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.
