Last night's test went so well that we're considering doing another tonight.
The question of when the next test occurs though depends upon how quickly we can squash a few bugs that make it almost unplayable after a certain amount of time.
First and foremost, I'm glad that we've successfully had people throwing down not just hundreds but thousands of items into the game world with above average performance, but the more objects added into the world, the faster the passage of time and subsequently the day/night cycle is going. With about one city block relatively filled, day and night were lasting about 60 seconds. Having people log into that would surely on annoy everyone, so we're working to resolve it asap.
It's just like Einstein said all along, time is relative!
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Divergence Kickstarter Campaign Announced For August 1st 2013!
At long last we're finally ready to announce our new campaign's start date and details!
There are a lot of things that are important to a lot of people, but in the end the feature that seemed the most important to the most people were player housing and player cities, and so that's what we devoted our energy to developing this time around.
And not just any old kind of player housing and cities. People made it very clear to us that they know when they're being duped, and that none such half-assed measures would be tolerated such as the abysmal attempts of games like Age of Conan and even worse, Everquest 2.
Nobody wants a home that exists in the exact same configuration with the exact same shapes and the exact same location as everyone else. They want to be able to point to the top of a hill and say, "See that? That's mine..."
As you all can imagine, this is a big big job for even a "real" studio. SOE spent millions developing their system years ago with a team of dozens of highly paid professionals. What makes SGL think we can compete with something like that, when no other professional studio has been able to match it since?
Because I believe a wanton amount of waste, inefficiency and plain-old-fashioned "not-give-a-damn" goes on in the game industry today. There should be nothing you're able to do in this little mmo that you can't do in Star Wars: Old Republic for an example; a multi-hundred-million-dollar "you must buy it because..Bioware... Shiny... Star Wars... more of...".
My intention is to continually build and improve this franchise and this particular game until it's the best out there, and I think that once this campaign starts people will see "what is possible" and hopefully back it to greatness.
Why August 1st?
Because in truth, the compulsion is simply to keep on saying, "Just one more fix..! Just one more thing...!" and to be honest, that could go on forever. At some point, you have to draw the line and say "it's happening at this place on this time one way or another" and set the wheels in motion. Our deposit has been put down on our simultaneous advertising campaign for MMORPG.com and it can't be refunded, so this is happening.
What all can we expect in the new campaign?
Like I mentioned earlier, player housing will be the primary focus, however we're also going to be showing off our framework for player cities as well. I know this is a big claim and assured to arouse some "PuhSHAH!"s from the community. I urge all to simply curb their suspicions until they see it in action ;)
How complete are those features?
Not. Obviously. The basis for being able to do the things we're doing in the new video is the harvesting, gathering and basic crafting systems which is... why we're trying to get money to go further with this. And so what you're seeing in the new footage is essentially those prerequisites stripped away just to show the "ability" that you have to do these things. Once we get another round of funding, it will be my pleasure to expand this to crafting and harvesting. I'll be expanding on this a lot in the commentary and press release.
Any new races, breeds or species that we'll see?
You'll just have to wait and see ;)
About the new movie(s) coming out... What will be the setting?
The hope was I'd be able to host them on one of our player islands in a different climate than our last video. So far we've shown Coniferous and Mediterranean climates. I'd love to host it somewhere else this time but one stubborn bug is cropping up that might prevent that. I have people on it so hopefully we'll know something in the next week as the new footage will be shot towards the middle of next week.
Does this campaign have a focus as to an individual faction?
It didn't intend to but when you're hiring a lot of people and working with them every day, things work out differently than you often anticipate. For example I had consignments for my designs for all three Terran factions to be included in the new campaign but only the fellow helping me with VRTek actually completed his work, so i've been playing catchup with OSI and DC for the last several weeks. Because of this reason and this reason alone (that there are actually assets for VR) that you'll see them more prominent in the new campaign, but we'll be filling OSI and DC out with the proceeds of this campaign to a much greater degree, even during the campaign.
What about perks? What will they be and how many?
