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!