Divergence Steam Download Now Available!

For those who don't frequent the facebook page, just an announcement to let everyone know that Divergence has successfully been integrated into Steam, so you can finally ditch that klunky old patcher, plug your key into Steam and download neat and clean from there. Anyone who needs their Steam key and has contributed at the appropriate level, just write us on our facebook page or email me directly at ethan@divergence-online.com

Divergence Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/415812755276522/

Long-Awaited Divergence Combat Patch Goes LIVE! (pt. 1)

Wednesday, December 9th 2015 marks the day Divergence finally experienced homicide involving a firearm.
Ana Todica, a homo-Solitus female was the unfortuante recipient of repeated gunshot wounds to the chest and bled out on the scene. Negative Capability occurred immediately afterwards; Her cloning data was successfully received by the ATC cloning network and processed a new body for her 90 seconds later.

A new dev blog post will be made after this one outlining the actual specifics of weapons crafting and utilization, death and dying, and the various other changes made to the game, so to get this process started and without further ado -

Major New Features:

Armed Combat

• For the first time ever, Divergence now has fundamental structure for completely twitch-based combat.
• Weapons can be crafted with characteristics derived from the quality and features of the crafted materials input during the crafting process. A more in-depth explanation will be available in the next devblog post.
• Seventeen firearms, comprising handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and long-range rifles have been added to the game world.
• Dozens of available ammunitions.
• Water has been added to the game world at long last. You'll find the ocean at zero elevation, which means you'll need to either travel to the coast, or find an extreme lowland (such as the desert) to see it in action. Improvements to come in following patches.
• All items now have Mass, which is determined during crafting.
• All structures can now be damaged and destroyed, and will reflect that damage if below 50% condition. See the important note below.
• Player death occurs now when your health (red bar) drops to 0%. You'll be confronted with the option of respawning at the cloning facility until player cloning facilities become available as does limited permadeath.
• Gunshots and effects will now attenuate based on distance and local reverberation. It sounds totally cool.

 

Upgrades and Improvements.

• Fifteen new tree, grass and foliage species.
• Tonemapping improvements.
• All-new login scene.
• Crafting tool now displays relevant traits of materials requested for all schematics and also displays how those components affect the outome of your crafted items.
• Skills and Professions have been completely refactored from the ground up. The skills panel will look only slightly different to the user, however the big difference is that now the server is able to create, store, and license all future unlockable schematics and abilities in future patches.
• Inventory icons will now size to one of three sizes; "Large, Medium, and Small" based on their intended size.
• Ennie legs are now fixed so they dont look like they're squatting.
• Female characters mouths are no longer open while holding certain items.
• All items now have Mass, which is determined during crafting.
• All structures can now be damaged and destroyed, and will reflect that damage if below 50% condition. See the important note below.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• All schematics are auto-unlocked for right now as soon as you re-learn Novice Artisan (which you must do). In the coming weeks, we will finally move these schematics to the correct location in each profession, such as artisan, architect, weaponsmith, etc, so get your fill right now.
• Additionally, material requirements for crafted items are extremely lax - Requiring only a few very raw materials in most cases - This is purely to make it easy for people to craft items that we wanted to get tested before launch, so again, have your fun while you can and you don't have to crafter individual gun barrels and so on.
• For those who haven't kept up to date, the game world now is essentially just a place where we've been dumping things for testing and that's why you'll see weird trees all over the place in odd places and very little design actually taking place. There's no point yet, because the "real" game world can't be authored until the week before launch.
• While you can throw punches in weird directions in unarmed right now, we haven't done melee combat yet, so keep that in mind. We decided to start with the most difficult type of combat; Ranged, and then do melee next.
• ALL STRUCTURES AND ITEMS CAN NOW BE DESTROYED so keep this in mind while shooting your guns in all directions.
• When you shoot someone's ferrocrete wall, the damage is transferred up to the hopper, and if the hopper id destroyed, everything contained within is destroyed along with it.

Stay tuned for part two of this devblog, outlining more of what all is included in this push.

December Plan of Events

It's been a rampant several weeks since our IGG ended, but not even a month since we're already nearly ready to release out first big update to the game, introducing tons of new "actual game" features.

Between now and our first patch, you will not be able to log into the game, so if you don't see the game version number change, don't waste your time.

Here's a brief intinerary of what everyone can expect to happen in the near future between today and our January first launch day:

1. A few more absolutely critical fixes.
2. First patch introducing all our new content created since IGG. Brief announcement over social media meant to draw in 20-30 testers who'd like to be the first to try new stuff and willing to give us useful and open-minded feedback on it.
3. Tweaks, fixes based on that feedback.
4. Trying to get as many additional features working in the time we have left.
5. Our super-duper bigass patch with a better explanation meant to draw in as many or more testers.
6. Free for all slugfest where we initiate Ragnarok, paint the desert sand red and shoot video and still images to be used on our actual steam page.
7. Erasure of all in-game content, existing terrain, basically everything.
8. Replace all previous terrain and terrain content with new "for launch" landscape layout.
9. Full announcement to all past contributors on all campaigns and elsewhere, letting everyone know we're going ahead with launch and what they can expect.
10. "Land Grab Event" for everyone entitled.
11. Obliteration of our existing game client and patcher, preparing to deploy everything to the much, much, much better steam patching service. Non-steam-key enabled game installs will no longer work, so make sure you use the steam keys that we'll be giving you based on your contribution level.
12. Launch day! Beta is considered to be in effect, so anyone who contributed at that level will be getting their steam keys as well.

A note on the quality and depth of our upcoming Steam Early Access Launch

I cannot stress enough the importance of people understanding that this is absolutely not the point at which we wanted to be launching the game, nor are we in any way painting the game as "complete" in any form. We were simply relying on a successful campaign to fund the rest of the game but with just 1/3 of what we needed to do so, we are completely 100% flat broke and not even able to fly home to see our families on Xmas. The money had to be spent on what little help we could afford with the hopes that we can recoup it later.

That's why we're taking the "life is feudal" approach and releasing the game as Early Access. There is plain and simple no other method of survival, and survival is obviously essential to growth.

But what state will the game be at Early Access Launch?

Very not-shit.
What we'll have is basically an experimental engine and drivetrain capable of breaking land speed records, with a lawn chair for a drivers seat and no body. Ugly, spartan, but with incredible potential. It's our hope that those who turn over the engine and give it the try it deserves will see that potential and buy-in, enabling us to continue adding more and more to it over the months post-launch.

What features exactly are we talking about? Well, that would involve me spoiling the surprise, and neither do i want to speak about upcoming features until i'm certain they'll be usable in the time we have.

We'll know more the closer we get to that date. Thanks for reading.

Early Access Launch Date Set

Greetings all.

I'd originally written out a long dev blog post outlining our situation since IndieGoGo, but recently decided against it. Instead, i'm taking a minimum amount of time away from work purely to outline what you can expect over the next couple weeks.

