Hello again! I thought I’d give you guys an update on the progress towards Blox Survival.
Before I get into what’s been going on though, I’d like to emphasise just how massive of a project this is. I’m often running into limitations of the Roblox engine and shaving off ten-thousandths of seconds from my code’s run time, and that’s not even beginning to address all of the game design and gameplay features that will need to be implemented on top of everything! Thanks for sticking around so long - your support is greatly appreciated 
So, what’s going on with Blox?
A faster, slimmer engine
When I first started work on Blox Survival many months ago, the project requirements were vastly different and I had different ideas for how I was going to implement things. However, over the course of development so far, there’s been tons of issues with performance, code clarity and maintainability that I didn’t foresee and which were getting difficult to fix. The engine wasn’t designed to do what it now had to, and it was slowing the development of Survival considerably as I spent more time trying to make it work and less time working towards a public test.
A short while back, I decided to finally pull the trigger and restart. I began building a new branch of the Project Vox engine, designed to better fit the requirements and address the performance concerns that the older codebase couldn’t fix. Tons of legacy code held over from Classic (and beyond!) was scrapped and reimplemented to a higher standard, and more performance-friendy algorithms like greedy meshing were put front and center.
The end result of all this work is a cleaner and much better performing engine that still provides the powerful capabilities needed to make Blox run. Going forward, the emphasis with this new engine will be on maintainable and lightweight technology first, which should be beneficial not just to players on low-end devices but also to those on more capable hardware too.
That being said, the new engine is still, well, new! Most things haven’t been ported over yet, and it’ll be a while before things start looking more complete. You can keep up to date with development in the development channels (I’m in code-discussion an awful lot nowadays!)
Moderation changes to Classic public servers
While Classic isn’t actively being developed anymore, I’ve been keeping an eye on what’s been going on. I’ve noticed that there’s a lot more false votekicks than there were previously as some bad actors have been abusing the system on 2 player servers.
The original motivation for keeping votekick enabled on these small servers is that, if someone started causing trouble, there’d be no in-game mechanism for removing them from the game. A downside of this, however, is that it’d be possible to abuse this by simply votekicking anyone who joins your server. At the time, we decided this was acceptable as long as it didn’t get heavily abused.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s been happening. Since we can no longer trust that the system won’t be abused in this way, votekick will soon be disabled for 2 player servers - hopefully this helps alleviate some of the problems that have arisen over time.
The Blox OST is still coming!
In the last post in this series, I announced I would be releasing the Blox Classic OST on Bandcamp. Since I’ve gotten a couple of questions about that, I thought I’d just slip a quick note in at the bottom here - it’s still coming! I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet as I’ve been pretty busy with other stuff.
That’s all for this instalment of The Road To Survival™!
I hope to talk to you guys again very soon - thanks for sticking around to see Blox through development! I really appreciate the support