Published by elfprince13 on January 1, 2010 at 10:23:58 AM CST | Discuss this article (12)

After some discussion yesterday we're making our announcement here. There's some good news and some bad news ;) Lets start with the bad news so you can all be grumpy for a couple seconds before you get to the good news. The FreeBuild demo will not be released today. We've been working our butts off to get it to you today, however outside circumstances have conspired to prevent that. I'm currently staying at my family's house in Maine, and I rely on my Wi-Fi connection being broadcast between parabolic antennae a mile apart, and then repeated in the house. The connection is sketchy at best, but we're in the midst of 3 blizzards converging on the lake, and the rate of packet loss across the lake makes accessing SVN nearly impossible for me. I'll be home sometime this weekend, or monday, and will do my best to get the demo out as quickly as possible after that point, targetting next weekend as the alternative

Now for the good news. Now that we have something resembling a workable game, the FreeBuild team would like to open up our SVN repository to checkout (not commits, though users should feel free to submit patches through our bug tracking system where they can be vetted by the development team), in the spirit of other cathedral-style development open source projects. The game isn't quite ready for demo, but it is playable (though we strongly recommend using the join by ip functionality). To aid in using this functionality, feel free to post about your server, and the IP of your server, in the "Servers & Activities" section of the forums.

One last note, FreeBuild still uses several models from the original blockland alpha. These are not part of Blockland Retail, and we in no way take credit for their creation. They are a stepping stone towards our future plans for using the LDraw parts library, and given that the community from which this project arose has had use of them without complaint for several years, we felt that it was fair for us to continue using them on an interim basis.


Happy New Years and please begin checking out the game and providing us with feedback.
The repository is located at https://svn.bountysource.com/tbg/trunk

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