Divergence: Online's Steam launch date is officially set for January 1st 2016. Meaning, a month and change. We will be considering Steam Early Access to be "beta", and those you contributed for alpha or beta access will be getting their steam keys at that time.

Why so soon?

1. We work incredibly fucking fast and efficiently. Did I not sell that to the best of my abilities during the campaign?
2. The IndieGoGo failed, and we're broke because -
3. I wrote a lot of emails to a lot of visitors on the campaign to find out why they weren't putting in money, and the vast vast majority who responded gave more or less the exact same answer with different wording; "It seems like it's going to be released in the near future for $30, so why would I put in $100 now?"Makes sense I guess, but that doesn't help our situation right now, does it; The situation of being left with barely enough money to expand the team from two people to three. Yay.

But that's life, and for that matter, indie development.

Over the next few weeks, anyone who tries to log in is going to notice things changing between one week at the next as we rush to get in everything that we can

Profits from Steam Early Access will continue to be re-invested back into the project to build on our existing structure and add more content continuously. As we've always done, as we're going to continue to do, rain or shine.

What to expect between now and January 1st.

• Not a lot of dev blog posts. I don't have time and to be totally honest, I don't want to. My attitude sucks as you can probably imagine having devoted every ounce of strength i had to that campaign and it didn't make an ounce of difference, and so I'd rather put that resentment to use and just work.
• Weekly (or whatever) new patches with little or no explanation as to what they added. Want to know more about it? Log in and look around, or just wait for January 1st.
• Tons and tons and tons of work. We're up around noon and at it until three or four A.M. typically. It's client and server programming, concept art, 3D modeling, texturing, rigging and animating, terrain creation, trees and foliage, even A.I foundational work.
• We aren't responding to any more "my shit is buried under the ground and i can't get to it" help requests, because all this stuff is getting wiped in a month anyway. Ergo, it's pointless to care about it.
• Free-Users can still log in also, however do so at your own risk. We'll be occasionally giving out guns and ammo to contributors and filling the world full of savage carnivorous life forms. Thus, the term "free user" will henceforth be synonymous with "free meat."
• You may log in one day after noticing a patch and suddenly see people killing each other, or buildings on fire. This is just nature working itself out.
• Your existing stuff will likely degrade and self destruct once we have maintenance, vendors, and currency working, unless you upkeep it. 
• If we even make any mention at all about what stuff is being added each patch, it'll most likely be on our facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/415812755276522/

For those who contributed:

• You guys will continue to be able to log in throughout the entire process, as promised.
• You get to test new content before anyone else as a result.
• You have free reign to organize into packs and victimize anyone you don't recognize without fear of repercussions from us. Hell, if we're testing stuff and in game at the time, maybe we'll bird-dog for you and join in the hunt!
• On December 31st, all your shit will explode and the world will totally change shape, so be prepared. Burn your property to the ground yourself before anyone else has a chance to is my advice.
• You can expect the aforementioned "shitty attitude" to exclude you, because you helped us when we needed it most. If you want help, or have questions, just ask and we'll be johnny-on-the-spot with that.

Crafting Down Until Later Today

Just letting everyone know that crafting is offline until later today when we can push a new patch for the client to synchronize with the server. You can still try, but you won't get have any success until the new patch for your clients goes out. New stuff coming so thanks for sticking with us.

Version 0.155 - Massive Engine and Graphics Upgrade LIVE

Thanks for baring with us through the issues we experienced with the host we use for our game patches. As far as we can tell, it's resolved (for now, although we're anxious to begin using Steams service) and we recommend that everyone take advantage of this by patching up and experiencing the fruits of our labor; A total overhaul and upgrade to Divergence's core engine systems and graphics.

This total engine overhaul isn't something we foresaw doing in the near future; In fact we had plans to start on it around the turn of the year after our Steam launch. However fate rarely calls on us at a time of our choosing.

There are a lot of factors that led into it; The softwares we use were all migrating to "the new version" and one-by-one announcing their discontinuation of support for the "professional" version we used. All of the new candy was being developed specifically to use it, and despite the fact that our version was top-of-the-line mere months before this, it was quickly being relegated to a position regarded as "old useless shit".

All of these elements led to the necessity of an overhaul, but the single biggest factor was, to be put simply, we had outgrown the existing system. No seriously, we did; The existing software we used to compile each new version of the game was based on 32-bit, which had a maximum memory usage of just 3.5gb, meaning that to build each new version of the game for you fine people typically resulted in it crashing out before completion somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 times before success, and it was getting worse with each MB the game increased in size.

That bottleneck has now been eliminated as we're operating purely on 64-bit architecture from here on out. It's infinitely easier to test, build, re-test, and re-build for us and results in a lot less headache. The result is a new foundation of the game which we'll be able to built on for the rest of the game's life with some amazing advantages.

Physically-Based Rendering (PBR)

Divergence has been completely overhauled with a brand-new graphics pipeline utilizing today's bleeding-edge graphics innovation known as physically-based lighting, AKA physically-based rendering (PBR).
PBR allows artists to not just define a series of texture maps to be applied to a models surface, but also define the actual physical surface characteristics of that object and translate all light hitting it into realistic patters. Surfaces can now be defined as metallic, organic, matte, gloss, or any combination of patters.
Since I'm the primary artist on this project, that creates a shitload of work for me to do on my own, as any surface you wish to take advantage of this now needs to have new textures created, but the potential rewards are very worth the work involved. For now, you won't see a whole lot of surfaces using it (Rocks and Ferrocrete are two that do) because I have to re-make all that stuff, but as time progresses you'll see more and more.

All-New Environment and Atmosphere

As much as people liked the Aurora Borealis, for now, it was an unfortunate casualty of progress and thus won't be seen in the game again anytime soon. The simple reason for that is that feature was created by a third-party who walked away from the project, and doesn't want to help us reintegrate it into this version of the game.
Although it's sad to see that feature go, the benefits of the new systems are obvious to anyone who logs into the game.

• Atmospheric scattering now correctly propagates independent of your camera view range and thus creates a completely smooth transition from near-to-far distances. It looks totally great - No more "purple edge".
• The night sky finally shows the actual planet our world, Rook, is orbiting in all its glory. No more bullshit being stuck with Earth's moon as a placeholder.
• Night time light has also been increased somewhat to help with testing.
• Volumetric Lighting!

Volumetric Lighting has has finally seen its debut in Divergence as well, being emitted from both the star at the center of our system as well as the planet we orbit at night. VL is the big-brother to the common practice of using crepuscular rays (AKA "God Rays" or "Sun Shafts) to imitate the streaking of light through atmospheric particulates. Sunshafts are what you use because you can't use volumetric light, we however, can now do it.
True volumetric light behaves totally different from sunshafts in that:

1. Its origin need not be within screenscape to generate the effect
2. Light collects anywhere it falls, resulting in a nearly "foggy" appearance depending on density.

