longbyte1 wrote:Then BnS is doomed. You pointed it out yourself. There's no problem to solve anymore, we're just making somewhat related voxel shooters people might be interested in. Evidently you found that none of those games turned out to be worth playing. It's out of your control. If it dies, it dies; and if it lives, it lives.
P much. I should've prefixed all of what I've said with "in the best possible scenario..", because that's what was being thought whilst typing.
Because I'm slightly bored and someone's complaining and suggesting that we pretty much do nothing other than get rid of the hallway servers despite the fact that the most popular server as of late is aloha.pk tower of babel.
No, I just don't see anything requiring effort ever taking off now and being worth a mention. What I described also takes into the account that in this declining situation we're in, getting rid of shitty maps with no variety and giving players a 'take it or leave it' approach is not past consideration when things are going down regardless. In short, making the "best" out of what we've got left with the time we've got left.
How much time do we have left? Maybe the right question is, how much more money there is left for hosting the BnS forums. Once that money dries up, that's it for us and we all have to pack our bags and go to Reddit and/or aloha.pk.
The thing about BnS is, the mods/admins who are in control are adamant that .75/.76 is the "one true version" and they refuse to move on. This is against the spirit of the development of the game and the community. There's no fire left in the heart of the community like there was when Ben was around. Case in point, there's actually some pretty cool improvements in 0.8 which Ben released before he went to Fagex (on one of the original forums. Sources lost, but I think I have an installer lying around somewhere). I remember there were different scopes, server improvements (much better than the pyspades/openspades shit we have today), UI improvements, also some cave maps that looked really cool but need a VOXLAP patch to get them to work, which .76 just doesn't have support for. It was the culmination of all his work on AoS, his last bit of revamp before handing the game away to a company that defecated all over it and binned it. And hardly anyone got to see the fruits of his labour :(.
"Remember the hype for 0.76?" Sure I do, this is what kept the community alive. There was hype for every +.1 increase in version number. Each release would reignite interest, would create a fire of desire. Ben was the backbone of the community, and even though he literally gave the rights away to Nathan/izzy they didn't budge from .75/.76. So it's no wonder the community has disintegrated. We need a version bump.
Yes, this is indeed a big issue. Since people have been on 0.75 for so long, any changes are met with huge hostility and/or disinterest. New attempts are constantly made, but nobody even cares so it's not a surprise the devs soon give up.
I improved the map load times 4-8x in the recent piqueserver release and nobody even replied to that thread.
Fri Sep 15, 2017 8:15 pmATHEISTs_r_us wrote:
also some cave maps that looked really cool but need a VOXLAP patch to get them to work, which .76 just doesn't have support for.
Waiiiiit I never heard of this can you tell a bit more, it sounds very interesting.
Also, VoxelWar development is somewhat going ahead. "We" are making proper player models rn.
Sat Sep 16, 2017 2:48 pmLeCom wrote:
Waiiiiit I never heard of this can you tell a bit more, it sounds very interesting.
Ken added a couple of sexy features in a private copy of VOXLAP that ended up in PND3D (http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/pnd3d.htm). It made larger maps possible (in general 4096x4096x256 compressed down to <200MB in memory (!) - needed a LOT of handwritten ASM to make use of it efficiently, apparently, and for AoS 16384x16384x256 with some simple paging/offloading to disk) and Ben had some ideas about smaller blocks for more detailed construction and caves that made it into 0.8. The coolest thing was the efficiency: it would still run on your grandma's rig if you added an 8GB spinny disk (no CPU/RAM upgrades).
And that was just one of the features in .8. A lot of work went into that one. :(.
Sat Sep 16, 2017 2:48 pmLeCom wrote:
Also, VoxelWar development is somewhat going ahead. "We" are making proper player models rn.