October Changes

It's been almost a month since our kickstarter campaign ended.

Out of the $19,626 people think we got from that campaign, the truth us that the project only netted maybe 11K of that. The reason is the difference between how kickstarter handles payments as opposed to indiegogo. More specifically, payments through kickstarter (because it uses amazon payments) aren't actually billed until after the campaign is completed, and because of that, can actually bounce. In our case, a huge percentage of those contributions bounced. Creditcards over their limits and so on. The whole time I've been noticing other peoples kickstarters in the past I've always thought, "Wow they made $20,000?". I had no idea that the reality is evident that you don't actually get what you think you will. There's a huge amount of letdown that occurs when someone pledges $1,000 only for their payment method to bounce and you get literally nothing.

Also, our policy of "you get your access immediately when we see your contribution", while well meaning, basically ended in a ton of people getting free access the whole time after they played for a month then their creditcard on file bounced for the contribution they set.

And now to the biggest issue which we've spent the better part of September smashing our heads over and the eventual resolution that came of it.

We have no choice. We have to do a graphics renderer switch. It's the last thing in the world I wanted to do but the issue is that the one area we did not have access to was the data stream itself. It wasn't necessary to utilize the kinds of crazy features our players have enjoyed thus far, but as insane as it sounds, the initialization of the most basic feature you can imagine, such as a functional inventory system required to finish itemizing the game, is more or less impossible.

The Cons:

1. There will be percievably no new or future updates to the existing game unless something changes. It stays as it sits aside from the fact that i may add more assets such as the new OSI parts once they're ready.
2. It's going to set us back at least a month, which means setting back the date we can throw up an Indiegogo campaign for the sales of turrets and defensive structures by an equal amount of time.
3. Less new assets than I had anticipated because of the manpower it's going to take to do the conversion.
4. We (temporarily) lose the specific effects associated with our day/night cycle. The graphics won't look as nice for the first month or so, especially with regards to grass and foliage.

And now the Pros:

1. We'll finally have open access to our own shader pipeline and able to create our own, paving the way for improved graphics in the future. Although they will look more primitive for now, as time progresses our shaders will continue to become more complex and elaborate until they eventually surpass what we already had.
2. Actual support from a business, not just one guy on the other side of the planet.
3. Divergence goes from 1/3 of a programmer to 3 full-time coders including for the first time, our new Lead Programmer, Steven.
4. No "hacking" required to integrate the features we want in the future.
5. We keep our existing server accounts system. If you had access before, you have it now and at the level appropriate to your past contributions. If you could log into the prototype, you can log into the "real game", even at the same time if you wish.
6. 100x quicker and easier integration of our character customization system.
7. An even larger game world... I know this will surprise a lot of people, but the fact remains that the lack of occlusion was one of the only limitations of the prototype and with our new renderer, that limitation is now removed.
8. We're leaving the prototype up 24/7 for people to play in as long as they wish. It's our goal to, while working out our system for packaging area contents (houses, buildings, etc) retain a consistent data storage language on the server so that, in theory, what you do in the world of the prototype appears in the "live game" simultaneously.
9. Higher resolution terrain with better resolution textures. If you had land, it looks better now. If you had an island, it's even more detailed.

In the end, it is a positive move and will certainly cut down our time to a somewhat finished product in the long term.

Our guys will continue to be on teamspeak every week, in our channel, doing our work some days beginning at 8am pst and ending as late as 5am. I want to thank everyone who has stopped in to teamspeak to offer their words of encouragement.

W're going to be working like madmen to have something amazing to show the community at the end of October.

Announcement: Ability To Package Area Contents Into "Pre-Made" Duplicatable and Transferable Assets

Sorry, had a bit of a crisis earlier which delayed the announcement.

What was previously a mere speculation of a long-term "possible" goal has been made possible;

The copying, duplicating, or otherwise replication of world area and it's contents, laying the foundation of features such as the ability for players to create their own "pre-made buildings and structures" for trade or sale.

Thanks for the help community.

Major announcement later on today, evening PST.

Major announcement later on today, evening PST.
A few people have been asking me about the possibility of functionality that would, in the distance future, allow for something very specific to take place and up until a few minutes ago i've been saying, "No... No do you have any idea how difficult that would be to pull off? Maybe in a couple years we'll investigate the possibility of that."

I got the godamn thing WORKING at 4:50AM...

People keep telling me I should sleep and this is precisely why I don't... Too many breakthroughs happen that you never expected at ridiculously late hours. Anyhoo. Going to TRY to sleep for a few hours now and keep the secret through additional testing for a few more hours until tonight ;)

-Ethan

Server Migration and Building The Starter Zone

Today, August 3rd 2013, we pretty much finished the process of integrating the bulk of necessary data from our old "prototyping" accounts system to a full and robust SQL database. The point of this is it'll allow us to begin the process of flagging player accounts with criteria necessary to grant them their perks, even while some of those perks are still in development.