Our VL solution also has an animated dither to simulate the movement of particulates traveling through air where light is illuminating it.

Totally New Tree and Foliage Systems

All foliage is being replaced by a massively-upgraded new system allowing for multiple levels of details and beautifully smoothe transitions between them. No more obvious cutout billboards. In addition, the new system correctly shades all levels of detail, so no more black billboards closing in around you. The new system also allows of species variation which gives the impression of slight variations in colorization, as well as full integration with our new fog and atmosphere systems. It just looks really, really, good, and runs exponentially more efficiently than before.

Big FPS Boosts

Framerates have increased across the board to a large degree, even on maximum settings due to the removal of even more bottlenecks and the optimization of graphics inquiries. We still have some work to do, primarily with lights and ferrocrete o our two largest FPS hogs, but in general players should enjoy excellent framerates now even with all these graphical options maximized.

Many fixes and improvements including factory crates, factories, and missing LODs causing some models to appear invisible.

The IndieGoGo Situation

Our IndieGoGo campaign is drawing to a close, with less than two weeks remaining. I'd be lying if I said that we were happy about the way it went, with all indications being that it will not meet its goal.
It's a little comfort that over 4000 people pledged that "Yes, they would buy it if it were on Steam right now" putting us not just in the top 100, the top 50, or even the top 10, but at #1 in the world, but as far as we can tell, none of those people have put their actual money into the project yet, and that's why we're having to try and come up with some way of still finishing this.

The simple truth is that if people want this game launched on January 1st, the campaign absolutely must produce more than what it's done so far, even if it's just a couple thousand dollars, that money can and will be the difference between only one species of creatures in the game or six; The difference between basic combat, or basic combat and skills progression like psychic and all the cool stuff we want to do with synthetics.

If you have friends or family still on the fence, this is essentially the time we urge you to get them involved.

And for those who have contributed and supported us this far, we can't thank you enough, so hopefully we'll be able to continue to hash out this amazing game for you while we're all still young-ish :)

-Ethan Casner

New Patch Going Online Today!

It's been a huge headache but thankfully it looks like the hosting situation where our patcher is linked may finally be resolved. Test patches have been going through successfully tonight so with any luck, the fully-upgraded game should be available by 1pm PST for all to download!

It's likely you'll get a "patcher failed" the first time you try simply because of the massive amount of changes, so just power through it and remember this is alpha.

If all goes well we'll be making another dev blog post with all the details about the new version of the game available within a few hours of it going online.

Thanks for your patience.

Patcher Issues Today - Please Stand By

The reason the patcher is borked is because our god damn host decided to lock us out at the firewall and they're "working on" a fix. Any amount of shouting you can imagine needs to be done, I guarantee you I've already done, personally, so until it's back up, if you go to patch and somehow get through, you may end up just having to re-do it later that day, so my advice would be just sit tight for a day or so until we can get the new version online. I promise, you won't be disappointed. :)

Patch 0978 Live + New Toys

Fixes, Additions, and Improvements

• Rocks and Boulders that were previously craftable are now placeable in the game world. Keep in mind that you won't always be able to pick them back up since they're meant to be a part of the world once they've been placed. They require low-grade ore, and gemstone which is available in quarries (There's one north of Castle 1)
• New "goto" location created and named "Desert 1" which will take you to a very flat location in the desert with mountains on either side - Excellent for building unobstructed. Don't fill it full of ugly unused equipment please - We want to beautiful it when we get a chance.
• Ultra-High quality Igneous Extrusive Ore available until depletion at a spot in between the Kash Trees (East of Castle 1) which when used to craft Small Storage Modules, will result in nearly maxing-out the storage capabilities of harvesters crafted with them.
• Facial equipment items such as Goggles, sunglasses, and eyewear will now save to your characters appearance when you log out, and other players can see you do it as well. If you still need to claim your preorder eyewear, just message us ingame or on the forums in the appropriate thread.
• Hopper ranges have been increased. The graphical representation still needs to be updated as well, so expect that in future patches.
• Ferrocrete Tool no longer bugs sometimes when trying to rotate the "wall" component.
• Equipped items appear to be scaling appropriately for Ennie! We weren't sure if this would work or not, and it needs adjustment, but it seems to work pretty good :)
• Planetary Synchronization (world pre-loading) is now faster.
• New splash screen was added to pre-load the login scene so you don't have to stare at a white screen now while the game loads ;)
• Kash Trees now have improved graphics and materials, as well as reduced cost to rendering due to improved level-of-detail.

Really Big Feature

Audio has been massively upgraded to allow for volumetric effects. Sounds playing in the world will now reflect high-frequency muffling when solid objects obstruct your view of them.

New Toy

Chemical Extraction Installation has been added to the game in the Structures tab of the crafting tool. This installation is capable of automated extraction of chemicals from resource locations in the same way mineral mining installations have always been able to extract minerals.

Patch 0973 Live + #1 Game on Steam Greenlight!

Thanks to everyone who helped make Divergence the #1 game on Steam Greenlight! As a way of saying thank you, harvester rates have been increased greatly, as well as their maximum storage capacities :)

World

• All terrain shading and textures have been improved. "Vertigo Effect" was discovered to be an artifact of using too many splat layers, so layers were lowed to 8 until new solution can be ascertained to allow for 12 again.
• Sunlight has been reduced from 270% earth to 150% resulting in reduced eyepain to players. This was originally set to a very high amount to compensate for shader error with tree billboards making them darker than intended. This issue still exists, which is why you'll notice tree billboards in the distance are dark as hell, but we're going to leave the light levels where they are until we can fix that because the game just looks a lot better with the new reduced sunlight.
• New login scene. Enjoy!
• Latest world data is now packaged with each game patch, so world preloading is now faster!
• Pre-Login splash screen was added to handle loading of resources before hitting the login scene, which was causing white screen that stayed for a long time.

Schematic

• Personal Harvester acquisition rate increased by 100%
• Mineral Mining Installation acquisition rate increased by 50%
• Small Storage Module Overall Quality now determined by Shock Resistance of input Low-Grade Ore

All Harvesters

• Maximum storage capacity now determined directly by Overall Quality of Small Storage Module Component.

Patch 093 Live + Top-10 Greenlight Games!

