Well it’s come to my attention that we haven’t really been updating the blog. So it’s my pleasure to announce that I’ll be contributing significantly more to the blog now. We’ll start off with a recap of all the RTB 4 updates and then we’ll have a series of (almost) daily updates that should keep you informed about what’s up with development. If you want to follow development yourself, keep watching on this thread over on the Blockland forums. We hope to provide a distilled version of the updates to you here, so you don’t have to read the thread. And now, without further delay, we’ll start with the recap of the last few weeks or so.
July 11
So a while back I said I’d be experimenting with a proprietary chat server - I’ve pretty much finished this and got a proof-of-concept model working in python which has a significantly smaller CPU and memory footprint while also being able to happily hold >1000 concurrent connections which is likely more than we’ll ever need. From a load perspective this is really promising - I wasn’t too keen on increasing the server resources for the old server. Due to this, I think I’m going to go ahead with our own chat. A lot of time was spent with me trying to figure out how the XMPP protocol worked so it’ll cut out a lot of time if I just make up our own protocol. It also makes it much more extensible because I don’t have to learn someone else’s codebase. So the features I’ll be aiming to implement for v4 are:
- Friends list + presence
- Friend invitations
- Friend messaging
- Friend list management (groups)
- Blocking
- Status updates (away/busy/available)
- Join friend’s servers
- Invite friends to the server you’re on
- Private chatrooms (not sure whether I will allow people to make them whenever or whether they must be requested/registered)
- Private chat settings (admin/mod/access settings)
— Ephialtes via the Blockland Forums
July 12
BlockBot will be retired or atleast take a lesser role when the v4 chat system is out. At the moment everyone is shoved into a single IRC room - this was just a terrible idea to begin with because 32 blockland players in a single server is a nightmare, let alone 500.
v4 will not have a main chat area - you’re just going to have a list of friends you can message. As mentioned, there will be private chatrooms (and perhaps a public helpdesk/general chat) but ideally there won’t be 500 people in a single room at one time.
As for server invitations - you can only send them to people on your friends list so there’s no issue of spam (and if someone is spamming you, remove them from your friend list).
– Ephialtes via the Blockland Forums
July 14
I’ve been continuing development on the chat server and surprisingly this is nearing completion. Authentication is in place as well as private room persistance. I suspect the server will be complete in the next couple of days.
The toughest bit is the interface for the chat - It’s very interactive and looks pretty cool so far. It should feel like a proper friends list and not some hacky torque add-on. Here’s another example of the menu functionality (my bad for the jpeg quality):
V4 was originally going to include a lot more features but I’m thinking I might just cut everything out and release it as just the chat client (and then introduce the other features in 4.1). I think people have waited long enough for this so I don’t want to delay it any further. I will be aiming for a private/public beta of the chat client in roughly a month’s time and depending on performance we can then go ahead for a full release.
–Ephialtes via the Blockland Forums
July 17
To keep people from sending you random invites set “People who can send me an invite” to “Nobody at all…”
You can see in the earlier picture where the Invite notification bar is, and also in this one. When you click it you’re shown this:
–Ephialtes via the Blockland Forums (part 2), edited for blog post
July 18
I’ve finished the friends list and private room portions of the chat server now, and also integrated that into the RTB database. The things left to do are authentication (leaving this until last because I’m developing locally, but it won’t take long at all), sorting friends into groups, and messaging which is also relatively simple. Fun bits then include some security and secret management commands and then I’m going to profile and load test it and see where we stand after that.
Then we move onto the chat client which is a bit harder. The friends list part of the interface is complete and just requires a few small changes to get it working with the new server, then there’s just the messaging interface which shouldn’t be too hard. As you can see from the screenshots, a bunch of the work chat client is already done.
–Ephialtes via the Blockland Forums
July 19
Messaging is done now, along with authentication. Blocking/unblocking of friends as well as status updates (away/busy/available) are also implemented.
–Ephialtes via the Blockland Forums
Questions and Answers
Q: Will you be able to view things in the holding tank from the mod manager?
A: No.
Q: Are you hurrying up development of the chat client because of other similiar projects on the Blockland forums?
A: Sure, partly. I’ve thrown around a lot of ideas in this thread regarding a chat client and it’d be a shame if someone else implemented my own ideas before I could. It’s not like I’ve suddenly decided to make a chat client - this has been on the drawing board for atleast a year.
Q: What features will be in RTB 4.1 and later versions?
A: 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 - ???
Q: What’s all this about the gallery?
A: 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.
Q: Will you be able to kick people out of chatrooms?
A: 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.
Q: Why doesn’t RTB host music files?
A: We used to allow music but people would just submit full songs. There was also a lot of annoying code to make it dump the file in the Music folder instead of the add-ons folder. Basically it was just too much work for a few dumbasses to upload Justin Bieber songs.
Q: What will happen to the IRC?
A: It’s going away forever.
Q: Will you add voice chat?
A: The version of TGE that Blockland uses has no support for microphone capture (or any support for anything else voice chat would need) so voice chat won’t be happening. I doubt I’d want to inflict such a thing on the community either.
Q: Will beta testsers be listed in the credits for RTB4?
A: No.
Q: When the master server goes down I the chat system will go down too. I found it useful when the master server was down occasionally to check what was going on and some people gave server IPs to connect to manually. Do you have a plan for this?
A: I’m designing a contingency system which RTB Connect would put in place if it lost connection to the master server. It will essentially allow people to login to RTB Connect as “guests” (you won’t get your friends list) and will be auto-joined to a central chatroom. There are a few things to consider here but I feel it’ll meet the requirement you mentioned above.
Beta Testing Information
Every major release there is typically a beta testing period spanning several weeks. Beta testers are selected by a simple first come, first served selection policy. Fairly soon beta testing will be open for registration at this link. Make sure to bookmark it if you’re interested in testing and check daily!!
Typically beta testing is opened to 100 people. After that, as we need more testers and others get bored and stop testing, more positions are opened. Again, it’s a first to register, first to test policy. If John Doe is the 100th person to sign up and <insert the name of your favorite person here> didn’t sign up yet, too bad. John Doe tests and the god of Blockland mods does not get to test.
Your job will be to test the game and report any bugs to the beta testing forums. You will be given access to these forums upon being accepted into the program. Beta testing is a thankless job, you will not get paid, you will not get put into any credits, we won’t make you an admin on the forums, nobody will remember you. All you get is the smug satisfaction of getting something before everyone else and/or the warm fuzzy feeling for helping make the mod better for everyone else in your small way.
Mailbag
Have any questions about the development and future of RTB? Questions about Blockland in general, or the forums? Any questions at all for the staff? Email them to the following address:
The best will be featured in a periodic blog update!