Hope - For The Sissies Who Need It

6am and I'm finally close to being able to lay my face on a soft surface for a few hours before getting back to it.

We've had great progress which I have zero desire to jynx, so all I'm going to say is that Divergence has been officially "adopted" by our recent software switch (which i hope to fully announce at some point in the near future) and it's ambassadors have been bending over backwards for us these last two weeks. It's a long-needed breath of fresh air both for myself personally and the project.

The goal was to make the switch while retaining the quality of architecture and graphics we had previously, but i'm pleased to announce that, now with the full pipeline open before us to all of our dark purposes and all roadblocks swept away at last, we have no exceeded previous standards. Some things will require some tweaking obviously, but overall we will no longer need to "sell" this move as an upgrade - as one can see in the image below, it is apparent to all.

Normally being flat broke would find me in less than top spirits, but right now i'm feeling good enough about our near future that it isn't weighing me down.

New stuff to come soon.

-Ethan

Under The Hood

Well here we aren't aren't we. October came and went.

There's nothing more I would like to do than post up a big fat devblog with new images of this fantastic new structure we have, but the truth is that just can't happen right now as much as I want it to.

Everyone involved knew that we were about to be saddled with a crap-ton of boring "under the hood" work until anything like "new flashy stuff" emerged. I'd be lying if I said i didn't foresee us through that by now, but at this point I think placeholders for the most important features can only hurt us and I'm opting out of that.

We worked in the placeholder inventory once before. Remember how that worked out? People running around undressing each others characters without consent? I won't go down that path again.

Don't I have any good news at all? Well some as it turns out at least.

During the course of "porting" from one renderer to another, we gradually came up with an answer to one of our most frequent questions; Will we be able to retain the existing world?

The idea we have currently is that, while in the interim of working out the new systems with the new software, indications are that there is a way for us to copy or duplicate all of or at least parts of the existing game world into the new one. What this means is that, if we can pull it off, there's a good chance the nice flashy client we have right now can be used by contributors as a sort of "world editing tool" whereas data made to that world is semi-automatically (once every hour or so) copied over to the new world.

It's something at least and i'm always on the lookout for ways of giving people something to entertain themselves while the real work is being done.

Hopefully I'll have more on this within this coming week.

Thanks for being understanding as always.

-Ethan

October Changes

It's been almost a month since our kickstarter campaign ended.

Out of the $19,626 people think we got from that campaign, the truth us that the project only netted maybe 11K of that. The reason is the difference between how kickstarter handles payments as opposed to indiegogo. More specifically, payments through kickstarter (because it uses amazon payments) aren't actually billed until after the campaign is completed, and because of that, can actually bounce. In our case, a huge percentage of those contributions bounced. Creditcards over their limits and so on. The whole time I've been noticing other peoples kickstarters in the past I've always thought, "Wow they made $20,000?". I had no idea that the reality is evident that you don't actually get what you think you will. There's a huge amount of letdown that occurs when someone pledges $1,000 only for their payment method to bounce and you get literally nothing.

Also, our policy of "you get your access immediately when we see your contribution", while well meaning, basically ended in a ton of people getting free access the whole time after they played for a month then their creditcard on file bounced for the contribution they set.

And now to the biggest issue which we've spent the better part of September smashing our heads over and the eventual resolution that came of it.

We have no choice. We have to do a graphics renderer switch. It's the last thing in the world I wanted to do but the issue is that the one area we did not have access to was the data stream itself. It wasn't necessary to utilize the kinds of crazy features our players have enjoyed thus far, but as insane as it sounds, the initialization of the most basic feature you can imagine, such as a functional inventory system required to finish itemizing the game, is more or less impossible.

The Cons:

1. There will be percievably no new or future updates to the existing game unless something changes. It stays as it sits aside from the fact that i may add more assets such as the new OSI parts once they're ready.
2. It's going to set us back at least a month, which means setting back the date we can throw up an Indiegogo campaign for the sales of turrets and defensive structures by an equal amount of time.
3. Less new assets than I had anticipated because of the manpower it's going to take to do the conversion.
4. We (temporarily) lose the specific effects associated with our day/night cycle. The graphics won't look as nice for the first month or so, especially with regards to grass and foliage.

And now the Pros:

1. We'll finally have open access to our own shader pipeline and able to create our own, paving the way for improved graphics in the future. Although they will look more primitive for now, as time progresses our shaders will continue to become more complex and elaborate until they eventually surpass what we already had.
2. Actual support from a business, not just one guy on the other side of the planet.
3. Divergence goes from 1/3 of a programmer to 3 full-time coders including for the first time, our new Lead Programmer, Steven.
4. No "hacking" required to integrate the features we want in the future.
5. We keep our existing server accounts system. If you had access before, you have it now and at the level appropriate to your past contributions. If you could log into the prototype, you can log into the "real game", even at the same time if you wish.
6. 100x quicker and easier integration of our character customization system.
7. An even larger game world... I know this will surprise a lot of people, but the fact remains that the lack of occlusion was one of the only limitations of the prototype and with our new renderer, that limitation is now removed.
8. We're leaving the prototype up 24/7 for people to play in as long as they wish. It's our goal to, while working out our system for packaging area contents (houses, buildings, etc) retain a consistent data storage language on the server so that, in theory, what you do in the world of the prototype appears in the "live game" simultaneously.
9. Higher resolution terrain with better resolution textures. If you had land, it looks better now. If you had an island, it's even more detailed.