Fixes

1. Generators should now be able to fill any power-cell size unless specified otherwise.
2. Extremely shit generators and harvesters (meaning with extremely low power output and acquisition rates) should now still function and not round-off the values to zero.
3. Hoppers will not correctly reflect their range when "show hopper range" is toggled in the hopper menu.
4. Personal Harvester now has the correct schematic and will craft. Sorry about the mixup!
5. Jumping now looks and reacts a lot better. It's a little too easy to jump over tall things, so it'll require some tweaking still, but in the meantime it should feel a lot better.
6. Many light-sources now cast hard shadows exclusively in "Retarded" settings, as well as shadow range has been decreased by 20% to increase performance until out upcoming optimizations can be finalized that improve framerates even more.
7. Ferrocrete "Load" menu now shows all current available types. This is irrelevant to most players since we haven't given out Ferrocrete tools to many people yet, but will be completely usable henceforth following our upcoming Ferrocrete/Voxel Lifestream on Wednesday October 14th.
8. Chat now no-longer auto-fades out extremely quickly. It'll stay on screen for long enough to see all the shit people are talking about copper ;)
9. Humanoids don't look like they've been smoking ganja all day now - "Red-eye" has been eliminated.
10. Several minor fixes here and there.

New

1. All Eyewears should now be equippable to both male and female humanoids. Nobody else will see you wear them until they are server-attached, but at the very least, we can start giving them out to players who contributed to our IndieGoGo as promised :)
2. Malkavian Cormorants have been seen in the Northwest traveling in flocks of 100 or more... If they don't kill performance too much, we'll be adding their nests as a harvestable resource and increasing their numbers.
3. Harvesters should now auto-disable themselves (auto-offline) when they have filled their output hoppers with their designated resources. This will become pretty important once we institute maintenance, so your equipment doesn't just continually eat it up when it can't possibly harvest anymore.
4. Several pre-made buildings, such as the cantina, now cull their interiors even if they aren't a part of an occlusion sector. This should drastically improve FPS when near them as much as 100% depending on your PC specs!
5. Equipped tools now show on your character's body to all other players.
6. Super-secret stuff that should be made public within a couple days.

Thanks for all your help putting us in the top-10 of all greenlight games guys! And don't forget to contribute!

Spawning Bug Isolated - Patch Incoming!

Eureka!

We now know why some people are getting stuck at the loading screen indefinitely, and also why some people spawn in a beautiful vanilla void. Patch is being built right now and should be live to download in <1 hour.

Thanks to those who submitted reports which told us what to look for.

This does not mean that the issue with having too many voxels in an area is resolved - That's a separate issue that we can now move onto. But this should at least get you in. The automated 'recovery" system should pull you to a safe spawn location now, but in the event it doesn't, just type  /goto Base 1 Spawn , exit and come back and you'll be golden.

Help Us Unclog The System So You Can Play

Every time we think we've got everyone in the game, someone else sends me a message on our forums that vaguely suggests they can't, so here's what we're going to do dudes.

If we're going to track down the last remaining bugs preventing people from getting into the game, what we need from you is to tell us exactly what's going on. I mean exactly what you see, none of these "it doesn't work" business.

Grey screen? Black screen? Words on the screen? Does it stay there indefinitely or does it eventually kick you back to the login scene? All that stuff. If you can, Maybe even upload an image for us to see if you can.

And also, I know I said /goto Castle 1, but stop going to Castle 1 immediately. Because everyone went to Castle 1, and now that area's too full of stuff. We very much appreciate the stuff people are doing in the game and so on, but nobody is striking out on their own, they're all trying to build within a one-mile radius of wherever we're having them spawn now and that's just re-clogging stuff up until we can push the big patch we want to bust that loose.

Oh, and please place all this stuff in the tech support part of the forums below.

Thanks!

http://www.divergence-online.com/phpbb3/viewforum.php?f=23

Divergence: Online Hits Steam Greenlight!

As promised, Divergence hits Steam Greenlight today! Thanks to all who helped us get to this milestone, and we can't wait to take this project even further than it's gone before with your help, so follow the link below and click "Yes" damnit! XD

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=530659232

Divergence Hits Steam Greenlight Later Today!

Dear friends,

After much consideration and weighing of all possible ramifications, we've come to the conclusion to go ahead and list the game on Steam Greenlight later today.

The decision comes mostly due to major changes to indieGoGo's features and policies that we were previously unaware had taken place. The details aren't that important, but what is important is that because of these policies, our campaign two years in the making is currently burried on the equivalent of page 10 on their site, and even more unbelievable... It's burried beneath dozens of old campaigns dead and burried years ago. We're still waiting on an explanation as to why a currently live campaign would take a back seat to dozens of campaigns, many of which ended two or more years ago, but in the meantime, the complete and total lack of exposure is murdering us. This cannot continue.

Therefore, we've made the decision to push our plans to Greenlight Divergence ahead of schedule to supplement IndieGoGo's vacuous exposure with Steam's in an addempt to drive traffic to our IndieGoGo "before it's too late".

Steam Greenlight does not mean we're planning on launching the game this month, or even next month. It's simply an introductory step that everyone already knew we were going to have to take to get the game on Steam eventually; We're just choosing to do it now and use that exposure to help benefit the game and finance our combat module before we even think about an official launch.

Therefore what we're asking is for everyone who's supported this project from the beginning and feels as we do that it could end up changing the face of MMORPGs, to help us greenlight the game on Steam and if they have time, say a few kind words to offset the all-but-guaranteed tsunami of trolls that any newly listed game on Steam is certain to attract.

We're never going to stop, but we can't do it alone. You've given us your money, you've given us your patience, and we hope we've at least shown that with us, you always know exactly what we're doing with the trust and resources you've given us, so we hope later today you'll help us turn a current state of struggle into a success.

Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for the steam announcement!

-Ethan Casner

New Power Grids Video Online!

New video showing the basics of power-grid establishment and management is online!

Flashlights, Fix For Black Screen Woes, and New Videos

We're aware that as time goes on, it get's harder and harder for some people to get into the game world and we know why it's happening -

Too much stuff has been built directly outside of the starting cloner in the woods and if you see the black screen for an extended period, it simply means your internet bandwidth bottleneck is insufficient to pipe it all into you before you time out of the game.

We'd planned on optimizing the data stream even more as time went on but we didn't realize how quickly people would start building really big things right in front of where you spawn.

To rectify this, we're doing two things;

1. Optimize all data coming to and from your client and the server.
2. Move existing structures (I mean the really big stuff, like that half-finished castle right in front of the starting area) to a newer, more open area until we can optimize it even more.

To keep this kind of thing from disrupting play again, we'll just have GMs monitor what's getting built and where, attempt to contact the owners if they do dumb stuff (like building literally right in front of the cloner, preventing people from getting out) and when necessary, relocating their constructions elsewhere.

For right now, a quick solution until we can push out a new patch tomorrow or the day after, here's what you can do to get into the game:

When you're at the black screen with my super-cool phrase on it, you can still chat believe it or not, therefore you can still use chat commands, including our temporary "goto" command used to sneak across the world super fast.

Just type in "/goto Castle 1" exactly as it's written there without the quotation marks and caps-sensitive. That'll instantly teleport you to a location that we'd planned to keep secret for the time being; A community "sandbox" area with semi-flat ground that all contributors at or above the $100 level can start building with Ferrocrete once we have that video out.

Again, ignore the fact that it's ugly, it's just a GM testing area, but that should get you ingame at least.

