Advancements in the Field

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Written by: IsraeliRD

Category: News

Published: 03 July 2014

Hits: 2976

Being able to see the development of our knowledge of Marble Blast in the past few years, especially from the standpoint of Platinum and PlatinumQuest, has been a rewarding experience. At the very beginning we had only the knowledge of making levels in the level editor. That soon followed with QuArK, and later on, Constructor and Map2Dif and its various errors. When Alex told to Phil how to make Moving Platforms it was absolutely ground breaking for us, and when we managed to change code so that we could customize Marble Blast it was the beginning of an era.

Since then many things happened: we learned how to modify the GUI (level select was a really tough one), Spy47 created the checkpoint and then the leaderboards and even gave a shot at multiplayer. Many other people then made mods and we’ve seen many community things happen, such as a speedometer, .mis modes and games (tic-tac-toe, minesweeper, and more). PlatinumQuest added even more features and game modes and every time something new comes it just blows my mind. Now with 1.50 having so many new features and multiplayer it is just amazing to see how far we came.

As of recently we have done what was previously thought to be impossible;
Modify the Marble Blast engine.
In Marble Blast Platinum 1.50 Release Candidate 1 we will be adding new files to the root directory of Marble Blast, as well as a new executable. Launching it will overwrite parts of the code of the Marble Blast engine. Be warned: if you’re on Mac, you will need to enter a user/pass to give it access, but only for the first time you run it. Windows will not even need to run it as Administrator.

The modifications implemented are written by the Platinum Team and modify very specific parts:

• Change the camera in-game so it allows us to fix radar bugging out on gravities which aren’t “normal” i.e. anything non 1 0 0 0.

• Client container searching (client-side collision)

• Attempt to fix transfer speed (download/upload levels) and underlying issues in the way the Torque Game Engine handles TCP/UDP objects.

• Attempt to fix some instances where the game would crash

As of current there are no additional plans, but if we do add anything, we will inform you.

In addition to that there has been some progress in updating the Marble Blast graphics engine, but it is very likely not to be ready in time for 1.50. We are more likely to see it for PlatinumQuest.

We are excited that this is possible and are looking forwards to further modifying the Marble Blast engine.
- Matan and the Platinum Team