In the end, it is a positive move and will certainly cut down our time to a somewhat finished product in the long term.

Our guys will continue to be on teamspeak every week, in our channel, doing our work some days beginning at 8am pst and ending as late as 5am. I want to thank everyone who has stopped in to teamspeak to offer their words of encouragement.

W're going to be working like madmen to have something amazing to show the community at the end of October.

Announcement: Ability To Package Area Contents Into "Pre-Made" Duplicatable and Transferable Assets

Sorry, had a bit of a crisis earlier which delayed the announcement.

What was previously a mere speculation of a long-term "possible" goal has been made possible;

The copying, duplicating, or otherwise replication of world area and it's contents, laying the foundation of features such as the ability for players to create their own "pre-made buildings and structures" for trade or sale.

Thanks for the help community.

Major announcement later on today, evening PST.

Major announcement later on today, evening PST.
A few people have been asking me about the possibility of functionality that would, in the distance future, allow for something very specific to take place and up until a few minutes ago i've been saying, "No... No do you have any idea how difficult that would be to pull off? Maybe in a couple years we'll investigate the possibility of that."

I got the godamn thing WORKING at 4:50AM...

People keep telling me I should sleep and this is precisely why I don't... Too many breakthroughs happen that you never expected at ridiculously late hours. Anyhoo. Going to TRY to sleep for a few hours now and keep the secret through additional testing for a few more hours until tonight ;)

-Ethan

Server Migration and Building The Starter Zone

Today, August 3rd 2013, we pretty much finished the process of integrating the bulk of necessary data from our old "prototyping" accounts system to a full and robust SQL database. The point of this is it'll allow us to begin the process of flagging player accounts with criteria necessary to grant them their perks, even while some of those perks are still in development.

Later on today we'll begin the process of migrating the server (from my freaking PC) to an actual VPS that should, in theory, allow us to start letting in many more people at once while simultaneously improving latency across the board.

If all goes well, our first test after this will be something really, really awesome. We're going to rebuild the "starting zone", with the help of a few players, while INSIDE the game... This will be a true test of our technology and pipeline in seeing how well it handles such an attempt.

We came close to $2K tonight and it's been less than 12 hours so I'm hopeful that, if we can keep up the current momentum and perhaps build a little more, we could beat our startup campaign! This would be a huge help because I set the goal at $15K simply because... There's no actual reason to set it higher than $10 if you think about it. With these sites, the amount of money you get is based on whether you meet your goal or not, whether that goal is $10 or $10M, it makes no difference. It can only hurt you to set it higher as opposed to lower because if you don't make the goal, whatever it was, you don't get anything.

Sounds bizarre huh?

Well anyways, how much we can crank out plays a direct role in how many additional bodies i can hire on and how much new content we can afford to create with aforementioned bodies.

Thanks for your support guys and we'll be announcing how the server migration went, for better or for worse, tomorrow evening on our teamspeak :)

-Ethan

Divergence Online Kickstarter NOW LIVE!

At long last, Divergence's Kickstarter is officially live! We're offering some unique perks that i hope will really turn some heads and drum up support for the project. I'll also be adding additional media to it throughout the campaign such as a brief video for our military synthetics (two of which are still being created) so definitely check that out.

For anyone wishing to checkout the game immediately, our Gold-level perk grants you alpha access as well as the other bonuses listed, meaning you'll be included in the list of accounts who have access to it immediately as early as this next week!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/372333499/divergence-online

Kickstarter - Skyscrapers - Video

Tons of stuff going on right now for us!

As many people are aware, our Kickstarter is supposed to be starting today but as I'm coming to find out, there can be hiccups with that particular process. First and foremost, it can take up to several days to get "approved" and there are some incredibly fine details nowadays to getting on there I wasn't aware of.

I actually emailed them in advance, attempting to ensure that things would go off without a hitch and this morning was informed that "stating players may re-sell your product at a later date to other individuals for a profit" prohibits your project from being approved... Ok, so everyone who has ever bought anything off of a kickstarter project ever has remained the sole owner of that product and never sold it to another person.... What?

So I stripped that info from the listing and am currently awaiting another response as to it's status. Meanwhile, our MMORPG.com advertising has begun at the rate of $100 per day regardless of whether there's a campaign to point to or not. Not their fault I'm aware. Their staff were nice enough to give us a brilliant review on their site but my concern is that it'll be off the front page by the time Kickstarter approves the listing.

Right now, it can't be helped. It's just that waiting is a real bitch.

So in the meantime, we're devoting our energy to finishing our functionality for removing "stuck" objects in the game, and also putting the finishing touches on our SQL server implementation and also switching the storage method of world data to a "release" build which we hope will increase the performance of block and object placement in areas containing more than 1000 objects.

In most cases, people building their homes and other structures in the game in various locations notice no downtime when placing or pulling up assets. They only notice "lag" when someone approaches a thousand or so blocks or objects in a single area, because the server must then access a 2mb area file to add or subtract from instead of one typically around 4K only in size.