We'll update you again with a more permanent solution in the next few days :)

In addition to this, new in the game is a highly requested "Flashlight". We're adding these as actual craftable objects in the game in the near future, but for right now, night time pisses people off so just press L on the keyboard and voila, let there be light :)

In addition, for those who don't already know, we've uploaded new videos detailing the working of several game features to help you get started. Our next video, detailing factories will be released either today or tomorrow if all goes according to plan. Help spread the word!

Divergence Announces new PVP-Optional Server Stretch Goal!

We've had so many articles come out wherein hundreds, if not thousands, of people make mention in some form that they "would contribute if it weren't for the open-pvp", that we've completely re-evaluated the situation and came up with a potential solution that could benefit everybody!

The game, as it sits right now, has no PVP. Remember, that's the point of this IndieGoGo; To add top-shelf combat to our top-shelf crafting and other awesome features.

We've decided to officially announce our first stretch-goal as an additional "PVP-Optional" server. The new server will have some PVP, but it'll be consentual unlike our primary server. Players on the new server can either spend their days harvesting, crafting, dancing, playing as non-combatants, or flag themselves for PVP with a "TEF" and engage in an afternoon of RvR fun.

What's a TEF?

A "TEF" or "Temporary Enemy Flag" occurs either intentionally, by flagging yourself via chat command, or by performing certain actions. A few of those are:

• Healing or buffing factionally-combative players in a state of PVP.
• Killing or harming faction NPCs, such as town guards of an opposing faction.
• Being forcefully ejected from a player city or establishment where you are unwelcome.

Essentially, if you're playing just to craft, harvest, dance, or even if you're healing or aiding other players (so long as they are not recently engaged in PVP), you can no longer be harmed, debuffed, or otherwise negatively affected by other players.

Won't this require your current game code to be changed, and how soon would this be available?

Running a secondary "PVP-Optional" server will not require significant changes to combat, since that's already the focus of our IndieGoGo, there is none! It will simply require more resources to be directed at developing the aforementioned "TEF" system. This is something we're more than prepared to do for the players, so long as we don't have to detract money from the overall development of the game to do it. Therefore, what we decided to do was add a brand new stretch goal to invite the players to make it possible for us to develop this "optional PVP".

What we hope this'll do, is give all those people who write us and say "I'd contribute but... Open PVP" a way of putting their money where their mouth is. while simultaneously funding both the game itself, and the style of gameplay they prefer. We could bring it online even before our Steam release for testing.

Will there be any other differences between the Primary server and the secondary "PVP-Optional" server?

There will be a few minor differences between the two geared mainly to gently nudge people towards our primary server, such as story events, and GMs playing notable NPCs and faction leaders on the primary server, but as far as game mechanics and features are concerned, they both get the same content. Additionally, we're experimenting with the idea of allowing characters to transfer between servers if they meet certain stipulations and even keep their character names, so long as it can be done in a manner that neither rewards nor penalizes the practice.

What if people contribute specifically to make the PVP-Optional server happen, but then it doesn't meet that stretch goal?

In that case, depending on how close it comes to the goal, we'll either elect to do the PVP-Optional server regardless of that fact, or we'll offer refunds to those people. Basically in either scenario, you can't lose :)

Thanks again for all your support guys, and let’s make this damn game happen!

-Ethan Casner

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/divergence-online--2

Divergence Stage 3 IndieGoGo is LIVE!

After more than two years of backbreaking labor, Divergence's Stage 3 IndieGoGo is finally live!

The first video ended up being over 16 minutes long after we'd already condensed it down as much as physically possible, so we hope there's enough in there to tide people over until the next video goes live tomorrow :)

Thanks again for all your help and support guys; we couldn't have done it without you.

Check back tomorrow for the first of many instructional videos, and remember you can always download the latest build of the game at www.divergence-online.com/download

I'll also be bringing the game forums back online within a day or two and make an announcement on that, just as soon as the latest PHP is finally updated on them, as well as our public Teamspeak server info!

-Ethan

New Continents and Ferrocrete Coming!

Late July and Early August have been spent doing a multitude of things. Among the biggest and baddest:

1. Full-integration of our high-res blocks-building system known as "Ferrocrete". You know, the one everyone loved in Alpha 1, only four-times the resolution of our previous blocks, allowing for intricate design work not seen in any other game!
2. Adding two totally new and huge continents!
1. Akkhera - A vast desert of red quartz and sand, for those players who want a lot of empty space to build upon unobstructed by potential geographical and natural formations.
2. Malkav - A huge, mountainous continent, containing both grand snow-capped peaks, mountain valleys, and rolling hills, inundated with rich and dense woodlands.
3. Total upgrade to existing screen effects, including a new volumetric fog solution that just looks ridiculously good.
4. A few new assets that we believe old SWG fans will appreciate, including the "Kash" trees shown below ;)
5. Numerous bug fixes.

What's left for August?

1. Fix a ton of bugs.
2. Move Arabast to the polar region where it's supposed to be.
3. Create a mass transit system to allow players to travel from one continent to the next. Originally, this was meant to be accomplished by the use of boats traveling over the ocean, but due to time constraints, we may just settle for a teleporter for the time being.
4. Fix the issues associated with conflicts between our day/night system and new effects that are causing artifacts, such as bright fog at night.
5. Create functionality allowing players to craft their own ferrocrete so they can get started building that skyscraper they want to!
6. Build the whole IndieGoGo page.
7. Capture, edit, and narrate several new videos for the aforementioned campaign outlining all this cool stuff we've done for the game and also how to play it.
8. A few other odds and ends.

Our next big patch will come once Ferrocrete is functioning 90%, which will also be the patch where we introduce the new continents and hopefully a method to traverse them.

Thanks for your support!

Patch 07 Goes Live!

Push 007 is absolutely our biggest content addition to date and, we believe, marks a major milestone, not just for Divergence, but in the lineage of true MMORPGs to date. In this commit, we're pulling the project not just a few steps, but one full mile closer to that long-awaited finish line at long last. While still in upwards of a month to two away from being able to launch our third and final financing campaign, we're at a point where our confidence about being able to make a truly big impact is at an all-time high.