Later on today we'll begin the process of migrating the server (from my freaking PC) to an actual VPS that should, in theory, allow us to start letting in many more people at once while simultaneously improving latency across the board.

If all goes well, our first test after this will be something really, really awesome. We're going to rebuild the "starting zone", with the help of a few players, while INSIDE the game... This will be a true test of our technology and pipeline in seeing how well it handles such an attempt.

We came close to $2K tonight and it's been less than 12 hours so I'm hopeful that, if we can keep up the current momentum and perhaps build a little more, we could beat our startup campaign! This would be a huge help because I set the goal at $15K simply because... There's no actual reason to set it higher than $10 if you think about it. With these sites, the amount of money you get is based on whether you meet your goal or not, whether that goal is $10 or $10M, it makes no difference. It can only hurt you to set it higher as opposed to lower because if you don't make the goal, whatever it was, you don't get anything.

Sounds bizarre huh?

Well anyways, how much we can crank out plays a direct role in how many additional bodies i can hire on and how much new content we can afford to create with aforementioned bodies.

Thanks for your support guys and we'll be announcing how the server migration went, for better or for worse, tomorrow evening on our teamspeak :)

-Ethan

Divergence Online Kickstarter NOW LIVE!

At long last, Divergence's Kickstarter is officially live! We're offering some unique perks that i hope will really turn some heads and drum up support for the project. I'll also be adding additional media to it throughout the campaign such as a brief video for our military synthetics (two of which are still being created) so definitely check that out.

For anyone wishing to checkout the game immediately, our Gold-level perk grants you alpha access as well as the other bonuses listed, meaning you'll be included in the list of accounts who have access to it immediately as early as this next week!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/372333499/divergence-online

Kickstarter - Skyscrapers - Video

Tons of stuff going on right now for us!

As many people are aware, our Kickstarter is supposed to be starting today but as I'm coming to find out, there can be hiccups with that particular process. First and foremost, it can take up to several days to get "approved" and there are some incredibly fine details nowadays to getting on there I wasn't aware of.

I actually emailed them in advance, attempting to ensure that things would go off without a hitch and this morning was informed that "stating players may re-sell your product at a later date to other individuals for a profit" prohibits your project from being approved... Ok, so everyone who has ever bought anything off of a kickstarter project ever has remained the sole owner of that product and never sold it to another person.... What?

So I stripped that info from the listing and am currently awaiting another response as to it's status. Meanwhile, our MMORPG.com advertising has begun at the rate of $100 per day regardless of whether there's a campaign to point to or not. Not their fault I'm aware. Their staff were nice enough to give us a brilliant review on their site but my concern is that it'll be off the front page by the time Kickstarter approves the listing.

Right now, it can't be helped. It's just that waiting is a real bitch.

So in the meantime, we're devoting our energy to finishing our functionality for removing "stuck" objects in the game, and also putting the finishing touches on our SQL server implementation and also switching the storage method of world data to a "release" build which we hope will increase the performance of block and object placement in areas containing more than 1000 objects.

In most cases, people building their homes and other structures in the game in various locations notice no downtime when placing or pulling up assets. They only notice "lag" when someone approaches a thousand or so blocks or objects in a single area, because the server must then access a 2mb area file to add or subtract from instead of one typically around 4K only in size.

Just to be clear, an "area" is only 128 square meters in Diveregence. So packing that many items into such a small space would only occur if you were, for instance, building a skyscraper. And that is why the only place it occurs is the spot where one of our players built Divergence's first skyscraper :P

"The Tower of Babel" as it's being called, viewing for a few moments in video 2 was apparently someone's attempt to see whether we were full of it when we said in previous videos just how far away the limits were if there were any at all. Currently, it's dozens of stories tall, easily the largest thing on the island aside from the volcano and was gaining height up until the moment we had to call it to a pause because manipulating it was lagging other people in other areas out.

To be 100% clear, having a huge, huge, huge structure like that causes absolutely no lag (latency) issues in game. Not even for anyone inside of it. It's only when that area must be "accessed" by the server to make changes that it does. Having a "shopping mall-sized" area that is only 3-5 stories tall would not cause such an issue because those buildings are horizontal and it's contents would be spread out over several areas, preventing any single one from bloating in size.

But when you make a super-mega-ultra-huge height object, you're cramming it all into one area, and that's what we're working to resolve right now.

Hopefully by tomorrow we'll know whether our fix worked or not, but I'm also working with one of our artists to try and get a second Military Synthetic in soon also.

Thanks for the support guys and we'll let you know the moment the campaign actually is approved!

Community Pre-Alpha Test Tonight!

You heard it right! In one hour the Divergence login server will go online and anyone able to successfully connect to it will be allowed a preview of our systems for a few hours.

Again, i know it's short notice but if we announced it further in advance the likelihood is there wouldn't be enough room for everyone so we "need to keep it small".

Head on over to our forums announcement page for details!

http://www.divergence-online.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=305&start=10#p2560