Just to be clear, an "area" is only 128 square meters in Diveregence. So packing that many items into such a small space would only occur if you were, for instance, building a skyscraper. And that is why the only place it occurs is the spot where one of our players built Divergence's first skyscraper :P

"The Tower of Babel" as it's being called, viewing for a few moments in video 2 was apparently someone's attempt to see whether we were full of it when we said in previous videos just how far away the limits were if there were any at all. Currently, it's dozens of stories tall, easily the largest thing on the island aside from the volcano and was gaining height up until the moment we had to call it to a pause because manipulating it was lagging other people in other areas out.

To be 100% clear, having a huge, huge, huge structure like that causes absolutely no lag (latency) issues in game. Not even for anyone inside of it. It's only when that area must be "accessed" by the server to make changes that it does. Having a "shopping mall-sized" area that is only 3-5 stories tall would not cause such an issue because those buildings are horizontal and it's contents would be spread out over several areas, preventing any single one from bloating in size.

But when you make a super-mega-ultra-huge height object, you're cramming it all into one area, and that's what we're working to resolve right now.

Hopefully by tomorrow we'll know whether our fix worked or not, but I'm also working with one of our artists to try and get a second Military Synthetic in soon also.

Thanks for the support guys and we'll let you know the moment the campaign actually is approved!

Community Pre-Alpha Test Tonight!

You heard it right! In one hour the Divergence login server will go online and anyone able to successfully connect to it will be allowed a preview of our systems for a few hours.

Again, i know it's short notice but if we announced it further in advance the likelihood is there wouldn't be enough room for everyone so we "need to keep it small".

Head on over to our forums announcement page for details!

http://www.divergence-online.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=305&start=10#p2560

Alpha Build 0.24 / Relativity

Last night's test went so well that we're considering doing another tonight.

The question of when the next test occurs though depends upon how quickly we can squash a few bugs that make it almost unplayable after a certain amount of time.

First and foremost, I'm glad that we've successfully had people throwing down not just hundreds but thousands of items into the game world with above average performance, but the more objects added into the world, the faster the passage of time and subsequently the day/night cycle is going. With about one city block relatively filled, day and night were lasting about 60 seconds. Having people log into that would surely on annoy everyone, so we're working to resolve it asap.

It's just like Einstein said all along, time is relative!

Divergence Kickstarter Campaign Announced For August 1st 2013!

At long last we're finally ready to announce our new campaign's start date and details!

There are a lot of things that are important to a lot of people, but in the end the feature that seemed the most important to the most people were player housing and player cities, and so that's what we devoted our energy to developing this time around.

And not just any old kind of player housing and cities. People made it very clear to us that they know when they're being duped, and that none such half-assed measures would be tolerated such as the abysmal attempts of games like Age of Conan and even worse, Everquest 2.

Nobody wants a home that exists in the exact same configuration with the exact same shapes and the exact same location as everyone else. They want to be able to point to the top of a hill and say, "See that? That's mine..."

As you all can imagine, this is a big big job for even a "real" studio. SOE spent millions developing their system years ago with a team of dozens of highly paid professionals. What makes SGL think we can compete with something like that, when no other professional studio has been able to match it since?

Because I believe a wanton amount of waste, inefficiency and plain-old-fashioned "not-give-a-damn" goes on in the game industry today. There should be nothing you're able to do in this little mmo that you can't do in Star Wars: Old Republic for an example; a multi-hundred-million-dollar "you must buy it because..Bioware... Shiny... Star Wars... more of...".

My intention is to continually build and improve this franchise and this particular game until it's the best out there, and I think that once this campaign starts people will see "what is possible" and hopefully back it to greatness.

Why August 1st?
Because in truth, the compulsion is simply to keep on saying, "Just one more fix..! Just one more thing...!" and to be honest, that could go on forever. At some point, you have to draw the line and say "it's happening at this place on this time one way or another" and set the wheels in motion. Our deposit has been put down on our simultaneous advertising campaign for MMORPG.com and it can't be refunded, so this is happening.

What all can we expect in the new campaign?
Like I mentioned earlier, player housing will be the primary focus, however we're also going to be showing off our framework for player cities as well. I know this is a big claim and assured to arouse some "PuhSHAH!"s from the community. I urge all to simply curb their suspicions until they see it in action ;)

How complete are those features?
Not. Obviously. The basis for being able to do the things we're doing in the new video is the harvesting, gathering and basic crafting systems which is... why we're trying to get money to go further with this. And so what you're seeing in the new footage is essentially those prerequisites stripped away just to show the "ability" that you have to do these things. Once we get another round of funding, it will be my pleasure to expand this to crafting and harvesting. I'll be expanding on this a lot in the commentary and press release.

Any new races, breeds or species that we'll see?
You'll just have to wait and see ;)

About the new movie(s) coming out... What will be the setting?
The hope was I'd be able to host them on one of our player islands in a different climate than our last video. So far we've shown Coniferous and Mediterranean climates. I'd love to host it somewhere else this time but one stubborn bug is cropping up that might prevent that. I have people on it so hopefully we'll know something in the next week as the new footage will be shot towards the middle of next week.

Does this campaign have a focus as to an individual faction?
It didn't intend to but when you're hiring a lot of people and working with them every day, things work out differently than you often anticipate. For example I had consignments for my designs for all three Terran factions to be included in the new campaign but only the fellow helping me with VRTek actually completed his work, so i've been playing catchup with OSI and DC for the last several weeks. Because of this reason and this reason alone (that there are actually assets for VR) that you'll see them more prominent in the new campaign, but we'll be filling OSI and DC out with the proceeds of this campaign to a much greater degree, even during the campaign.