And thus, although I'd like to say a lot more and give every person individually who go us to this point a shout-out, it'll have to wait because I'm sure those same people would much prefer us to be working instead of dicking around blabbing on a dev blog. Therefore, without further ado:

Divergence: Online

Alpha 2

v0.07

Known Issues:

1. First-Gen Solitus eyes don't display the color they should. This is do to the replacement of their unique shader and the fact that we have to modify character customization code to compensate for it now.
2. Something's up with Androids, so don't try making an Android for the time being because it won't work, and I don't have time to "fix" people who tried it anyway.
3. You'll notice that the vast majority of craftable items require a very small amount of raw materials, and in many cases, the same materials. This is purely for ease-of-testing and very temporary. We can modify and assign any crafting schematic for any item at any time to be as simple or complex as we choose to allow for those items to be quickly made and tested in game. So feel free to play around with them and the crafting tool, but don't get spoiled because when Divergence launches, you won't exactly be able to build a starship engine out of five pounds of copper.
4. IGNORE THE PLANTS. We're fully aware that crazy amounts of grass, trees, and flowers aren't meant to be springing up from tundra. However, we needed to test our upcoming foliage system in a live-game setting and didn't want to wait until after we were ready to unlock the other continents, so we just threw some down here purely for testing.
5. Previously, the game patcher would CRC check every single file individually front to back. This resulted in wait times of up to ten minutes and was totally unacceptable. Although the patcher has been completely upgraded to reduce that time to less than two seconds now, it is, on occasion, forcing the player to re-download the entire game. Therefore, the likelihood is high that we're going to just have to replace the whole stupid thing with something that won't give us so many problems. Therefore, if you choose to install the game now from the updated installer, be forewarned that you may also be required to re-install the game entirely if we do, in-fact, replace the patcher in the coming weeks.
6. Some of the new items in the crafting tool appear up in the air or otherwise not perfect. Some of these needed to be re-oriented but we didn't feel like further delaying this update just for minor cosmetic blemishes so we'll be cleaning those up after the fact.
7. You must uninstall the current game in its entirety, as the above line mentions the entire patching system has been re-worked, and re-install via the link below.

In essence, it still needs some work, so if you choose to play the game at this moment instead of waiting, you have been forewarned of these issues.

Download Current Build Here

Having gotten that out of the way, what follows are the official patch notes!

Patch Description:

Originally, we'd planned on making it all about the addition of one major feature integral to the game; Automated Harvesting Machinery. However, once we began that process we realized that it really would be best if we, instead, built a system of powering devices first that would, in turn, be used to power objects such as these; Generators.

But... Once we'd gotten into that, again, then did we realize that it would also be beneficial to go ahead and create our desired system for managing all electrical devices in your area; A system of creating and managing power grids, or just "Grids" for short.

While this originally sounded like the kind of infrastructure that could take up to six months to develop, it became obvious early on that our ability to maintain a six-day workweek (and 7 for some) of no less than ten hours each day was resulting in rapid progress that grew steadily more efficient as time progressed.

It's that Goldilocks-zone that professional project managers regard as their white whale; Desperately trying to obtain but always out of reach. So when I looked around and realized we were in that valley, my job became overwhelmingly apparent; Stay in the god damn valley at any cost.

The result was that as of yesterday, we have functional, in the current version of the game, not one or two but all three features released in a single big patch.

What we're talking about is a fully-functional structure that allows for, as far as any of us are aware, the most advanced and expandable system of local and civic management in any MMO to date. It surpasses Star Wars Galaxies in its prime in many regards which will all be outlined below.

Coupled with our advanced crafting system already released what this allows the player to do is:

1. Locate resource locations throughout the game world of varying characteristics.
2. Survey, sample, and draw those materials from the terrain.
3. Use those base materials to craft fully-automated harvesting machinery, each item with vastly differing stats of its own based on the what resources you fed into its crafting, such as its energy efficiency, its maximum durability, the rate at which it can draw resources from the ground and other characteristics.
4. Use those same materials to custom-make your own power-generators and reactors with complimentary stats of their own, such as their own strengths, efficiencies, and capabilities such as how much power they can output at maximum.
5. Feed one, or several of your power sources into a centralized power-grid system.
6. Use a power-grid interface item, placed in the world, to manage both incoming power sources and outgoing power-consuming devices in realtime.
7. Turn on and off many devices, or even whole structures throughout your town from the grid interface, such as street lamps, cloning buildings, reactors, factories, and harvesters.

Power Generators:

Power, in the form of electrical energy, can come from many sources. The primary source being electrical power generators.

These generators, themselves can come in the form of anything from a small appliance-sized portable generator, or a large starship reactor such as the (pictured) Komatsu Series-8000 Starship-Grade Reactor.

Generators may also run in a number of modes of operation. Currently in game, they have two possible modes;

1. Power-Cell Charge Mode - This mode allows the generator to, when empty power cells of the appropriate size (small, medium, large) are placed inside the generator's input hopper, the generator can then charge these cells at a rate illustrated in it's inspection panel and controlled by the quality of components which went into it's construction. The purpose of this mode is to charge portable power cells which can then be used in other equipment which is desired to function without the need to be connected to an external power source, such as a generator or grid.
2. Grid Mode - This mode allows the general to feed into virtually any local power grid of which its manager has adequate permissions to do so. This allows the generator to power anything as small as a single overhead lamp to an entire structure or array of structures.

Power Grids:

Crafting a power grid item, placing it in the game world allows you to, through the use of it's Grid Interface Panel:

1. Display all connected power sources and their current online/offline state in the left panel.
2. Monitor all incoming and outgoing power demands, and sources, displayed in figures representing how much power you have available, compared against the maximum capacity of that hopper and also the total required load of connected devices on the right.
3. Turn on and off power-demanding devices to manage and balance your total input and output, on the right.

Automated Harvesting Equipment:

"Harvesters", are automated machines, deployable from your inventory onto the world's surface, that when activated and provided a power source, will continue to draw a specified resource (provided that resource exists at the specified location) from the ground and place it, in stacks, into the harvesters' output hopper where it can then be transferred to the player's inventory.
These devices, like others, can be powered by two means:

1. Internal Power - This mode allows the device to be powered solely from internal power, which comes in the form of pre-charged power cells placed in its input hopper. When brought online, the installation begins to produce the specified resource while slowly (or at least, at the rate allowed by its quality of components specified during crafting) drains the power cells.
2. Grid Mode - This allows the installation to draw its power from an external power source; A grid. This grid can be either a personal one you have set up yourself, or even a large, shared communal source fed by a multitude of individual power souces for you and your friends to use.

Visual Upgrades

• Added totally new tonemapping method, replacing the old "built-into Unity" standard with a new system that creates a much more cinematic visual experience with regards to color grading, depth, luminosity, and saturation.
• Added simulated retina-dilation effect. This effect simulates the expansion and contraction of the eye's iris when moving between areas of low and high brightness.
• Added totally new bloom method which replaces Unity's built-in system. Our new method isn't based on a simple brightness threshold like most "cheap" methods of bloom and instead is based on the way bloom actually occurs in real life; simulating bloom based on an overly-bright object or surface relative to it's surroundings.
• Added new dirty lens affect which becomes visible when looking into, or at, a very bright object or surface.
• Added a completely new and state-of-the-art method of SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) that totally replaces out previous method of simple ambient obscurance. This new method, in addition to accurately reproducing a much more natural and realistic effect, also brings to Divergence a brand-new experimental feature of color-bleeding; Which reproduces the known phenomenon of bright, or very richly-colored objects or surfaces bouncing some of their colored-lighting information to objects in near-proximity
• Enhanced Depth of Field effect has temporarily been disabled because some users reported it being "annoying".
• Improved all lighting on distant tree and foliage objects (billboards) to correctly shade these billboards based on the time of day.
• Increased default view distance to 3km (3000 meters) !
• Replaced night-time sky with our beloved night sky from the previous prototype.
• Reduced number of Malkavian Cormorants (The Birds) as they fly overhead by 50% of improve framerates. New separate flocks will be added in the future to create the same effect without hampering framerates.

