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