The block worlds are closed
Skydex started as a block world. You walked a voxel copy of the Earth called Globe (one block was about a kilometre) or its finer twin Terra (one block, 100 metres), placed blocks and put up buildings. Then flight arrived, and since the summer almost everyone comes to fly over the real map and catch aircraft and ships.
We looked at October. 29 people switched from a flight into one of the block worlds, and together they spent about eleven minutes there. Nobody placed a block. The last block anywhere was placed on 9 October, the last building was edited in September. So from today the block worlds no longer take visitors, and every page load starts in the flight.
What happens to old links
- Links into a block world. Links of the form
/?goto=globe|…or/?goto=terra|…(the old "Visit in-world" and "Copy fly link" buttons made them) are converted on arrival: we take the block coordinates, turn them into latitude and longitude and fly you over the same spot. - Building pages.
/<username>/<building>pages are retired. The address now says the page is gone and links to the owner's profile. Search engines get a "gone" answer, so the pages drop out of results. - Blueprints. The gallery at gallery.skydex.online is closed and sends visitors to the home page. A "Use in game" link from it opens a plain flight.
- Old profile links.
/profile/<id>now goes to the public profile page at/<username>, which has your catches, ranks and collection. - In the game the world switcher is gone, along with the blueprint button, the blueprint tab in profile settings and the invitations to build together.
If you had the block world set as your default, the game remembers flight instead from now on.
What we keep
Buildings, blocks, blueprints and their history stay in the database; only the public pages are gone. If the block worlds ever come back, they come back with everything that was built in them.
Two fixes found on the way
While counting visits we found that most "block world" visits were not visits at all. A new player whose browser was showing the "allow location?" prompt waited on the loading screen for as long as the prompt stayed open, sometimes for minutes, and in that time the game had no connection at all. Now the game waits five seconds for an answer and otherwise starts from your approximate location. "Fly here" links don't ask for your location at all, since they take you somewhere else anyway.
The second fix: signing in with Google in the middle of a flight now puts you back in the air at the same spot instead of the start screen, and a catch you made as a guest just before is still counted.
Where people fly right now is on the world map.