We have a new weapon that should satisfy our weapon hungry needs, although it still needs tweaking. However, I think we should have some "Superblocks" that take maybe 10 pick/bullets to destroy or 3 shovel digs to destroy. You can only choose to use them like the weapon, and the only way to get more is to die. I think 10 or 5 would be a good number, and maybe you can't put them within 2 blocks of the intel or bases xy coordinates. Any CONSTRUCTIVE comments welcome. All others viciously ignored.

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Unfortunately, the only way to prevent people from using a large amount of these blocks is to not implement them. respawning is easy and the maps are not that large, especially maps like pinpoint or island where it is a short run to anything you want to fortify.

Anyone who wants to build a really tough wall or fort only has to respawn by changing weapons or running out into enemy fire and use the blocks they get after respawning. Rinse and repeat.
Maybe allowing servers to toggle things like this would be a good idea; actually, letting the server admins toggle everything(guns available, blocks available, can people destroy or place, etc.) is a good idea in and among itself.

It adds complexity to the design to have different kinds of blocks in the game. But the technical part is the real issue.

My understanding is that it will also take a substantial change to the engine to get it working well, because the current format is tuned around block colors - red, green, blue, and alpha(used for damage, the client adds lighting on top of this). If you add a "is super" property on top of the colors you have more data for every block. If you add the properties as a list of "these types of blocks are super blocks" then there's some overhead every time anyone does block damage, to check to see if that block is one of the super ones. And that doesn't even cover how to render them so that they show up differently, which could change some assumptions of the map renderer(e.g. that blocks are just one color and not textured or something).

So if we scrapped the basis of the existing map format we could get blocks with different properties, implement them very well and make the game more like Minecraft, where there are lots of different block types. But we would probably be trading performance(size of download, memory consumption, cpu load) or quantity of colors to do so.

It may be simpler to set a certain block color to behave differently... but I don't think that player-placable "tough" blocks are really that great an idea, since they'd get spammed everywhere by griefers, and take a lot longer to remove.

I did present a previous idea of making map-edit-only invincible blocks that would allow makers of custom maps to make the frames of important structures invincible (so you could still make holes in the floor on Bridge Wars, and tunnel through the walls, but collapsing the entire bridge won't be possible). Of course, even that feature would be badly abused by map creators, some of whom would probably overuse the feature to make invincible trees or pre-built fortifications that are impervious to any assault.

@^: Then no-one would play that map.
It could just have a different texture, like an X on it or something like that. I do suppose that it could be abused, but the trade off of only having a few super blocks leads building large structures with a super foundation, but mostly regular

they should look like gold (even though gold is soft) because it looks cool :D

PineApples, while that may be cool, I don't think that's how voxels work.

Can any wizards confirm whether textures would even work with the voxlap engine?

Need just reduce damage for block from bullet

http://ace-spades.com/forums/topic.php?id=2949