Howdy!

Mine Blocks was created over 3 years ago, when I was 14 years old. In that time, the community of players for Mine Blocks grew immensely, I learned a LOT about Flash, and Flash itself evolved as Adobe took over.

During all these changes, Mine Blocks was stuck in ActionScript 2, having been originally created in Macromedia Flash 8 Pro. ActionScript 2 is an excellent programming language - Mine Blocks wouldn't exist without it - but after Mine Blocks was started, Adobe created ActionScript 3. ActionScript 3 is much more powerful!

Sigh. If only Mine Blocks was created in ActionScript 3. It would run about 5 to 10 times faster (allegedly), and allow the use of really cool features (things I probably shouldn't list here, lol!). If only.

Wait a second! Mine Blocks CAN be created in ActionScript 3!

Yep! I'm currently porting Mine Blocks over to ActionScript 3.0 to make the game faster, more up to date, (hopefully) less buggy, and have features that weren't even possible in the previous versions!

So far I have most of the main menu done, the game world is starting to run, and now I'm basically just fixing thousands of bugs and crashes! It's actually really awesome! To put the speed improvement into perspective, the world generates in 3 seconds. In the previous version it took closer to 30 seconds.



Images: Working title screen, buggy first game render, and working game render! They look almost exactly like the ActionScript 2 version!

So what do you think?! Now that you know what's going on, will you forgive me for taking so long on 1.27? :D That being said, there probably wont be a lot of new features in the next update, since this whole time I've been working on the AS3 port. The actual differences will most likely just be bug fixes, like fixing the ability to eat steak, and other stuff.

- Zanz