Items

Added 37 new craftable items, including:

• Power Generators
• Harvesters
• Terminals (For Grids and ETC)
• Structure-building items such as floors, ceilings, walls, both internal and external.

Important Additional Notes:

This is some heavy stuff, and we're the first to admit that without some tutorials, very few people would figure out how to utilize all this crazy stuff on their own, so we're fully aware that videos explaining how to use all these features are a necessity.

The reality, however, is that we're flat broke and have been that way for a long time. And ecause we're flat broke, and several key items still need to be addressed, such as basic combat, the plain truth is that we're relying incredibly on our next and final financing campaign to provide the funding we need to finish the game and make it ready for Steam and an official launch. We need to make a maximum impact, during that campaign, and that means holding off on new videos until the time is right to do a "big unveil" to the whole public.

What we will be doing though, are several more blog posts, demonstrating, through imagery and instructions, how you navigate this system should you choose to have a look at it as-is instead of waiting.

What's next for Divergence?

The next few weeks will be spent on the following four tasks:

1. Streamlining, squashing bugs, and overall cleaning up all of the features we added in this push. Many parts of the interface alone need to be improved to allow for an enjoyable and user-friendly experience.
2. The long-awaited re-introduction of our popular blocks system from the original game prototype, but completely upgraded and re-imagined. While you're certainly able to build an entire civilization out of crafted items in Divergence, players loved the simplicity of building with blocks as well. Additionally, there are many benefits of using blocks to blueprint or construct a skeleton of a building before actually committing to it's construction. Re-introducing blocks into the game, we believe, will be one of the final steps (the other being basic combat) required to take the game from being a proof-of-concept piece to an actual game,
3. New blog posts outlining the actual processes and steps required to use all of these crazy awesome tools we've just put into the game.
4. Deciding on a more permanent solution to the patcher situation.

Thanks for reading this far and for your continual support. We couldn't have made it this far towards creating a truly revolutionary mmorpg without you!

Patch 07 is coming and it's going to melt your face off.

Just a quick update to let everyone know what's going on with the game this week.

Version .07 is on its way and it's going to be big.

What's in it?

Without giving out the surprise, what I can say is that we had originally intended on making the next patch all about "X", but development went so well that it's actually going to include X, Y, and Z all in one patch.

• Many, many new items, item types, and new actions for those items.
• Many new additions and improvements to in-game camera and world object effects.
• Many improvements to existing character and object models, textures, and materials.
• Our biggest addition of new game features, in one single update, to date.

All-in-all, with these and more massive upgrades coming to the game world, Campaign 3 is looking to be our biggest, baddest campaign to date.

Ok, I'm still waiting for a video on harvesting, and now you're doing all this advanced stuff? When can i/we expect to see some actual video demonstration of these features?

We really, really want to put those videos together but the simple reason why we've only been sharing images thus far is because, although undoubtedly they would, and will, generate considerable buzz for the project, the truth is that would likely not result in that buzz generating any kind of financial income for us to continue with development. As much as I personally am looking forward to making those videos, with as "not yet on the global radar" as Divergence is, we really have to suck it up and wait until our next campaign as ready. That way we can use the unveiling of all these new features to help fuel our next campaign and see that it reaches its goal.

And as always, anyone who has contributed at or above the Gold Alpha level can simply log into the game at any point after this week's patch and try out the new stuff whenever they like. If you want a personal tutorial, you're just going to have to wait a little bit longer ;)

Thanks again for all your help guys, and please feel free to check the devblog this coming week so you'll know right when new content is added as promised.

The Breakup - It's Not Me, It's You... (Plus Hoppers!)

We've been a part of each other's life as far back as i can remember. We watched the turn of a new century unfold together.

But you're kind of a shithead.

The issue people have been having with patching is because my host, who I've been with forever, instituted a "filter" a while back to keep people from using "too much bandwidth". What this basically entails is, if any IP address draws too much data, it locks out that IP and you get that "NEGATIVE CAPABILITY: Can't download stuff" error that has been pissing people, including myself, off as of late.

I've given them over two months to successfully remove us from this system but even after dozens upon dozens of emails and phone calls, it still happens, so I'm saying the hell with it and moving on.

The entire contents of our host, which means many files required for the website, the patcher and all files, forums, and databases, will have to be migrated to a new host. I've already set it all in motion and solidified a battle strategy, so now it's just a matter of switch-flipping.

This will not require the game itself to be taken down and will remain online through the entire process. It will however, prevent the game from downloading new patches, so we're trying to get as many updates as possible out for you guys before the site is taken down pending migration.

Also, since the forums haven't been used much as of late, I'm going to be taking this opportunity to do a much-needed update to their database structure for security-sake and probably wipe them - Or at the very least, archive all the threads and posts and start anew with a fresh system once we're ready to begin our new campaign and new users begin to flood in.

Now onto the updates!

Alpha 0.062 :// Hoppers!

Keeping with the spirit of the breakneck pace we've been able to chuck out updates over the last few weeks and months, 0.062 was completed, as usual, ahead of schedule, releasing the basics of an innovative new feature that we hope will help put us on the map; Hoppers.

What is a "Hopper"?

In Divergence, "hoppers" are one of, if not the, most important item or structure that exists. They provide a linking point between the actual game world and your character in that, unlike some other games, in Divergence, you can build on any land you damn well please. No ridiculous "zones" or "areas" that are pre-flattened and space-determined. If you like that spot on that hill, make it your home. No bullshit, just do it.
But how does one get from "I've made walls, how do i make them into a home?" to a respectable property?
The answer is with a hopper.
In the world of Divergence, a "hopper" is a piece of electronic machinery between the size of a PC tower or even a home itself that, when online, allows any and all objects placed within it's range to become one with it on a molecular level.
The item itself is contained within the hopper on a molecular level - Condensing every atom down to a fraction of what it was within the hoppers internal storage.
When you pack up a hopper, removing it from the game world and placing it back into your inventory, the hopper compresses all objects within its responsibility down to mere fractions of what they were before so that an entire property-worth of possession can fit into a space smaller than a washing machine.

The only limitation is mass. The more mass the hopper must compress, the more energy it must utilize. Additionally, merely reducing the space between subatomic particles does not reduce the actual mass/weight of an object, it merely makes it more compact, so there is a limit to how much each hopper can manage. The better hopper you make, the more stuff you can have and at a cheaper upkeep rate.