I'd love to outline this ahead of time, but it would be impossible to list them without at the same time giving away "the surprise". I will say this though that several of the perks will have to do with aiding you in setting up your homestead. These perks will be an excellent way for both individual lone-wolves and also groups of friends to start off with enough materials to immediately begin staking their claim to an amazing piece of real-estate as the foundation for their own homes, settlements, trade outposts and even metropolises.
Ooooooh "surprise". Does that have something to do with the "super secret" stuff you mentioned in the last campaign? that if we chipped in enough money that we'd have it for this campaign?
Yes ;) And you'll be really surprised. I hope so anyway because if you see it in action and aren't surprised you're one jaded sumbitch my friend!
Will you be honoring any previous contributors by "grandfathering them into" the new perks system?
Yes, to a certain degree. This isn't going to happen without more money and so i can't lose my shirt on this, but at the bare minimum some people will be elevated based on their contributions: For example, all player-island purchasers will inherit our top-end property defense package to help prevent someone snatching their claim on the first day of release simply because they had a day job and couldn't be there. In addition, all players who purchased a vindicator or Verrator (the separate perk, not the perk where you got both) will be elevated from a Tier 1 to a Tier 2 suit at no charge. This suit likely won't appear in the new campaign simply because i'm very picky about what artists I bring on to help me out and i'm still in the market for an alien-technology-only artist to help me flesh it out. Players who bought both a Vindicator and Verrator will get something different from that but in a species war with two sides vying for survival, players who can "play both sides of the table" are in a much greater position to grief their own people than those who play individual sides."
Will Vindicator and Verrator still be available in the new campaign?
Yes but to a much lesser degree. We're pretty much at the limit of how many we want in the world. They're gods of death and our game world is in no position to survive a Ragnarok just yet, so they will be present in very limited supply and to a much greater expense. Essentially, they're only for fanatics now, which is the way I intended for it to be.
I want the characters that people already purchased to be rare and coveted.
I missed the last campaign so i didn't have a chance to get them when they were cheaper! Is there any way i could still lock in that price?
Under normal circumstances I would say no. But in truth, if I had the ability to include even one new thing into the upcoming campaign, I would be doing the project a disservice if i didn't at least try to come up with the money for it. I had a blessed response from players when UPS delivered my PC to me in pieces upon re-opening sales for a brief period last time and therefore for the next week I'll be taking email requests for these characters (individually - no packages for both sides anymore unless you want to pay double as in two orders) if anyone is still interested in getting in while they're cheaper. As an added bonus, I'll be grandfathering in any of these characters into Tier 2 suits if they buy before the new campaign starts as all new Vindicator sales after August 1st will begin in Tier 1 suits.
This also opens up a unique investment opportunity for players who maybe want to "buy in" now to a rare species in the game for the purposes of re-selling them to other players at a later date for profit. Anyone who recalls how much money a player Jedi (for instance) was going for on ebay in pre-cu SWG will understand what I mean.
Any sales requests can go straight to my email but please be compassionate - I still get over 15 emails a day and it's brutal to try and respond to every single one and still work on the game.
ethan (at) divergence-online.com
Well I've said enough for right now. If anyone is still reading, I want to say thanks again for the opportunity to service the mmo community with something I believe it desperately needs and I'm looking forward to showing off "What we did with your money" very soon XD
There are a lot of things that are important to a lot of people, but in the end the feature that seemed the most important to the most people were player housing and player cities, and so that's what we devoted our energy to developing this time around.
And not just any old kind of player housing and cities. People made it very clear to us that they know when they're being duped, and that none such half-assed measures would be tolerated such as the abysmal attempts of games like Age of Conan and even worse, Everquest 2.
Nobody wants a home that exists in the exact same configuration with the exact same shapes and the exact same location as everyone else. They want to be able to point to the top of a hill and say, "See that? That's mine..."
As you all can imagine, this is a big big job for even a "real" studio. SOE spent millions developing their system years ago with a team of dozens of highly paid professionals. What makes SGL think we can compete with something like that, when no other professional studio has been able to match it since?
