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- Written by: Aayrl
- Category: News
- Hits: 2656
Twas the night before free gifts, and all through the leaderboards; not a marble was rolling - not even Kurt. The marbles hung socks on various pillars, with the hopes that free gifts and achievements would be stuffed with fillers. The marbles were neatly placed in their boxes, with visions of beating IsraeliRD on Nukesweeper while carrying little foxes. And HiGuy, with his gigantic coding wrench, and I with my tattered SQL hat, settled down at the programming bench. As we mashed the keyboards, tapping away into the night, we couldn't help but wonder what we could have in store for the community as we worked on the site. When suddenly, in the leaderboards chat, arose a clatter of noise, emotes, and "PQ WHERe?!"; as someone started shouting about toys. As we Alt-tabbed back in, waiting for the game to load, we pulled open the console and gazed at the code. What appeared on the first line, as our eyes did discover, was the gigantic imprint or our good friend St. Jeff, with guise of red cover. He was dressed all in Platinum, with a gigantic red hat, he reached into his computer and pulled out a .pak; "Free Gifts, my good fellows, and the community shall cheer!" twas the advice he spoke, and with the advice I awoke. Never again, shall I program with energy drinks in hand; let this be a lesson to those whom do not go to bed as early as they can.
As for the advice.. we did listen to our crazy thoughts, and we have an extra special website achievement and some bonus assortments lined up for everyone! Starting on December 25th at Midnight GMT (+0), and lasting until December 31st, any user that logs in to the Marble Blast Website and Visits their User Profile will be granted a unique achievement and some festive holiday flair!
So while you're at home, enjoying the holidays, take a spare moment to hop on to the Website and give thanks to your friends here for another Marble Blast filled year. We wish you all a happy holiday and we hope you all stay safe and enjoy the family around you this wintry season.
Happy Holidays from all of us here on the Marble Blast Community Staff,
~Aayrl
Marble Blast Community Manager
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- Written by: Aayrl
- Category: News
- Hits: 3779
Hey folks,
The weather outside is frightful, and the warm glow of your computer screens is delightful. If you've got no other place to go, let it go, let it go, and come play in the snow!
To celebrate the wintry holiday season, we're introducing this year our first annual Winterfest Event! All of your favorite Marble Blast Multiplayer levels have received a wintry makeover, featuring:
- 6 Brand New In-Game Achievements and 35 new Website Achievements
- A new Title and Suffix system
- Snowball Game Mode
- Loads of new scenery objects and obstacles
- Multiplayer UI Recolors to match the Winter Season
- Brand new Chilly and Frozen scores to beat
- Hidden Snow-globe objects
- ...and much, much more!
In addition, for a limited time, the website will feature daily achievements between December 1st and December 31st, so be sure you log in to the website and visit your User Profile via the Profile Button every day and claim your rewards! Perhaps there will be an extra special gift waiting for you under the tree on December 25th?
The Winterfest Event will be live beginning on December 1st, and be available until the 11th of January, 2015 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time. In addition, the fabled PlatinumQuest Multiplayer Levels will be unlocked for the public to play between the 1st of December and the 4th of January, 2015, inclusive.
In addition to the exciting content we've prepared for you, we will also be upgrading our servers late this December. We will be launching a brand new dedicated server for our leaderboards and website and several new dedicated servers for the leaderboards system. One server will be located in London, UK, as a testing server for several days. We openly invite you to provide us with feedback so we may improve our dedicated server process.
If all goes well with the dedicated server testing, the remaining dedicated servers will be launched. In total, we expect to have 7 dedicated servers by the end of January, 2015:
- Tsuf 1 - California, USA
- Tsuf 2 - California, USA
- Thistle - Vermont, USA
- Beginners Only (Provisional Users only, < 20 games played) - Vermont, USA
- Cuties Only (Established Users with 1650+ rating only) - Vermont, USA
- London 1 (TBA) - London, UK
- London 2 (TBA) - London, UK
We would like to thank the following community members for making this Winterfest event possible:
- Aayrl - Usability Testing, Quality Assurance, Winterfest Ideas, Winter Textures, Level Design, Web Programming
- RDs.Empire - Jaw-dropping scenery and dts shapes for Winterfest
- Whirligig - Physics Programming related to Wintry Hats
- Buzzmusic - Phenomenal Winter-themed Music
- HiGuy - Lead Programmer, Level Design, Web Programming
- Jeff - Physics Programming, Assistant Programmer
- IsraeliRD - Lead Designer, Winterfest Ideas, Level Design, Usability Testing
As always, we greatly appreciate donations to help us keep the website and leaderboard services running as optimally and efficiently as possible. We are currently paying the expenses for our website and dedicated servers out-of-pocket. Any donations provided by community members will only be used to pay for the website and dedicated services. You may donate via PayPal through your User Profile by clicking on the Profile button (once logged in to the website) on the top right side of your browser. From here, click on the Donate button, located on the right side of the screen. Please be aware that donations of $1, while greatly appreciated, will still have a premium taken off the top by PayPal (whom takes 33 cents as part of their fees).