Am I limited to just one hopper per character?

No, you are not. Right now, you can have as many as you like but keep in mind that again, they will, very soon in the future, require upkeep; money. If you let your hopper's upkeep or maintenance pool drop to zero, it will begin to take damage to it's condition, which when it reaches zero, will explode, taking all contained items with it.

What types of hoppers are there?

Hoppers come in four sizes:

1. Small (The size of a PC Tower - This one is used rarely)
2. Medium (A size suitable to contain an average-sized home)
3. Large (A size capable of hosting a large home and surrounding property)
4. Civic (A huge hopper used in cities to allow things such as street-lamps to be saved to the city hall, instead of the individual person's home)

Can hoppers be moved?

You bet your ass. If you'd like to move your life to another corner of the game world, all you need to do is access your hopper and pack it up with the pick-up command. The hopper and all its contents will then be reduced to a small item in your inventory that you can take with you wherever you go, and expand once again wherever you please. Keep in mind that this process eats a lot of maintenance, so it can get costly depending on the amount of stuff you have inside the hopper.

What about, can they move "in the game world" or are they purely stationary objects?

We built our systems from the ground up to be the best around, and keeping with that spirit, virtually any object in the game world can be built to contain a hopper of its own. A few examples would be:

Guns can be hoppers as well, allowing attachments to be saved to the gun itself the same way as anything else.

Vehicles such as boats and land vehicles can be reconfigured to the creators whim. Put lawn chairs on your yacht, a BBQ or remove the top and make it a convertible. Do whatever you like.

An example of this functioning right now in the game world is the absolutely huge DC ship parked on the ice of Arabast. The ship itself is one huge hopper, built to allow its owners to completely designed the interior as they see fit. Don't believe me? Fucking log in and see for yourself.

Am I the only one who can add and remove stuff on my property or can my friends help?

As of patch 0.062, Divergence now has a fully-functional "Admin System". This allows you to access and add or remove the names of any character currently in the game world that you'd like to also have the ability to add and remove from your property. You and your friends can collaborate on that big base just the way you were hoping, but be forewarned, the temptation to stab you in the back and steal your stuff will be great.

What's next?

Now that we have this beast wrangled, we're already knee-deep into developing functionality for both power generators (to power your fancy lights and base defenses) and automated harvesting installations. Expect to see those features outlined in our next devblog post.

Advanced Crafting NOW LIVE in Divergence!

You've waited for it, now you have it. At long last, fully-functional item crafting in Divergence!

But not just any crafting system. Version 0.05 and its subsequent patches introduce what could arguably be called the best crafting system we're aware of in any current mmorpg.

We're fully aware what a bold statement that is, but we really feel confident that once players begin to experiment with it that they'll quickly grasp the scope and magnitude of what we've managed to accomplish.

Behold, The Awesome:

Our crafting process begins with resource harvesting, the basics of which having been formally announced in our last blog post are already in the game.

Opening your "General Crafting Tool" will present you with a list of currently unlocked schematics. Right now, we just hard-coded some basic stuff to make until we expand on the professions-unlocks in the upcoming updates.

Selecting an item you wish to craft and proceeding to the next step will take you to the Item Assembly screen.

From here, you're given several items:

1. A mini-inventory window displaying the various resources and items you currently have in your possession, for use in crafting.
2. An examination window which displays the individual stats of each aspect of the resource or material, such as its conductivity or unit toughness.
3. The Draft Schematic Slots panel, which displays the various components required to satisfy before you can move onto the next step, detailed below.
4. A preview of the item you're making. We'd like to turn this into a 3D view but for right now it's purely an icon of the item you're trying to create.
5. A Schematics Overview panel which displays the various aspects of this schematic, such as what materials are required to make each of the components needed to craft it.

The Draft Schematic Slots Panel Displays:

1. The icon of the resource or component required
2. The quantity provided/required
3. The suitability of that particular harvested resource to craft the best quality item. In this case, the red line at the right of the "bindings" component signifies that the resulting stats based on this section will be poor. In this instance, the basic stat of "condition" that determines how much damage any item can take before being destroyed is determined by the "Unit Toughness" of the bindings component. Since the metal used here was of low toughness, the strength of the pants, before becoming destroyed, will be reduced.

Once you're satisfied with your results and click to Assemble the product, you'll be able to then name your item and review the final results/stats of the item(s) you just created. You can even use hex code to colorize the wording in the name of your item ;) (We felt your SWG players would appreciate that)

The Run-Down:

What our system enables is the ability to truly craft any item in the game with completely different stats to every other item, and create products vastly superior, or inferior, to your competitors. In a later publish, we'll be introducing factory schematics and factories, allowing you to mass-produce large numbers of the same item to help you create large amounts of items for personal use, trade, or sale.

Master crafters will scour the vast continents of the game, alone or in a group, surveying, sampling, and hoarding over newly-discovered resource locations; Always looking for a higher quality of this type of metal, or that type of polymer, to continually increase the quality of their end-created goods and grow their reputation as a true master of their trade.

It is, for lack of a better term, the best crafting system in any current game, and we have you guys to thank for it though relentless support of the game and the future for it we're slaving away to create.

What's Next?

Now that we have, arguably the most advanced part of the game thus-far, functionally developed, we'll be spending a week or so cleaning it up, replacing fonts, smoothing edges and overall making it run as perfect as we can, so we can move onto the next steps. Among them:

1. Expanding on our current "You can place stuff in the game world" system, to create a secondary layer for our "hoppers" (the button has already been added, which is the new one you'll see in the bottom right). What this allows players to do is, instead of saving all walls, floors, items, to just the game world itself, saving them TO what we call a "Hopper", which can then be uprooted, relocated, and re-expanded to essentially "take your entire estate with you". It's the basis for an entire tertiary economy built around player architects designing whole homes from individual parts, duplicating the estate's hopper, and then selling or trading that hopper to another player, who can then expand the hopper anywhere they like in the world.
2. Once we've crushed that step, we'll be moving on to automated objects, such as the much-in-demand "Harvesters" which allow players to collect resources via a peaceable object that continually draws a specified resource out of the game world without the player being required to participate.
3. Having finished that system, we'll then be free to expand the dynamic world objects system to include, at last, a series of non-player-managed vehicles, in the form of "boats" which will finally allow the player to travel to other continents across the ocean while we work on player vehicles.

Tasks we'll also be performing while working on the items above include:

• Updating the aesthetics of several human breeds as well as Lokri to create more unique and individual texturing and details for their faces and bodies.
• Adding dozens of new schematics for testing over the course of the next few weeks to vastly increase the numbers of craftable items in our catalogue.
• New models and textures for existing assets, and also totally new ones.

That's all for now. As always, thanks a ton for your continued support while we continuously work towards building everything we need to prepare for our next crowdsourcing campaign!