We know you're itching for information about the development of BlockCommunity's game. So we decided to give it to you. You might be pleased or absolutely disgusted. We don't know if we'll meet the release date, but it's much more likely than last time. We actually have people working, and there are very few uncertainties and no collaboration issues this time round.

Our target release date is in the first quarter of 2011 (Jan/Feb/March). It is likely to arrive around mid-February, but we're not sure. We've also got another large announcement for that time, and it's something almost totally new. You might know if you've been listening closely to staff... And the Iris Ticket "may" be involved (huge number of winks here).

So what's planned for this release? Well, first and foremost are at least fundamental physics from our temporary physics developer, drummerp. He's been working hard - physics isn't as easy as checking vector lengths and reversing/zeroing velocities - and collision detection and basic "atmospheric" physics, i.e. gravity are already finished, with collision response well under way.

There will also be some improvements in rendering to be a bit more powerful/realistic - xRedx is currently implementing fragment/pixel shaders, which allow for much more advanced lighting effects, in contrast to the normal vertex shaders, which simply draw gradients of tint across surfaces, leading to some unusually unrealistic appearing surfaces. You might even get some particle effects with point sprite support if you're lucky.

I'm in the process of designing a launcher UI so you can revel in my amazing designs launch the game less directly and manage your "games", which are just the usual Lua loading scripts. Silentfood will be implementing this into a proper application, which we may or may not be able to build for Linux. Enjoy this sneak peek at what you'll probably get if Silentfood's not lazy.

Lua will likely be getting events for integration with physics, although we're not sure on the exact implementation details. Matrices and Object rotation are coming too.

An unlikely but possible addition to this release is basic networking, but I really wouldn't count on it. This has not been planned (i.e. protocol details) at all, however.

We hope you enjoy this information. Thanks for flaming us on the forums reading.

We here at BCy wish you a merry Christmas... and to celebrate the occasion, we're giving each user that visits today between 100 and 1000 Block Bux. The amount you get depends on how much you've donated and how many forum posts you've made in the sections under the BlockCommunity category.

The gifts blockware will stay on sale until tomorrow. They'll open over the course of the next week and will probably include exclusive hats, blockware, heads and faces, or an expensive asset already existing given for free to gift owners, depending on the gift.

We hope you enjoy Christmas and everything. We might be posting later too on some plans for our next game release.

Currently on this server, we're running a firewall. Unfortunately, this firewall is somewhat out of control, and out of our control, and we can't completely disable it. It randomly decides to ban people's IP addresses from visiting the site or any on the server.

This is very annoying and has even happened to me. We may be moving to another server in a few weeks time, however, but this is not concrete.

Please note that nobody is deliberately banned by IP address by anyone but me - IP address banning is not a power held by any other administrator or moderator as it's unnecessary for all but the most serious of cases.

If you get any errors related to "connection reset", "unable to connect/find server", etc. when visiting both http://www.blockcommunity.net/ and http://www.strikeinternet.com/, then you are likely to have been banned by the firewall, especially if you can connect from a proxy or some other connection (e.g. mobile internet).

If this happens to you, please email what http://whatismyip.org/ gives you to ds@blockcommunity.net. I check my email at least 3 times a day at different times, so don't worry about it not getting to me. It may be a day before you get 'unbanned' as I have to contact Strike.

Sorry about this. I will try to help you in any way I can with this issue. I felt it was necessary to have a central source of information rather than several forum threads.

Blockcommunity has seemed to have gone into a recession lately and I got a few ideas that the community can help with to get our activity up.

1. Tell your friends about us, if you think this place pwns then why not spread the word?

2. Hold some community competitions such as art, videos, and story competitions.

3. Help with the game in your own way. Find a program that you believe can help us? Then post a link to it!

I will also be doing some community things to help us to get active again. So thanks for reading and get posting!

-Diablo your friendly neighborhood Mod

These special PNG GIF images have some major issues with the site:

• Bandwidth
  
It's consuming peoples bandwidth. For instance I run multiple MineCraft servers at once. These PNG animations eat up the bandwidth since there's more than one picture...

So instead of me having to download one image, I have to download four plus images.

• Delay issues
  
It's taking users more time to load a webpage because you have to download each frame.

It also slows down CPU performance because it's telling the browser to keep replaying this image over and over again.

Now think of this... if a person clicks on a new thread with eight plus replies and each person has an animation avatar, how long would it take to download the whole webpage?

• The 2,000th account, Jaasce, was made on the 27th of August. For comparison, the 1,000th account joined on the 16th of April and 1,500th account joined on 7th July 2010.
  
• We achieved over 10,000 visits and nearly 300,000 pageviews in August. Hooray!
  
• The most popular web browser used to browse BlockCommunity is Chrome at about 41%. The second most popular is Firefox at around 24%.
  
• Mobile devices - specifically, Apple's iOS devices and Android phones - account for about 9% of visits.
  
• Approximately 55 bans and 36 warnings where given out in August.
  
• 171 accounts were made in August.
  
• 11,655 forum posts and 1,278 forum threads were made in August.
  
• 564,827 Block Bux exchanged hands through donations and asset sales in August.
  

Hope you enjoyed these extremely useless facts and statistics!

If you've been on BCy lately there have been a few interesting and note worthy developments on the site.

1) The forums now has sections to be more organized.
2) There are new forums such as "The Market", and "Entertainment".
3) Posts now have reputations which you can vote up and down.

Thanks for the updates ds!

Everyone congradulate her! =D

For the last two days I have been working on getting Moole's Lua working (again, one of those things I'm not good at). And I finally got it working! This means development is going to progress quickly.

We're hoping to add physics and characters in soon, and this little demo will be released so you can try it yourself.

Also: a little video showing off the basic stuff.



(Click the picture)

Since you guys wanted some updates, here they are:

I've been working on having skyboxes use cubemaps for textures, so they can be drawn faster and so sky reflections will be do-able. Anyway, it took me a couple of days (it really should've only taken one :/) to do this, so needless to say, as soon as I get this done I will try to stay away from cubemaps. Right now it works, except the textures shows black (probably doesn't count as working).

Less-boring stuff:

If I can fix the texture, tomorrow I will add a mesh importer so meshes can be loaded into the game. Then we will be able to get demos and things working, possibly released (no promises though).

What this really means is a demo (might) come out soon.