What about perks? What will they be and how many?
I'd love to outline this ahead of time, but it would be impossible to list them without at the same time giving away "the surprise". I will say this though that several of the perks will have to do with aiding you in setting up your homestead. These perks will be an excellent way for both individual lone-wolves and also groups of friends to start off with enough materials to immediately begin staking their claim to an amazing piece of real-estate as the foundation for their own homes, settlements, trade outposts and even metropolises.

Ooooooh "surprise". Does that have something to do with the "super secret" stuff you mentioned in the last campaign? that if we chipped in enough money that we'd have it for this campaign?
Yes ;) And you'll be really surprised. I hope so anyway because if you see it in action and aren't surprised you're one jaded sumbitch my friend!

Will you be honoring any previous contributors by "grandfathering them into" the new perks system?
Yes, to a certain degree. This isn't going to happen without more money and so i can't lose my shirt on this, but at the bare minimum some people will be elevated based on their contributions: For example, all player-island purchasers will inherit our top-end property defense package to help prevent someone snatching their claim on the first day of release simply because they had a day job and couldn't be there. In addition, all players who purchased a vindicator or Verrator (the separate perk, not the perk where you got both) will be elevated from a Tier 1 to a Tier 2 suit at no charge. This suit likely won't appear in the new campaign simply because i'm very picky about what artists I bring on to help me out and i'm still in the market for an alien-technology-only artist to help me flesh it out. Players who bought both a Vindicator and Verrator will get something different from that but in a species war with two sides vying for survival, players who can "play both sides of the table" are in a much greater position to grief their own people than those who play individual sides."

Will Vindicator and Verrator still be available in the new campaign?
Yes but to a much lesser degree. We're pretty much at the limit of how many we want in the world. They're gods of death and our game world is in no position to survive a Ragnarok just yet, so they will be present in very limited supply and to a much greater expense. Essentially, they're only for fanatics now, which is the way I intended for it to be.

I want the characters that people already purchased to be rare and coveted.

I missed the last campaign so i didn't have a chance to get them when they were cheaper! Is there any way i could still lock in that price?

Under normal circumstances I would say no. But in truth, if I had the ability to include even one new thing into the upcoming campaign, I would be doing the project a disservice if i didn't at least try to come up with the money for it. I had a blessed response from players when UPS delivered my PC to me in pieces upon re-opening sales for a brief period last time and therefore for the next week I'll be taking email requests for these characters (individually - no packages for both sides anymore unless you want to pay double as in two orders) if anyone is still interested in getting in while they're cheaper. As an added bonus, I'll be grandfathering in any of these characters into Tier 2 suits if they buy before the new campaign starts as all new Vindicator sales after August 1st will begin in Tier 1 suits.

This also opens up a unique investment opportunity for players who maybe want to "buy in" now to a rare species in the game for the purposes of re-selling them to other players at a later date for profit. Anyone who recalls how much money a player Jedi (for instance) was going for on ebay in pre-cu SWG will understand what I mean.

Any sales requests can go straight to my email but please be compassionate - I still get over 15 emails a day and it's brutal to try and respond to every single one and still work on the game.

ethan (at) divergence-online.com

Well I've said enough for right now. If anyone is still reading, I want to say thanks again for the opportunity to service the mmo community with something I believe it desperately needs and I'm looking forward to showing off  "What we did with your money" very soon XD

Very Close...

Incredibly close now.

All that's left is animating of one asset and two very small but important features that I can't do on my own. I wish I could say specifically how long it would take, as i can generally do on things I'm working on solo, but when it's stuff beyond my expertise such as 3D math, i can't speak for other people. All I can do is make their lives miserable until they give me what I want :P

Really wish I could show some screenshots but that would spoil the surprise. By the time the new campaign starts up and it's all "out there", you'll understand ;)

That's all!

Back In Business!

Special thanks to 12:01 computers in Portland Oregon for working tirelessly to get my shit back up and running. UPS still hasn't responded to my insurance claim.

On a more positive note, long nights and TV dinners are back to being a part of my daily routine. Fortunately enough progress was made before the event that even with a week down I'm still somewhat ahead of schedule and hoping to have this ready-ish sooner than anticipated. The hunt still continues for a lead programmer but most of my time is devoted to the game and honestly I haven't spent that much time recently searching.

Fuck UPS - 3 Vindicator / Verrator Available

I avoided making this post for the last week, but as backlogged as i'm getting on emails I found it necessary to just get it over with.

As a few people go I just recently moved and had my PC shipped to the new address. Everything worked out fine, the overlapping over utilities and internet service to the new address so i was set to only be out of action for at most one day. But when my PC arrived the tower was in a shape I can only describe as "fucked". Opening it up I found that virtually everything not secured by more than two screws was broken off and laping in a free-sliding heap at the bottom. This included my graphics card, sound card, even the cpu fan and worst of all, all 3 hard drives.

