Details

Written by: IsraeliRD

Category: News

Published: 15 February 2015

Hits: 3336

Hey guys, long time no see.
The army has taken quite a toll with my time, and whatever spare time I do have does not go into Marble Blast, unfortunately. That is being slightly remedied in the next few weeks.

The MBG WRR #4 is coming extremely soon. The beginner levels are scheduled to the 21st of February, the intermediates on the 25th and advanced on the 28th. SDA update (aka release) is happening on the 28th as well.

MBP gets a few updates as well:
- Starting March 1st, anyone with high Multiplayer rating will need to start playing more to preserve their status. To encourage rated matches, any player with over 1850 Multiplayer rating points will need to play at least 6 rated matches every 2 weeks, or else they will start losing Multiplayer rating at the current rate of 1%/day. Rating loss will continue only to 1850 points, and nobody under that will be affected.

- Patches and updates.
We are planning to release a few game modes that HiGuy had been messing online with some players; I approved them all. These will be pushed out in incremental patches.
In addition to those, we are developing an in-game screen recorder which will join the demo recording system. The following are required from your computer in order to handle this:

- 1 CPU core (Dual Core CPU and above, mutli-threaded is good). One core is used for playing, and one is used for exporting.
- HDD or SSD with lots of free disk space. The recording cache uses RAW RGB output, meaning uncompressed frames. A recording of Learning to Roll can take 100MBs, and RIP your HDD for Space Station or Battlecube Finale. The final recording will be much smaller than the cache.

- [Windows only] A graphics card with OpenGL support. The game will now require you to use the OpenGL option in the options  menu. This is because the recorder makes use of specific OpenGL capabilities.

Note those are the same requirements for any screen recorder out there that uses uncompressed frames output as it takes lots of hard drive space really fast. This will enable players to record marble blast videos without the need for FRAPS, Camtasia, Bandicam, Screenflow and others.

Lastly TAS tools are being developed, and this will allow Tool-Assisted Speedrunning of any level frame-by-frame, so that the perfect speedruns can be produced.

Until next time,
Matan

Details

Written by: Aayrl

Category: News

Published: 10 February 2015

Hits: 2705

Hey folks!

It's that time of year when folks tend to give out cheerful cards and delicious chocolate candies to their secret friends, and we've even gone so far as to reward each of you lovely community members with a very special pair of titles for you to choose from! To get into the February madness, all we ask of you is that you give us a wonderful hug! In order to do so, we ask that you log in to your Marble Blast account on our website and then click on one of the buttons in this news post below to claim your reward! Won't you just please give us a hug?

These achievements will remain active starting today (02/10/15) through next Monday (02/16/15), so claim your reward before they're gone! (Just so there is no confusion, you may claim both achievements.)

Enjoy!

~Aayrl
Marble Blast Community Manager

Details

Written by: HiGuy

Category: News

Published: 12 January 2015

Hits: 2796

Hey all,

We hope you enjoyed the winter update, but its time has finally ended (for better or for worse), and the original hunt Multiplayer levels are now available once again. Ironic, that Marble Blast has thawed right after one of the coldest days of the year so far (at least, for those in the US East).

As well, we hope that our transition to the new site has been smooth for you. There have been some issues regarding in-game connectivity to the leaderboards, with some scripts having longer load times than expected. We will try to address these in the upcoming weeks, but just bear with us for now as we investigate.

Thanks for a great Winter Event, and who knows what may happen around the time of mud season... No promises.

-HiGuy
Marble Blast Platinum 1.50 Lead Developer

Details

Written by: Aayrl

Category: News

Published: 05 January 2015

Hits: 2642

Greetings folks,

While we apologize for the extended maintenance and the delay in bringing all of our services back online, we are pleased to announce that MarbleBlast.com, and the Leaderboards service are now both located on our brand new blazing fast server located in London, UK! This newer server hardware and extensive hardware capabilities should reduce the number of server crashes and increase the amount of traffic our services can withstand during peak hours. You may also notice increased performance when submitting scores to the server, even in the remote regions of the globe.

In addition, our Website is now running on the latest and greatest version of Joomla 3.3.6! As some of you are aware, we've been running on Joomla 2.5.xx, which had its final day of long term support on December 31st, 2014. As a result, we took the server hardware upgrade opportunity to also upgrade our Joomla CMS system. There may be small portions of the website that are still a bit buggy, and we would appreciate it if you would let us know in the Feedback Forum if you encounter any bugs or issues in the next few days.

As always, additional update notes may be found on the Forums under the Rules & News section that detail additional upgrades and changes that were made in this weekend's maintenance. And, of course, please let us know if you encounter any troubles or issues when using the Website or Leaderboards so we may be made aware of any errors as a result of our updates.

Cheers,

~Aayrl
Marble Blast Community Manager