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.