Because I believe a wanton amount of waste, inefficiency and plain-old-fashioned "not-give-a-damn" goes on in the game industry today. There should be nothing you're able to do in this little mmo that you can't do in Star Wars: Old Republic for an example; a multi-hundred-million-dollar "you must buy it because..Bioware... Shiny... Star Wars... more of...".
My intention is to continually build and improve this franchise and this particular game until it's the best out there, and I think that once this campaign starts people will see "what is possible" and hopefully back it to greatness.
Why August 1st?
Because in truth, the compulsion is simply to keep on saying, "Just one more fix..! Just one more thing...!" and to be honest, that could go on forever. At some point, you have to draw the line and say "it's happening at this place on this time one way or another" and set the wheels in motion. Our deposit has been put down on our simultaneous advertising campaign for MMORPG.com and it can't be refunded, so this is happening.
What all can we expect in the new campaign?
Like I mentioned earlier, player housing will be the primary focus, however we're also going to be showing off our framework for player cities as well. I know this is a big claim and assured to arouse some "PuhSHAH!"s from the community. I urge all to simply curb their suspicions until they see it in action ;)
How complete are those features?
Not. Obviously. The basis for being able to do the things we're doing in the new video is the harvesting, gathering and basic crafting systems which is... why we're trying to get money to go further with this. And so what you're seeing in the new footage is essentially those prerequisites stripped away just to show the "ability" that you have to do these things. Once we get another round of funding, it will be my pleasure to expand this to crafting and harvesting. I'll be expanding on this a lot in the commentary and press release.
Any new races, breeds or species that we'll see?
You'll just have to wait and see ;)
About the new movie(s) coming out... What will be the setting?
The hope was I'd be able to host them on one of our player islands in a different climate than our last video. So far we've shown Coniferous and Mediterranean climates. I'd love to host it somewhere else this time but one stubborn bug is cropping up that might prevent that. I have people on it so hopefully we'll know something in the next week as the new footage will be shot towards the middle of next week.
Does this campaign have a focus as to an individual faction?
It didn't intend to but when you're hiring a lot of people and working with them every day, things work out differently than you often anticipate. For example I had consignments for my designs for all three Terran factions to be included in the new campaign but only the fellow helping me with VRTek actually completed his work, so i've been playing catchup with OSI and DC for the last several weeks. Because of this reason and this reason alone (that there are actually assets for VR) that you'll see them more prominent in the new campaign, but we'll be filling OSI and DC out with the proceeds of this campaign to a much greater degree, even during the campaign.
What about perks? What will they be and how many?
I'd love to outline this ahead of time, but it would be impossible to list them without at the same time giving away "the surprise". I will say this though that several of the perks will have to do with aiding you in setting up your homestead. These perks will be an excellent way for both individual lone-wolves and also groups of friends to start off with enough materials to immediately begin staking their claim to an amazing piece of real-estate as the foundation for their own homes, settlements, trade outposts and even metropolises.
Ooooooh "surprise". Does that have something to do with the "super secret" stuff you mentioned in the last campaign? that if we chipped in enough money that we'd have it for this campaign?
Yes ;) And you'll be really surprised. I hope so anyway because if you see it in action and aren't surprised you're one jaded sumbitch my friend!
Will you be honoring any previous contributors by "grandfathering them into" the new perks system?
Yes, to a certain degree. This isn't going to happen without more money and so i can't lose my shirt on this, but at the bare minimum some people will be elevated based on their contributions: For example, all player-island purchasers will inherit our top-end property defense package to help prevent someone snatching their claim on the first day of release simply because they had a day job and couldn't be there. In addition, all players who purchased a vindicator or Verrator (the separate perk, not the perk where you got both) will be elevated from a Tier 1 to a Tier 2 suit at no charge. This suit likely won't appear in the new campaign simply because i'm very picky about what artists I bring on to help me out and i'm still in the market for an alien-technology-only artist to help me flesh it out. Players who bought both a Vindicator and Verrator will get something different from that but in a species war with two sides vying for survival, players who can "play both sides of the table" are in a much greater position to grief their own people than those who play individual sides."