So naturally I opened a case with UPS and still haven't gotten a useful response. In the meantime i took my hard drives to a local pc repair shop to see what they could recover. 2 out of my 3 redundant hard drives were totally shot and the third was salvageable but not bootable. I left it with them overnight to clone it onto a new drive but when I got that one home after replacing most of my shit at Fry's Electronics for a ton of money, the replacement hard drive literally burned out at 2:30am (smoke.. fizzle... dead)

So now I'm like $500 down and still not usable PC. With any luck they'll have it working again soon but that doesn't fill the hole made by having to replace virtually a whole computer's worth of guts bought just last year anyway.

Again, sorry for the bad news but as many people as I'm getting asking me every day what's up, I wanted them to know I wasn't just sitting on my hands. I'm sitting on a 5 year old laptop right now but hopefully they'll have my shit recovered in the next day or so.

The upside at least is that a ton of actual assets generation is almost done. Even if the code still needs work, fortunately we're still slightly ahead of the curve in terms of content. So much so that I was able to finish one who new race that wasn't originally even planned to be available, but a surprisingly large number of people emailed in and asked about it specifically so we'll be including that in one of our near future videos :)

Thanks for your support. To try and recoup the costs of all this mess, I've decided to enable up to 3 more sales of a Vindicator and/or Verrator available at the original price if anyone still wants them. I get emails all the time, so I think this might be a way of coming with enough scratch to prevent me from having to dip into the company ink to replace this shit. For anyone who is interested, yet a very few will be available in the next campaign but they will be drastically more expensive; In the neighborhood of $200-$300 so if you are interested, drop an email to my business address and i'll send back an invoice.

Thanks for the team spirit guys :)

-Ethan

 ethan@divergence-online.com

One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development

After having been up for over 30 hours trying to get some stuff working that I feel very close to, I decided it was time to make a new DevBlog post, however after reading it back to myself, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that it will probably make me seem like The Unabomber.

My first response was to scrap the whole thing, then pick it back up tomorrow. Then, after weighing the consequenes, I decided to go ahead and keep it exactly as-is; A somewhat nonsensical collection of points that don't really relate to one another as much as they seemed to have in my mind at the time I wrote them down. I've decided to keep it as-is because keeping with the policy of honesty that I try to sell as the focal point of my campaign, it's best that people understand who and what they're getting involved in, for better or for worse.

And so without further ado:

----------------

Devblog: May 20th.
One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development

----------------

Common is the practice of game developers (especially MMORPG developers) who make broad claims about how kickass their product is going to be; How innovative and game-changing their creative vision, then once the obligatory "reality check sets in" they must recede from the original grand design of their heart's desire to something more realistic. It's called "settling".

Now imagine my surprise to find that I get to be a part of the first time, as far as I'm aware, that the opposite has actually happened. Less than one month has passed since the final day of our first financing campaign and the game is at least twice as far along as I had thought it could possibly be. We're not only on-schedule, but actually ahead of it. It might still go into testing at the same period, but it'll be better at that time than I previously figured it would be.

What's the secret?

Obviously the secret is hate. Anyone who watched either or both of my first two videos for our first campaign could probably glean with little effort how difficult it has become for me to mask my contempt for the state of MMO-gaming. As far as I'm concerned, WoW and companies like EA impregnated my once-beloved genre with the foul seed of corruption until it's belly was laid fat and bloated with millions of meme-spewing fetuses and their bad fucking English.

Yes, it's true. I am mostly ruined. However, ruined as I may very well be, I can still be useful at something.

This. I can be useful - at this, and that is enough for me.

There's an upside to trying and failing at something for seven years simply because you have no money however. The benefit is efficiency. When you have nothing for a long enough time, you slowly become the master of finding out ways to do things cheaply. Just as the human body becomes an engine of brutal efficiency if kept just above the point of starvation for long enough, so then has Stained Glass Llama gradually solidified into a lean lumberjack of game development somehow.

And then you suddenly have money. For me, it was compliments of a few hundred desperate MMOers who, if i had a people (which I don't) I would hesitate but for a moment to call them "my people". They are the closest thing that might exist.

Now the body has fuel and thus, now the money goes far. Very far in fact. Although still an expensive trade, building an mmorpg, if it isn't essential it doesn't stay.

Good family man? Good husband? Taking the family out camping on the weekend you say? Well, fuck you I'm paying the foreign guy who bleeds coffee on a Saturday night to help me get that feature working.

Why? Because that is what those 366 backers have entrusted me to do with their hard-earned money.

The more the cache in the pool rose day by day the more I began to feel an increasing sense of responsibility to those people. I think it finally hit me somewhere around the $20,000 mark; the critical mass of, "Oh shit... Now i really DO have to make this work..."

Then there was also an emotional component that I hadn't expected.

All in all, I received probably three negative "you will fail" messages and over 500 "you can do it" ones. I have spent the better part of my entire life being the adversary of my own species and here were these random humans throwing their money at me and begging me to continue. Begging.

I'll always remember one letter a guy sent me. It was a very emotional paragraph baring the trademark inconsistency and sentence structure of someone genuinely unstable. It took me two sittings to finish it only because the fellow really put you in a room with him and his troubles while he explained that the good times of his past (what i refer to as "The Golden Days of MMOs" mainly centered around EQ, AO and later, SWG) were gone and would never come around again, and somehow this was an allegory his life in general. That those good feelings derived from a silly little game, being a part of a real community where he had friends, had people waiting on him to log in and the freedom he enjoyed were over because of the new climate of the genre. It was a story of prison, suffering, loss and desperation for a chance to have back those good times.

