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