Will Vindicator and Verrator still be available in the new campaign?
Yes but to a much lesser degree. We're pretty much at the limit of how many we want in the world. They're gods of death and our game world is in no position to survive a Ragnarok just yet, so they will be present in very limited supply and to a much greater expense. Essentially, they're only for fanatics now, which is the way I intended for it to be.
I want the characters that people already purchased to be rare and coveted.
I missed the last campaign so i didn't have a chance to get them when they were cheaper! Is there any way i could still lock in that price?
Under normal circumstances I would say no. But in truth, if I had the ability to include even one new thing into the upcoming campaign, I would be doing the project a disservice if i didn't at least try to come up with the money for it. I had a blessed response from players when UPS delivered my PC to me in pieces upon re-opening sales for a brief period last time and therefore for the next week I'll be taking email requests for these characters (individually - no packages for both sides anymore unless you want to pay double as in two orders) if anyone is still interested in getting in while they're cheaper. As an added bonus, I'll be grandfathering in any of these characters into Tier 2 suits if they buy before the new campaign starts as all new Vindicator sales after August 1st will begin in Tier 1 suits.
This also opens up a unique investment opportunity for players who maybe want to "buy in" now to a rare species in the game for the purposes of re-selling them to other players at a later date for profit. Anyone who recalls how much money a player Jedi (for instance) was going for on ebay in pre-cu SWG will understand what I mean.
Any sales requests can go straight to my email but please be compassionate - I still get over 15 emails a day and it's brutal to try and respond to every single one and still work on the game.
ethan (at) divergence-online.com
Well I've said enough for right now. If anyone is still reading, I want to say thanks again for the opportunity to service the mmo community with something I believe it desperately needs and I'm looking forward to showing off "What we did with your money" very soon XD
Friday, June 28, 2013
Very Close...
Incredibly close now.
All that's left is animating of one asset and two very small but important features that I can't do on my own. I wish I could say specifically how long it would take, as i can generally do on things I'm working on solo, but when it's stuff beyond my expertise such as 3D math, i can't speak for other people. All I can do is make their lives miserable until they give me what I want :P
Really wish I could show some screenshots but that would spoil the surprise. By the time the new campaign starts up and it's all "out there", you'll understand ;)
That's all!
All that's left is animating of one asset and two very small but important features that I can't do on my own. I wish I could say specifically how long it would take, as i can generally do on things I'm working on solo, but when it's stuff beyond my expertise such as 3D math, i can't speak for other people. All I can do is make their lives miserable until they give me what I want :P
Really wish I could show some screenshots but that would spoil the surprise. By the time the new campaign starts up and it's all "out there", you'll understand ;)
That's all!
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Back In Business!
Special thanks to 12:01 computers in Portland Oregon for working tirelessly to get my shit back up and running. UPS still hasn't responded to my insurance claim.
On a more positive note, long nights and TV dinners are back to being a part of my daily routine. Fortunately enough progress was made before the event that even with a week down I'm still somewhat ahead of schedule and hoping to have this ready-ish sooner than anticipated. The hunt still continues for a lead programmer but most of my time is devoted to the game and honestly I haven't spent that much time recently searching.
On a more positive note, long nights and TV dinners are back to being a part of my daily routine. Fortunately enough progress was made before the event that even with a week down I'm still somewhat ahead of schedule and hoping to have this ready-ish sooner than anticipated. The hunt still continues for a lead programmer but most of my time is devoted to the game and honestly I haven't spent that much time recently searching.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Fuck UPS - 3 Vindicator / Verrator Available
I avoided making this post for the last week, but as backlogged as i'm getting on emails I found it necessary to just get it over with.
As a few people go I just recently moved and had my PC shipped to the new address. Everything worked out fine, the overlapping over utilities and internet service to the new address so i was set to only be out of action for at most one day. But when my PC arrived the tower was in a shape I can only describe as "fucked". Opening it up I found that virtually everything not secured by more than two screws was broken off and laping in a free-sliding heap at the bottom. This included my graphics card, sound card, even the cpu fan and worst of all, all 3 hard drives.