You could count the number of things I believe in on one hand, but one thing that I have to believe is that given enough time even the deepest wounds can be healed, or at the very least mended. Moving on requires the brain to accrue new memories and experiences, and sometimes a shitload of them for a serious enough trauma. The more distracted you can keep your thoughts, the quicker that time will pass and in theory, the sooner you can return to the world as something like a whole person.

And so I came to realize that I'm creating a distraction; An alternate reality for people to "escape into" and in many circles, such a practice is considered a negative one.

I decided to say, "Yeah? Screw it." If it keeps a guy from murdering his ex-wife and spending the rest of his life in prison, how can that possibly be a bad thing? Not that the pursuit of vengeance is not a valid cause in my opinion, which it most certainly is, but the ideal situation is one in which you are simply able to "Get over it". If you can't, by all means,go forth and seek vengeance. If you can however, do so.

The universe will not stand in judgement of me, or anyone else for that matter. It is both the responsibility and the right of the individual creature to find or create purpose should we need it.

I've accepted that my purpose right now is to create an artificial reality for emotionally unstable weirdos.

So be it.

New Script Finalized

Recently I finished the new script for the next video. I could spend that time yammering on about various things with regards to the setting or lore, but the overall feel I'm getting is that the great majority of people would prefer being able to see some new part of the game in action as opposed to just that. Therefore, that's where I'm devoting my energy right now.

All work regarding to the new campaign has been consigned. All features required for the new video are under work right now by myself and various parties. The existing game world viewable in previous videos has been successfully integrated into the streamed format necessary for the crazy features you're going to be seeing once they're ready.

I'd show some images but the statement was, "Super Secret" and frankly it would spoil the affect of everyone witnessing it at the same time with no preconceived expectations. Rest assured, everyone will be surprised.

A few weeks.

20K Milestone Crossed!

In the wake of Divergence crossing over the 20K contributions milestone I thought it prudent to take a few minutes away from development and spread a little news across the collective community bread so to speak.

Where is development at right now?

Right now we're focused solely on the features that form the core of the Divergence experience; The streaming, totally modifiable world. Fortunately, we aren't just starting this task and in fact we began it over a year ago, however completely flat broke at the time it was impossible to devote the time we wanted to it and  progress ground to a halt. This was the sole reason why I restarted the project with our first crowdsourcing campaign so that I personally could hire some full-time help to finish up what we started previously.

I've been blessed at cursed both as a result. A lot of people have emailed myself with programming skill available and we've made great progress. The flip side of that is, Divergence still does not have a Lead Programmer, it has several contributing individuals making considerable progress, but for all intents and purposes, we're still looking for a department lead who can devote at least 40 hours per week to organizing our individual contributors.

It isn't something I can do. I have a full team of artists, 2D and 3D and even two new animators to train and supervise every day, in addition to trying to get caught up on islands that people have ordered. It's 16-20 hour days for me just to keep my head above the water.

The good news is that every single day it's closer to being in a playable state than it was yesterday. The contributors coming in are a major major help in bolstering morale of the group. Everyone wants to be a part of something that is actually successful and moving.

Enough of this technical crap, what do you really mean about this progress? What is really going on right now?

Here is my best explanation of where Divergence is at right now, feature-wise.

The single biggest undertaking with this project, the one thing that sets it aside from all other mmorpgs is it's completely streamed and modifiable world.

But the videos of the world and islands already look great! What do you still have to do to it?

Well the world is awesome, don't get me wrong, but that world you see in the videos isn't directly modifiable by players yet, and that's the current push. Only areas created inside the game are modifiable and that isn't good enough. There are two game worlds... The first is the world you see in the videos; What I call "The Hard World" that is created from scratch. The second is "The Streamed World" which is what you get when you're actually playing the game. Once the world itself is updated/created on our end, it must be converted and compressed into a format that can be streamed over the internet as changes are made to it in real-time.

Nobody else that i'm aware of has this, which is why it's such a big deal.

How far along are we with it? Extremely.. ridiculously close. In fact the game already has the capability to create new area with all of those capabilities in real-time as-is. The work right now is to convert what we already have into that same format so that world artists such as myself can continue to build world in our advanced editors as opposed to "inside the game" which is much slower.

Will there be another crowdsourcing campaign?

Oh yes. There will most likely be a few more, each with their own new and unique perks as well as a few previous ones. I don't think we can pump out $50K to get this finished in just one push in under 30 days, so instead I'd like to do several of 10-20K each. It's must safer that way.

When will the next begin?

The next campaign will begin when we're able to show the progress we've made with proceeds from the first campaign. I'd love to be able to start the new one hot on the heels of the last, but more important than that is being able to show the work, and I can't start the new one without being able to demonstrate that in most likely a new really cool video. I'm hoping to begin the new campaign within a few weeks of the last, but again that's me saying "the major features will be ready to show in just a few weeks" which is a hard claim to make when I don't control how quickly those things are done (without tons of money of course).

You reached your $20K goal, what's up with this big secret feature?

You'll find that out in the video ;) The more financing the project pulls in, the more pull I have with game programmers in being able to prove it's worth their time to call in sick days, use up vacation and leave to get it done sooner rather than later.

What about the Factions video?!

