BBS 0.5

Hello! This is the first post on itch.io about BBS. I’m mainly posting because itch.io suggested to post a devlog, and I’m curious how it will go.

If you never heard of BBS, feel free to skip the change log, but if you did, here is a change list of new features added in version 0.5 (for the entire change log, click here):

• Added camera world object, which allows rendering scene to a texture (which can be displayed with billboard form)
• Added skybox options to world menu’s world settings panel
• Added bbs:item form, which allows displaying items (and entity’s items from an equipment slot)
• Added Use target option to body parts which passes the original entity from parent form
• Added item options to the items editor:
  • Form, allows you to substitute an item rendering from items atlas with a custom form
  • Extruded, allows you to change item rendering as a voxelized (extruded) model instead of as a plain billboard (quad that always faces the camera)
  • Frame color, allows you to specify color for new item tooltips (TorayLife)
  • Description, allows you to add description/lore of the item (TorayLife)
• Added Move to cursor (Ctrl + G) keybind in entity and world object editors panels to move entity/world object to place where cursor hovers
• Added Toggle axes (Ctrl + T) keybind to world menu that allows to toggle visibility of +X+Y+Z-X-Y-Z orbit pivot/axes preview
• Fixed crash with in-game scripting documentation (TheBendy)
• Fixed camera keeps going when switching to another menu (TheBendy)
• Fixed multiple macOS related issues:
  • Fixed mouse pointer incorrectly calculate mouse coordinates
  • Fixed screenshot and texture saving hanging
  • Fixed open URL buttons
• Improved item tooltips (TorayLife)

And now, I’ll tell you a story of what BBS is, and how it all started.

Long time ago, which was approximately 16 months ago…

Before I started working on BBS (it’s literally the project’s name, it’s not an abbreviation), I used to make mods. Minecraft mods. But not just regular gameplay mods, no, I used to make creator tool mods for creating Minecraft cinematic (aka machinimas) and roleplay videos, i.e. the Blockbuster mod.

If you ever seen TikTok videos/YouTube shorts where the POV shows some acid trip where mininions, squid game, herobrine, and siren head can be rescued, or cursed Minecraft, it’s most likely made with Blockbuster mod. You can thank me for that. 👊 😔

Back to the story, at one point, I got really sick of dealing with obstacles (Mojang’s code (it was an older version, there was no possibility to update easily to latest version), Forge, Optifine patches, and contributors’ dirty hacks), and dealing with creators who wouldn’t credit or donate for my work (there were a lot of people who were making millions of views by using my mods, with such views, setting up Patreon with $1/mo. wouldn’t bleed them).

In the end, I decided to just quit Minecraft modding, and create my own Minecraft with blackjack and hookers!

Lo and behold, BBS! 🎉

I really got inspired by the idea of how awesome could’ve been Minecraft modding if there weren’t so many obstacles and crap, so I took an old scrapped project, that was supposed to be a small voxel game, and I started building BBS (some people say it’s short for BlockBuster Studio 🤷‍♂️) on top of it.

I quit a couple of times throughout last 16 months, but BBS kept pulling me back. Closer to October 2022, I decided to try releasing the first version of BBS after New Year, and after a couple of months of work, I did it!

The launch was really exciting, although BBS came out pretty buggy on the first day. It was that bad, that community and I managed to find at least two dozens of minor bugs, that I quickly fixed by the next day. 😥

Since then, I’ve been steadily adding new features almost every two weeks. I intend on keep adding more and more features, so it was possible to at some point to create a proper video game without modding the engine, or create a film/cartoon with BBS.

The end of the post

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate your time. If you’d like to try out BBS, feel free to, and I would appreciate your feedback. There aren’t real tutorials at the moment, everything is mostly on trial-and-error basis (or ask-McHorse-on-his-Discord-server basis), but if you’ll have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them! ☺️