So naturally I opened a case with UPS and still haven't gotten a useful response. In the meantime i took my hard drives to a local pc repair shop to see what they could recover. 2 out of my 3 redundant hard drives were totally shot and the third was salvageable but not bootable. I left it with them overnight to clone it onto a new drive but when I got that one home after replacing most of my shit at Fry's Electronics for a ton of money, the replacement hard drive literally burned out at 2:30am (smoke.. fizzle... dead)
So now I'm like $500 down and still not usable PC. With any luck they'll have it working again soon but that doesn't fill the hole made by having to replace virtually a whole computer's worth of guts bought just last year anyway.
Again, sorry for the bad news but as many people as I'm getting asking me every day what's up, I wanted them to know I wasn't just sitting on my hands. I'm sitting on a 5 year old laptop right now but hopefully they'll have my shit recovered in the next day or so.
The upside at least is that a ton of actual assets generation is almost done. Even if the code still needs work, fortunately we're still slightly ahead of the curve in terms of content. So much so that I was able to finish one who new race that wasn't originally even planned to be available, but a surprisingly large number of people emailed in and asked about it specifically so we'll be including that in one of our near future videos :)
Thanks for your support. To try and recoup the costs of all this mess, I've decided to enable up to 3 more sales of a Vindicator and/or Verrator available at the original price if anyone still wants them. I get emails all the time, so I think this might be a way of coming with enough scratch to prevent me from having to dip into the company ink to replace this shit. For anyone who is interested, yet a very few will be available in the next campaign but they will be drastically more expensive; In the neighborhood of $200-$300 so if you are interested, drop an email to my business address and i'll send back an invoice.
Thanks for the team spirit guys :)
-Ethan
ethan@divergence-online.com
Monday, May 20, 2013
One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development
After having been up for over 30 hours trying to get some stuff working that I feel very close to, I decided it was time to make a new DevBlog post, however after reading it back to myself, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that it will probably make me seem like The Unabomber.
My first response was to scrap the whole thing, then pick it back up tomorrow. Then, after weighing the consequenes, I decided to go ahead and keep it exactly as-is; A somewhat nonsensical collection of points that don't really relate to one another as much as they seemed to have in my mind at the time I wrote them down. I've decided to keep it as-is because keeping with the policy of honesty that I try to sell as the focal point of my campaign, it's best that people understand who and what they're getting involved in, for better or for worse.
And so without further ado:
----------------
Devblog: May 20th.
One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development
----------------Common is the practice of game developers (especially MMORPG developers) who make broad claims about how kickass their product is going to be; How innovative and game-changing their creative vision, then once the obligatory "reality check sets in" they must recede from the original grand design of their heart's desire to something more realistic. It's called "settling".
Now imagine my surprise to find that I get to be a part of the first time, as far as I'm aware, that the opposite has actually happened. Less than one month has passed since the final day of our first financing campaign and the game is at least twice as far along as I had thought it could possibly be. We're not only on-schedule, but actually ahead of it. It might still go into testing at the same period, but it'll be better at that time than I previously figured it would be.
What's the secret?
Obviously the secret is hate. Anyone who watched either or both of my first two videos for our first campaign could probably glean with little effort how difficult it has become for me to mask my contempt for the state of MMO-gaming. As far as I'm concerned, WoW and companies like EA impregnated my once-beloved genre with the foul seed of corruption until it's belly was laid fat and bloated with millions of meme-spewing fetuses and their bad fucking English.
Yes, it's true. I am mostly ruined. However, ruined as I may very well be, I can still be useful at something.
This. I can be useful - at this, and that is enough for me.
There's an upside to trying and failing at something for seven years simply because you have no money however. The benefit is efficiency. When you have nothing for a long enough time, you slowly become the master of finding out ways to do things cheaply. Just as the human body becomes an engine of brutal efficiency if kept just above the point of starvation for long enough, so then has Stained Glass Llama gradually solidified into a lean lumberjack of game development somehow.