I'll get to it when i damn well get to it! Honestly the truth is there is a good amount of new artwork involving that very subject as well as concepts for new armor and so on that I'd like to include in the presentation, so I guess it's more accurate to say, "I'll get to it when that stuff can be included in it for maximum effect".

Facebook

My original idea was to make today's post something completely different since I'm really looking forward to updating the community on our status but there's one thing that I really don't think can be put off any longer:

Facebook.

I'm getting a lot, and i do mean a lot of friend requests every day. As cool at this feels, it also makes me feel like crap because none of these people realize that I don't... really... use facebook. I have all of 58 friends on Facebook and that's about all I can manage as is, being on it maybe once per week.

The point I'm trying to make is, if you sent me a friend request and I didn't accept, it isn't because you were ignored. The reason is because truthfully, I'm a hermit and I cherish the ability to say and do what I want without having to worry about it spilling over onto Divergence.

I let in two people at the beginning and immediately someone quoted me as saying, "I fucking hate people who name their kids after Twilight characters" onto Divergence's forums. As i cannot very well reconcile the ridiculous way people live their lives around me, or the way I feel about the things they do,  I can however choose to subject only those closest to me to those opinions. Most of which are people I share blood with, or have either helped me change a tire, move a couch or bail me out of jail.

There are a shitload of cons and virtually no pros is what I'm saying. Maybe in the future. Who knows.

Thanks for understanding. Like I said, I didn't want anyone to think they were being ignored.

Next update is in a few days! Hopefully with the one island video out of the way (and only 3 more to do still lol) I can put together the factions video I've been wanting to soon.

-Ethan

First Player Island Goes Live!

After much anticipation our first player-island is more or less ready. We'll still be making a few tweaks here and there but it's in good enough shape (I think) to at least show a few minute preview of it.

New Website is LIVE!

A promise is a promise ;)

As the title implies, the new site is finally live. I'll be taking feedback from a few internal sources heavily at first, and making tweaks here and there both in graphics and functionality, but so far it's by far one of the best sites I've ever put my name to. Several of the pages, especially in both the factions and civilizations tabs need to be improved and in some cases, finished.

I am not a godamn web developer! So please keep that in mind before offering criticism :P

I have it hosted off-site until I'm satisfied no major changes need to be made, but you can still get there from the trusty www.Divergence-Online.com link.

Enjoy, I hope!

Game and Funding Update

Hey gang. I thought I'd step in for a sec while i had a minute or two and catch everyone up to what's going on with the game, maybe clear up some inquiries I seem to be getting.

First off, I'm getting a lot of people saying, "There's only 5 1/2 weeks left and you still need over 40K, what happens when you don't meet that goal??"

Well the answer to that requires an understand of just how much coke you can get for $7,000. I'm waiting on a reply to an email I left Ozzy and it varies from state-to-state but at the very least our small dev team can have a weekend of ritual excess.

I jest, of course.

Here's the deal. It needs to get to at least $30,000 out of the 50. Why? Because if I absolutely had to, there's a place I didn't want to have to go to for money that I will if that's what it takes. Sure, I'll owe 20K, but what's the in the grand scheme of things. Besides, we can always do another campaign later on for much much less money to close the gap.

The campaign was still a very very good idea and I couldn't be more glad that we're doing it. It's brought not just funding but some very useful assets that found me through it who are making the technical side of it possible.

And now onto the state of the game:

Where are we at right now? What's going on? Well the answer to that is actually much simpler than you might suppose. We're working on the code to allow for the persistent state. This is absolutely necessary if we expect people's homes and harvesters to stay there when the server restarts. The upside is, we don't have to "create" hardly any of that, it already exists. Currently the server IS creating storage for both the world and objects,which it wasn't doing last week, it just isn't saving them yet. Progress is being made, but we spend a lot of time waiting on responses from our engine maker.

Regardless of how annoying I have to be to get what we need, it'll come. It took SOE years to get their persistent world working. Supporting us a few days or weeks won't kill you ;)

That's all for now. I need to get back to work on the world and then hopefully resolve this "post approval" deal on the forums.

Thanks for your support, please keep it coming!

Help Us Hype The Game!

Below is a cut and paste of an announcement I just made on the public forums incase anyone hasn't been over there yet. It's really important!
-----------------------
Anyone who noticed our old listing on MMORPG.com will recognize why we gave up on there initially. Back in the day it was the nexus of all trolldom and just took too much to combat to make it worth it.

However it does happened to be a place where an insane number of individuals go to read up on upcoming MMORPGs so in the interest of doing what's right for the project, I've been in touch with their staff and got the project brought back "online" with them.

What helps these games a lot is if people go to your listing and "hype" the project up, once it reaches a certain amount it lists it on the front page. That's a huge help! So what I'm asking people to do from the deepest section of my guts, maybe the sub-cockel region, is to there as soon as they can go to mmorpg and show the game some love.

What I thought we might do is each week pick a website or publication and all "bomb" it with attention. It's not much but it's the best Idea I think is on the table right now and who knows, it might even help close the gap.

Time to spit on your hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats!

MMORPG.com Divergence Hype Page:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/269/view/hype

MMORPG.com "Rumors" Forum:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/f ... -Room.html

MMORPG.com "The Pub" General Forums:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/f ... PGCOM.html

Our Indiegogo Listing With Videos (If you want to post the link)
http://igg.me/at/divergence/x/2437573

Video 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trpmoQnE ... K3KT4AtPLg

Video 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAFJ8FxJ ... K3KT4AtPLg

New Forums Are Live!

