I want to hear from you now is whether you think we should go for an earlier release with a few items cut out (to be added in a patch soon after release), or just keep plugging away at development until it’s good and ready? Let us know either in the comments or in our Development Thread.

Love Ephialtes

First off, I have decided that RTB will be released after v12 of Blockland, mostly because there’s a little fix in there that RTB needs to run nice and smooth.

Secondly, I mentioned a while ago I was testing a server for RTB Connect (and I also mentioned it was going super well) however after about a week of the server being online non-stop its CPU and Memory usage climbed from a modest 15% to around 85% and it was really slowing down the RTB Service so unfortunately I had to nuke it. Essentially I’ll be looking at some more light-weight server solutions, perhaps Python based. We’ll see.

RTB is also nicely on schedule (we don’t have one, so that makes it easy) and I’m about to send the first private beta copy out for some testing and borking. Yeah, apart from that - nothing really. Here’s a picture of the new transfers gui since these wordy posts are pretty boring.

A sneak peek of the new file transfer gui.

Long time no see. I’m glad to announce that I sat down over a 3 day weekend and really plugged away at the in-game version and it is very nearly hot to trot, so to speak. There is still one large issue that I am facing which is to do with the extremely frustrating Resource Manager (this basically remembers all the files in the Blockland directory so the game doesn’t have to ask windows for the file list over and over again). When people download files in-game, the resource manager doesn’t know about them (since it only builds a file list when the game starts up). The problem here is that the game won’t know you have a new add-on so you can’t use it until you start the game.

We solved this problem in RTB2 with a hacky method which basically tells the resource manager to refresh itself, which means running through about 1k+ files and causes the game to lock up for maybe a second or less. You may notice this lag when you finish downloading a file in the mod manager. Obviously the lag isn’t great so I’ve been looking into ways to tell the game about single files which has not worked. Essentially the new plan is to sweet talk Badspot into adding a little C++ method i’ve written up to do exactly this. It all depends on whether BL v12 is planned to be released before RTB v3.

Anyway apart from that, things are looking good. The only things left to do on the ingame portion are:

• Comment Display/Editing/Posting
• Screenshot Viewing + Caching + Server-side PNG Compression
• Add-On Management
• Top List/Top 10 Add-Ons/Add-On Spotlight

I have no ETA on these features, as I said it hinges on the v12 release date. If i can release v3 without huge delay and get this C++ patch in, that’d be perfect. I’m also pleased to announce we’ve successfully been testing the RTB Mod Bot in a secret section of the Blockland Forums called RTB Listings. It’s a child board of the Add-Ons forum which you’ll all get access to when RTBv3 goes live.

As mentioned earlier, we plan to have a switchover period where people can re-submit their v2 add-ons to the v3 system. This is both to filter out bad add-ons through re-review and also because its just a lot of work to move them over myself. There will be more information on this switchover nearer the time.

So I haven’t posted on the topic of RTB Connect for a while now, but there have been developments. For anyone who doesn’t know what this is yet - RTB Connect is a steam-like system whereby users ingame can have their own friends list, send private messages to those friends, see/join their servers and even create chatrooms and invite people to them. It is intended to replace the IRC which is pretty hard to manage. RTB Connect is expected to be in RTB4.

Anyway, I recently started the RTB Connect application on the RTB Server and it has been happily munching away on our memory (currently consuming 31% of our total memory) but it has barely affected our CPU load at all which is great - and apparently you guys haven’t noticed RTB going slower either. My concern is that we might get some higher CPU load when we have 400+ users online at the same time on this thing, but we will see.

RTB3 is going fine, the online system is basically done so its just the ingame portion that needs to be completed. Like I said last month, it’ll probably be out in a month or so but I won’t be posting more screenshots because everyone loves a surprise.

I’d like to announce our plans for a new feature we hope to introduce in RTB v5; The Gallery.

Again, like the Downloads system this will be accessible via our forums and in-game. The idea is to provide users with a place to host and share their saves. Users will be able to upload their saves and screenshots to accompany it from in-game using an upload tool and then other users will be able to download and load these saves in-game.

The user can go to “Load Bricks” as usual and click “Get From RTB” and saves can then be loaded in one of two ways. The user either loads a save directly from the site, or they save it to their saves folder for later use without having to go into RTB again to get it.

Much like the downloads system, users will also be able to comment and rate on the saves posted and there will be various spotlights to highlight highly rated builders. We’re hoping this allows you guys to share your saves easier and in some cases to prove ownership of a certain build. One of the main focuses of this system is that users can operate it entirely from in-game without having to go onto our forums to upload them. Saving will work by going to “Save Bricks” and then clicking “Save to RTB” where you will be presented with a small form to fill in, and the opportunity to take more screenshots to accompany your gallery submission. Your gallery postings will then be shown on your profile for everyone to see, as a portfolio of sorts.

There are also plans to give you private folders to upload your saves to as a backup, so if you’re playing Blockland at a friend’s house you can load your saves from your RTB account without needing to copy them over from your computer. It will also help if you have any computer trouble and lose your saves.

We may or may not restrict the “Save to RTB” feature to only work if the server you’re on is yours, these are technicalities to work out at a later date. Anyway, let us know what you think and feel free to post suggestions or comments either on this website or in our development thread in the Blockland Modifications Forum.

Ok, so I haven’t posted an update in a while… Basically i’ve now finished file commenting and most of the moderator tools and general functionality. The last outstanding things are the file rating algorithm which I still need to suss out, the search tool and the presets browser/downloading. All of those should take around a week hopefully, but we’ll see.

On the in-game side of  things, the core of the new Mod Manager seems to be working great and all the GUI generation seems cool too. There’s still lots of work to be done on this but because its easier to work in Torque on this sort of thing than in PHP, it shouldn’t take as long. There’s also notably less functionality that needs to be available in the in-game mod manager, since we don’t need all the moderator tools which take up a lot of dev time. Still no estimation for completion, but there never is anyway so thats nothing new.

On another note, I am considering adding a new special file section, the “Bargain Bin”. This will be a place that add-ons are moved to when they work acceptably but the quality is extremely poor. It’ll be generally discouraged to download things from the Bargain Bin so its mostly there to appease the idiots who just want low quality add-ons. Let me know what you think of this idea by dropping a comment.

Finally, I was promising an overhauled IRC system in RTB v3 however I have decided  to scrap  that. Existing IRC bugs will be fixed but it won’t be all shiny new like the mod manager. The reason for this is that RTB Connect (the buddy list system) will be coming shortly after v3 in RTB v4 which supports chatrooms much like IRC and I am convinced this will be a better solution for everyone, given that we have random people dropping into the IRC advertising things to users who are trying to play Blockland.

Anyway thats all the progress I’ve got, the Downloads System + new forum will be opened to everyone within a few weeks so they can move all their add-ons over to the new system. The old add-ons will be available after the switchover for a couple of months to give people enough time, then they will be cleared out.