January Progress!

It's been a crazy three weeks since our initial release of Alpha 2. We've gone up from version 0.001 all the way to nearly version 0.03, nearly 30 updates in less than 30 days! Here are some of the highlights:

1. Complete implementation of humanoid inventory and management.
2. Added Complete OSI Armor Suit 1 in three pieces; Chest, Arms, Legs,
3. Added VRTek Tactical Recon Suit 1 in one full-body piece (Individual parts to follow)
4. Added social clothing options in several pieces, shoes, pants, jacket, gloves, belt, hat, even shades.
5. Day/Night cycle now set by server (now it's actual day and night where everyone sees the same time of day!)
6. Day/Night now calculates latitude and longitude based on your locational coordinates and positions suns, planets, stars, and moon cycles based on your location on the world itself! (the further from the equator you get, the shorter and longer your days and night become, as well as totally different atmospheric scattering of light colorization and intensities)
7. Social animations now play across the network, so players can see you mocking them :P (list is still being generated as more are being added currently)
8. Many new structures, houses, other buildings added (This will be covered more thoroughly in an upcoming devblog post)
9. Player Housing and Cities Basics

Player Housing!

The first steps went in the week of the third and over the course of the last couple weeks we've drastically improved prefab-housing. To those unfamiliar with the project, there are two primary means of player housing and civic development (player cities) in Divergence.

1. Design and construction of homes and structures out of parts, such as individual wall modules, doors, etc.
2. Placement of whole-structures within the game world itself, AKA "Prefab Houses" those familiar with SWG will no-doubt recognize immediately. These structures can have anywhere from one to up to 20 individual rooms within them.

Our primary focus has been on first implementing prefab-houses since that is the less complicated of the two solutions and finalizing it paves the way for the first method of building via parts.

This system is now complete!

For testing, we've added several structures to the game and basically went around throwing them everywhere we could and then ripping them back down to see how the world reacts. Results are completely solid and reproducible! 

So where does that leave crafting these things?

That's where we're focusing now. "Resource acquisition and implementation". In order to build the stuff, you first need to get the materials out of the ground by way of harvesters. No "node clicking" In our game!

Over the next several weeks we'll be implementing and refining a server-wide system of resource locations for common materials such as ores, organic and inorganics and so other materials that will, once ready, allow for the very first crafted objects in Divergence to finally be constructed.

In addition to resource acquisition, i'll be simultaneously furthering the development of our "parts" system; The one that everyone was so happy with during the prototype :)

ADDITIONAL to the additions, all new artwork showcasing new ships and even guns will be incoming in the very near future as they are completed, preparing all the different aspects to be completed in time to be included into the game at last.

I want to thank everyone who contributed to get us to this point. With your support we'll be able to continue this streak of progress straight on through to our last few "bare minimum" features including basic harvesting/crafting and basic combat!

At Long Last... Divergence: Alpha 2 NOW LIVE

What a long, crazy voyage it's been.

In September 2013 with two small yet successful crowdsourcing campaigns under my belt, I remember thinking that surely 2014 to come was bound to be my best year yet.

What ended up happening was 12 months of backbreaking labor that, at the end of the day, didn't result in a game that was superior to the damn prototype that I had in 2013.

How is this possible? I'd like to blame one single factor or individual, but the truth is there isn't one. Rest assured, there was zero laziness. If you heard me say i was pulling 12 hour days, what i really meant was 15 and hoping my pancreas wouldn't shrivel up before it got released. However there are many games that one person can make, and this just isn't one of them. IF... I, or the community, were ok with settling for a game that needed to support only 100 people or less on a series of servers, or IF we were ok with drastically reducing the amount of customization, or perhaps going with tab-targeting instead of live combat, there would have been a game in 2014.

But the mandate the community gave me when they invested themselves in this project was there is to be no compromise. None. This is the pact that we agreed to at the beginning of this voyage, and if you're angry it's taken this long, then at least you'll be pleased to know that no such "watering down" has taken place.

This is the real McCoy.

And finally, the turning point came...

What had to happen was a long time in coming. I had to basically become an even bigger prick than I was already and start cutting ties that, by even the most gracious measurements, just plain weren't doing shit. Free help isn't free, if it costs you a year of your life. After much heated debate I ended up putting all my cards on the table and devoting to a radical new approach: To scrap the half-finished work of others and create our own networking system from the ground up so what I/we would never again be trapped under the rotting carcass of "someone elses black-boxed code".

I had no money left but my two best programmers Ana and Dan were so entirely confident that this was the right approach that they volunteered to work with me every single day for one month pro-bono to get this new alpha version of the game launched.

