[BB], 2024 in review

Published: 2025-01-01

Author: Teddi

What a year it has been! I don’t think I can recall a year that has been as eventful as 2024 in terms of releases across a broad spectrum of our systems. Replays! New Blog! Item icons actually being viewable in the inventory! It’s been a year of creature-comforts appearing and things becoming that little bit more polished. 2024 is potentially our most productive year in a long time in terms of delivering actual end-results to players. There’s always something ticking behind the scenes but it’s nice to see the fruits of our labour being enjoyed by the community.

Similar to last years post, we’ll start off looking at the community.

[BB] Community

I’m happy to say that our efforts starting in 2023 to improve the community have paid off. The re-introduction of the ‘martial law’ approach has been effective in curbing the negative behaviour we were seeing. We’ve seen a significant reduction in the number of incidents that require intervention and players are generally more respectful towards each other. For the first time since 2009, Admins are able to fully modify punishments via a web interface: this has been a game-changer for us as it allows us to be more flexible in our approach to discipline.

It sounds like a fairly minor thing, given that admins could remove and add punishments before in-game; but the ability to do it via the web interface has allowed admins to correct issues or fix punishments without having to re-add / remove them. From my point of view it seems to have encouraged admins in a positive sense that they now feel further empowered to take action, whereas before there seem to be some hesitation at times.

Additionally, adding the Steam verification system to Discord has been a great success. We’ve managed to reduce the amount of phishing incident attempts to near zero. While accounts can be compromised via other Discord servers, we’re able to ‘disable’ those accounts from being able to interact with other users on the Discord until the account has been secured without banning them which is a nice touch.

All in all, the community is in a much better place than it was a year ago. Let’s keep it up!

Post 2023 Server Move(s)

The server moves have generally been a success, with some teething issues here and there. We fired up a Minecraft server, tweaked some firewall rules and generally DDoS issues of the past that used to occasionally plague us are now non-existent. I’ve also written a server warden process as we no longer use TCAdmin which has given us some benefits, including but not limited to non-self-restarting physics based crashes no longer being a problem.

It’s possible in the future I may aim to rewrite the last remaining binary module which is windows-only to have a linux variant so we can reduce some complexity under the hood being a linux-host windows-guest setup, but it’s not top of the list and I’m not sure at this point if the payoff is truly worth it.

Donations

Donations picked up again and we’re running a minor surplus once again. Some of the surplus has been used to recently purchase some assets for some content coming in the near-future. Server is wiping its own backside once again!

General news improvements

For a while we used to post updates to the Forums and Steam, but we never really published them to Discord. Furthermore these were usually grouped up and released over time, rather than drip-fed out as I figured people might not enjoy the spam of “oh minor change has happened here, happy update!” sort of post. As it turns out, it seems people appreciate the news drip-feeding out, so earlier this year I started doing much more regular updates via our news channel on Discord.

This isn’t our end-goal for updates and (hopefully) only a stepping stone towards a more comprehensive news system that will be available in-game.

Gamemodes

BBase

BBase this year had some neat new additions as well as some quality of life improvements. SourceTV support for recording incidents, a new way for icons to be rendered and displayed in the inventory, wardrobe for Platinum members and just a whole boatload of other fixes and improvements. Oh did I mention that the votemap finally shows the avatar in the votemap list? Improved 4k support!

All in all I think BBase has probably gotten to the point where it holds things up fairly well and we’re able to just focus on adding new content and improving what already exists. Considering it’s essentially a 14 year old code-base it’s managed to hold up fairly well.

Surf

2024. Year. Of. The. Replay.

It’s finally here! Replays made it out!

While Replay isn’t the only thing that came to Surf this year, it’s certainly the biggest and arguably the most important. In general the system has been lauded and praised significantly and I’m happy to see it being used as much as it is. While it had some teething issues upon release (as expected), it’s been a fairly smooth ride since then. The feedback we’ve received on it has only been positive and I’m glad to see that it’s been well received. I don’t think people really understood the vision of what I wanted for the system until it was released and were overall pleasantly surprised. There are some minor improvements I want to do around it, including improving visibility of the system and pushing it more in to the forefront of the game.

At the time of writing this blog post, we have 38.67k replays, totalling 6.74GB of data. That’s a lot of replays!

Beyond Replay, we added Surf bounties for All-time records. Fixed a bunch of things (thanks to those who reported them!) and generally improved the gamemode here and there. With the addition of replays, Surf from my point of view is now feature complete.

What that means is while we’ll still be adding new maps and fixing bugs, we’re not looking to add any new major features to the gamemode. That’s not to say there won’t be any - but we’re not actively looking for them unless they’re a significant improvement to the gamemode. It is likely though that future plans will have the gamemode in mind and Surf will benefit from wider changes coming in the not-too-distant future.

Go Fish

Uh, it’s back.

Go Fish is back after a long break, and I’m excited to shake things up and make it more interesting. I’ve already made some updates, like adding custom NPCs (lmao anklebiters), a new map, and a few other changes. The goal is to create something fun that works whether you’re playing solo or with friends—something laid-back but still worth sticking with for the long run.

It’s received a fair amount of love and attention in the short term it’s been back and I’m hoping in the new year to expand upon it further. Time will tell I suppose!

Deathrun

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Closing Words

While I haven’t covered everything that happened in 2024, I think I’ve covered the most important parts. If I had to use a word to describe 2024, it would be “zesty”. It’s been a positive year of change and improvement, and I’m cautiously optimistic to see what 2025 has in store for us.

I hope you all have a great 2025 ahead, and I look forward to seeing you in-game!