Since finishing the website could take me a bit more time, what with the boon of having new team members to train and accommodate  I decided to go ahead and announce the forums right now so people can at least communicate with one another and we can start to build a healthy new community sooner rather than later.

Please have an open mind. I know they're basic but I just tacked on "webmaster" to an ever-increasing plate of jobs and at the very least they're a great starting point that we can build onto with more features at a later date should we choose to. I took the liberty of plugging in Youtube and Google video into the supported BBCode so that should keep you busy for a while eh?

As always, thanks a ton guys. Watch the forums for new announcements in the next few days! :)

http://www.Divergence-Online.com/forums

website update

Just popping in on my phone to say that i had to step away from my pc today to see a close friend out of town but ill be back tomorrow (sunday) to try and finish setting up the new website and forums as promised. Next video is at the 10k mark so thanks again for getting us this far guys and it feels great to be finally getting back to work on this insane project!

Player Cities v0.5 Q&A

For my first dev blog here, I thought I'd take a few minutes to outline some of the questions people have been asking about how Player Cities are intended to function in Divergence.
First off, try not to look at "a city" as if it were an object to be right-clicked and transferred into your ownership. A player city is nothing more than a collection of individual buildings placed by individual players in close proximity of one another. If those players with to share the expense of a mutually beneficial defensive network for their homes or buildings, they can decide among themselves someone who represents their interests, and that person can place a city hall.

The city hall serves numerous purposes. First and foremost it taxes all buildings within it's sphere of radius designated by it's owner and collects those fees. That revenue is pooled and added to it's own maintenance pool, which is the source of the services it can furnish.

The most common service a city hall can provide is to establish a militia or police force (depending on what the township wishes). A militia is typically a set of NPCs which are spawned and patrol within the city hall's sphere of influence. They're programmed to attack either individuals specified at the city hall, or can be extended to broader specifications such as "attack all non-OSI aligned" if the town wishes to be factionally affiliated.

This "militia" will patrol within it's boundaries, in between structures and attack anyone specified as "unwelcome". Once a member of it's ranks is killed, it is replaced by the city hall at the expense of it's maintenance pool.

The mayor (the owner of the city hall) can also place defensive structures as anyone else in the world can but any defensive structure (unless overridden such as a wealthy individual wishing to employ their own personal estate defenses at their own expense) placed within the sphere with maintenance from (once again) the city hall.

Q:"But what if our mayor quits the game or is being a douche?"
A: (Currently) there is only one way to replace an uncooperative mayor in Divergence. Armed rebellion.

A city hall is like any other structure in that it can be destroyed, either through controlled demolition or a simple self destruct sequence initiated by an AI or highly-skilled hacker. The mayor obviously can do anything in his power to stop this sequence from completing, including setting city defenses to target others at will, giving him time to access the panel and stop it's function. Once the city hall is destroyed, whatever was in the maintenance pool and internal bank (if that feature is enabled) is dropped to the ground for anyone to pick up. A new mayor can throw down a new city hall and the process repeats itself.

Q: "So what if someone sneaks through the main gate at my city, kills all the guards, destroys the defensive turrets, blows up the city hall and takes my money?"
A: Well then, it sucks to be you.

Remember that because a mayor can take measures to stop the destruction of his city hall, through personal action and city defenses that the only time when one individual should be able to totally take over a town is if that town is already virtually vacant and has no operational defenses of it's own. "Taking over" a township/town/city/metropolis requires a coordinated effort of several individuals willing to risk dying and losing their own inventory and equipment in the process. It also requires the commitment to, if necessary, maintain that effort in preventing the existing mayor from thwarting their attempts.

In other MMOs, the one's brave enough to attempt player cities, you always find their still remains scattered around. Ghost towns long since vacant, taking up prime real estate and always right where you wanted to mine a really good concentration of aluminum alloy. That won't happen in Divergence. "Don't try to take more than you're prepared to commit to defending" is the rule.

Q:"You said already that you don't impose a value set on players. Remember that stuff about player freedom? What if I want to name my town something ridiculous?"
A: You're more than welcome to name your city a disgusting array of personal attacks and/or racial slurs if you so wish. But as with everything in Divergence, be aware of the repercussions. A few might be:

1. A town named "Cuntville" or "Buttsecksopolis" isn't going to make it into the story. Neither will "Alderaan City" or anything else obviously named after something from another game or franchise. Don't expect my or anyone else on the dev team's help if your desire to be unoriginal and cliche.
2. For names that go beyond the beyond of offensiveness, such as racial slurs, you can expect no interference from anyone representing Stainglass Llama at that time. However keep in mind that we're developers by day, players by night, and if someone on my team wants to make it a personal mission to obliterate a city with a bigotous name, as long as they're operating at the capacity of a player and not a GM, they are well within their rights to do so.

I hope this has spelled out a few of the more pertinent questions people had about the player city system. Obviously there's a lot more I could get into but please understand that giving people info about a game you're in the process of making is a double-edged sword. On one side you want to give people as much info as possible, but on the other the moment you open your mouth you become liable for those features and at the time of this writing, there is just under a mere $5,000 in the development pool.

As always, thanks for your support and helping make Divergence: Online a reality!