Archive for April, 2009

RTB Connect

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Announcements | 8 Comments »

New Feature

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Announcements | 12 Comments »

More RTB3 Progress

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

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.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Development | 19 Comments »
Return to Blockland is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).