The result is this: Divergence: Alpha v0.001

The game that exists right now doesn't look like much, but in just one month's time we've already conquered mountains that we struggled to overcome for an entire year with the old system. It's sleek, lightweight, and most importantly 100% tailored to our specific needs because we built it with our own hands from the ground up. Nowadays we don't have to spend even one second trying to find a workout to some pre-existing system that stood in our way for literally months at a time before.

For the most part, the community was far more understanding than they should have been. If I gave some assclown $100 expecting to be in a new version of the game in a couple months and it took a year, I'd be one mad sumbitch. It's because of this incredibly supporting attitude from the community that anytime anyone did "turn on" me or the project, I took it really seriously and it was basically because I felt like i was letting someone down simply because i couldn't duplicate myself and have 5 me's all working on the game instead of just the one. In actuality, If we waited another month to push the game, it would absolutely, absolutely be even better than it is now.

However, i just cannot risk losing even one more friend I made back in 2013 to the ravages of time; This has to happen now. Now, damnit.

Special Thanks To:

My two guardian angels for this push were Dan and Ana; Putting in 14-18 hour days for the past month to make this launch happen. We literally all worked back-to-back rising and sleeping in shifts. If you see anyone by those names on our forums, please shower them with praise.

Also a huge thank you to Austen Lindsey for keeping us afloat when we hit rock bottom, as well as Corey, Mattis and all the crazy people who contributed financially to the cause from out campaigns and web store. It literally wouldn't have been possible without you.

And so without further ado, I'm releasing the first new version of Divergence in over a year to the general public for immediate (and hopefully ravenous) consumption by the masses.

This is NOT an MMO that exists in a series of dozens if not hundreds of servers. The game world you're going to be entering is the only one in existence. If you know anyone else on planet Earth who plays this game, they're in the same server. It's because of this feature that anything we do in this game is exponentially more difficult to accomplish than it would be in (what passes for) an MMO of today.

Harder, but absolutely worth it in our opinion, because the things you will do are undeniable to everyone else in the world.

Who can play?

Right now, anyone can download the game, make an account, log in, make a Homo-Sapien character and enter the game world. Alpha/Gold level contributors, rest assured, you aren't getting screwed over, because that's all free-users can to is "look". You're still the only ones who can actually affect things in the world.

Species and race permissions are LIVE. If you bought the Ennie perk, guess what, you can be a tiny lizard. If you bought a killer Vindicator, you can make that character as well. If you're gold, you can make synthetics, lokri, all that stuff. 

To gain these permissions, all contributors need to do is drop me an email at ethan@divergence-online.com with the name of your account and we'll hook you up just like in the prototype game.

In the future, i'd love for that to be automated but as it is right now, it's lower on the totem pole than "actual game features" so guess who get's to do the bitch work and add all those permissions by hand? ;)

Also this is the 64-bit version of the game. If you have an old crappy computer running 32-bit windows, you're going to have to chill for the time being until I have the time to deploy for that platform when we start building for linux and mac os as well.

Here are a list of things you shouldn't bitch about:

• The patcher looks like suck.
• I have to click the X after i make my account to get back to login and login with it.
• What, no music in the login screen?!
• I clicked a million keys at once and fragged character creation! (just restart it fool!)
• Some of the game windows are grey instead of  cool-blue like they should be right now!
• I paid $5 a year ago and i can't kill people who paid $1000 yet?!
• Some animations aren't 100% perfect.
• Sometimes, to open the chat window, i have to hit enter TWICE!
• It's too dark at night!
• It's not dark enough at night!
• I walked for ten miles then fell into the ocean and now i can't get out.
• Between 5:50pm and 6:pm in the game world the water looks stupid!
• I can't catch the birds.
• I stared at the sun and now i'm blind.

This version 0.001

Everything is going to be much, much better before we even consider considering any kind of release on Steam or otherwise. You're only reading this because you're an early, early adopter.

Will there still be another campaign and if so when?

Absolutely there will be. My original promise was that there wouldn't be a new campaign until one very simple thing was accomplished: turrets that players can place to defend their homesteads from interlopers. Are we there yet? No. Are we at least on the game-board? Absolutely. What was once a "Here's how we might be able to do it with the current system" is finally "We know exactly how to do that".

Let The Games Begin!

As always, thanks so much for your support guys. I'm very glad to say that you'll be seeing new updates on a regular basis as we push newer and bigger versions of the game each week.

The next thing i do will most likely be to start describing the actual instructions on how to play and make things happen, so check back here soon!

Download Here!

Divergence: Online - Alpha 2 Installer