And then you suddenly have money. For me, it was compliments of a few hundred desperate MMOers who, if i had a people (which I don't) I would hesitate but for a moment to call them "my people". They are the closest thing that might exist.
Now the body has fuel and thus, now the money goes far. Very far in fact. Although still an expensive trade, building an mmorpg, if it isn't essential it doesn't stay.
Good family man? Good husband? Taking the family out camping on the weekend you say? Well, fuck you I'm paying the foreign guy who bleeds coffee on a Saturday night to help me get that feature working.
Why? Because that is what those 366 backers have entrusted me to do with their hard-earned money.
The more the cache in the pool rose day by day the more I began to feel an increasing sense of responsibility to those people. I think it finally hit me somewhere around the $20,000 mark; the critical mass of, "Oh shit... Now i really DO have to make this work..."
Then there was also an emotional component that I hadn't expected.
All in all, I received probably three negative "you will fail" messages and over 500 "you can do it" ones. I have spent the better part of my entire life being the adversary of my own species and here were these random humans throwing their money at me and begging me to continue. Begging.
I'll always remember one letter a guy sent me. It was a very emotional paragraph baring the trademark inconsistency and sentence structure of someone genuinely unstable. It took me two sittings to finish it only because the fellow really put you in a room with him and his troubles while he explained that the good times of his past (what i refer to as "The Golden Days of MMOs" mainly centered around EQ, AO and later, SWG) were gone and would never come around again, and somehow this was an allegory his life in general. That those good feelings derived from a silly little game, being a part of a real community where he had friends, had people waiting on him to log in and the freedom he enjoyed were over because of the new climate of the genre. It was a story of prison, suffering, loss and desperation for a chance to have back those good times.
You could count the number of things I believe in on one hand, but one thing that I have to believe is that given enough time even the deepest wounds can be healed, or at the very least mended. Moving on requires the brain to accrue new memories and experiences, and sometimes a shitload of them for a serious enough trauma. The more distracted you can keep your thoughts, the quicker that time will pass and in theory, the sooner you can return to the world as something like a whole person.
And so I came to realize that I'm creating a distraction; An alternate reality for people to "escape into" and in many circles, such a practice is considered a negative one.
I decided to say, "Yeah? Screw it." If it keeps a guy from murdering his ex-wife and spending the rest of his life in prison, how can that possibly be a bad thing? Not that the pursuit of vengeance is not a valid cause in my opinion, which it most certainly is, but the ideal situation is one in which you are simply able to "Get over it". If you can't, by all means,go forth and seek vengeance. If you can however, do so.
The universe will not stand in judgement of me, or anyone else for that matter. It is both the responsibility and the right of the individual creature to find or create purpose should we need it.
I've accepted that my purpose right now is to create an artificial reality for emotionally unstable weirdos.
So be it.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
New Script Finalized
Recently I finished the new script for the next video. I could spend that time yammering on about various things with regards to the setting or lore, but the overall feel I'm getting is that the great majority of people would prefer being able to see some new part of the game in action as opposed to just that. Therefore, that's where I'm devoting my energy right now.
All work regarding to the new campaign has been consigned. All features required for the new video are under work right now by myself and various parties. The existing game world viewable in previous videos has been successfully integrated into the streamed format necessary for the crazy features you're going to be seeing once they're ready.
I'd show some images but the statement was, "Super Secret" and frankly it would spoil the affect of everyone witnessing it at the same time with no preconceived expectations. Rest assured, everyone will be surprised.
A few weeks.
All work regarding to the new campaign has been consigned. All features required for the new video are under work right now by myself and various parties. The existing game world viewable in previous videos has been successfully integrated into the streamed format necessary for the crazy features you're going to be seeing once they're ready.
I'd show some images but the statement was, "Super Secret" and frankly it would spoil the affect of everyone witnessing it at the same time with no preconceived expectations. Rest assured, everyone will be surprised.
A few weeks.
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