Happy Holidays, and enjoy the wintry levels!
~Aayrl
Marble Blast Community Manager
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- Written by: IsraeliRD
- Category: News
- Hits: 2998
Many of us are getting into a festive mood as we are entering the holiday season, and the Platinum Team, Aayrl, RDs.Empire and Buzzmusic have pulled a lightning fast effort to celebrate the holidays.
It’s been raining recently, and due to low temperatures a lot of Multiplayer levels are covered in ice. Marbles are advised to use caution when navigating to the gems. Those that did not have the extra ice on them have been removed to a warm shed. These levels will not be playable.
It also appears temperatures have gotten a little too extreme, and PlatinumQuest’s Ice Shards have started popping around the levels, freezing any marble that dares touch them. We found that using Mega Marbles is the best way to handle them, as you won’t get frozen; you will only lose your Mega Marble. PlatinumQuest’s Ice Slicks have also surfaced, even on non-ice surfaces.
Furthermore, all levels have been swept in a seasonal snow, and we don’t know when it will stop, but you will see it falling while playing. To help many combat the cold, we are happy to announce that small Santa’s hats will be provided for marbles to wear at all times.
To raise the chilly mood, a new festive soundtrack will be played while matches are being held, and it will replace the normal Tim Trance.
In addition, all rated matches will see a change in scores. Winners will receive a bonus of 3 points on every win, and losers will lose 3 fewer points, so if you were set to lose 3 points on a match, you will lose nothing instead. All Leaderboards have been modified so you can grab a new number 1 spot in these challenging levels.
Lastly, it has come to our attention from the police scanner that marbles seemed to have gained an ability to throw snowballs at each other, causing mayhem. Here at MarbleBlast.com, we strongly approve of that, and anyone found hitting each other with snowballs will be awarded extra points.
Temperatures should warm up during January, so these changes should be limited to the month of December, but weather forecast may see them stay for up to a week in January.
We wish all marblers to exercise caution and enjoy the holiday season.
- The Platinum Team
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- Written by: Jeff
- Category: News
- Hits: 2916
Hey,
The Platinum Team tries to continue to support Marble Blast Platinum for as many users as possible. Recently, we had to drop Mac OS X 10.6 support because of compiling issues with the newer code. However, those issues have now been resolved, and we have decided to add Mac OS X 10.6 support back into Marble Blast Platinum 1.50. The game client has been tested on an iMac running OS X 10.6.8 (the latest patch to Snow Leopard). This has no affect on Windows users in any way. For those of you who had to update your Mac client to play the game, I am sorry that this patch did not come sooner. I wasn't sure if this was going to compile for Mac OS X 10.6, but it ended up working in the long run. Sorry to keep you all waiting.
Looking into the future, I might try to add Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8 support if time permits, as well as a possibility of a PowerPC version. No guarantees; however, quite a bit of code would have to be rewritten as there are some dependencies on the Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X.
To all OS X 10.6 users, have fun with Marble Blast Platinum 1.50 and enjoy it!
- Jeff and the Platinum Team
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- Written by: IsraeliRD
- Category: News
- Hits: 3064
After 2.5 years since inception, the final build of Marble Blast Platinum 1.50 sees the day of light. This release sees over 50 additions, changes and fixes. A new Terms of Service has been written (thanks to Aayrl and HiGuy), and a Help button appears on the Main Menu which contains loads of information. Both are a must read for all users.
A new launcher has also been released and is required to download. It updates the directory from platinumbeta -> platinum and also adds a Times Importer, so you can take all your prefs files from MBG and MBP (1.14, 1.20, 1.50 beta 1 - rc2) and thus have all your latest progress in one prefs file. The best part of the launcher is that it auto-updates, so you no longer have to download another one after this.
With this we are hoping that everyone will enjoy 1.50 and the many features it has brought you all.
Now then, I did hear of FUBAR resuming development... :)