The Breakup - It's Not Me, It's You... (Plus Hoppers!)

We've been a part of each other's life as far back as i can remember. We watched the turn of a new century unfold together.

But you're kind of a shithead.

The issue people have been having with patching is because my host, who I've been with forever, instituted a "filter" a while back to keep people from using "too much bandwidth". What this basically entails is, if any IP address draws too much data, it locks out that IP and you get that "NEGATIVE CAPABILITY: Can't download stuff" error that has been pissing people, including myself, off as of late.

I've given them over two months to successfully remove us from this system but even after dozens upon dozens of emails and phone calls, it still happens, so I'm saying the hell with it and moving on.

The entire contents of our host, which means many files required for the website, the patcher and all files, forums, and databases, will have to be migrated to a new host. I've already set it all in motion and solidified a battle strategy, so now it's just a matter of switch-flipping.

This will not require the game itself to be taken down and will remain online through the entire process. It will however, prevent the game from downloading new patches, so we're trying to get as many updates as possible out for you guys before the site is taken down pending migration.

Also, since the forums haven't been used much as of late, I'm going to be taking this opportunity to do a much-needed update to their database structure for security-sake and probably wipe them - Or at the very least, archive all the threads and posts and start anew with a fresh system once we're ready to begin our new campaign and new users begin to flood in.

Now onto the updates!

Alpha 0.062 :// Hoppers!

Keeping with the spirit of the breakneck pace we've been able to chuck out updates over the last few weeks and months, 0.062 was completed, as usual, ahead of schedule, releasing the basics of an innovative new feature that we hope will help put us on the map; Hoppers.

What is a "Hopper"?

In Divergence, "hoppers" are one of, if not the, most important item or structure that exists. They provide a linking point between the actual game world and your character in that, unlike some other games, in Divergence, you can build on any land you damn well please. No ridiculous "zones" or "areas" that are pre-flattened and space-determined. If you like that spot on that hill, make it your home. No bullshit, just do it.
But how does one get from "I've made walls, how do i make them into a home?" to a respectable property?
The answer is with a hopper.
In the world of Divergence, a "hopper" is a piece of electronic machinery between the size of a PC tower or even a home itself that, when online, allows any and all objects placed within it's range to become one with it on a molecular level.
The item itself is contained within the hopper on a molecular level - Condensing every atom down to a fraction of what it was within the hoppers internal storage.
When you pack up a hopper, removing it from the game world and placing it back into your inventory, the hopper compresses all objects within its responsibility down to mere fractions of what they were before so that an entire property-worth of possession can fit into a space smaller than a washing machine.

The only limitation is mass. The more mass the hopper must compress, the more energy it must utilize. Additionally, merely reducing the space between subatomic particles does not reduce the actual mass/weight of an object, it merely makes it more compact, so there is a limit to how much each hopper can manage. The better hopper you make, the more stuff you can have and at a cheaper upkeep rate.

Am I limited to just one hopper per character?

No, you are not. Right now, you can have as many as you like but keep in mind that again, they will, very soon in the future, require upkeep; money. If you let your hopper's upkeep or maintenance pool drop to zero, it will begin to take damage to it's condition, which when it reaches zero, will explode, taking all contained items with it.

What types of hoppers are there?

Hoppers come in four sizes:

1. Small (The size of a PC Tower - This one is used rarely)
2. Medium (A size suitable to contain an average-sized home)
3. Large (A size capable of hosting a large home and surrounding property)
4. Civic (A huge hopper used in cities to allow things such as street-lamps to be saved to the city hall, instead of the individual person's home)

Can hoppers be moved?

You bet your ass. If you'd like to move your life to another corner of the game world, all you need to do is access your hopper and pack it up with the pick-up command. The hopper and all its contents will then be reduced to a small item in your inventory that you can take with you wherever you go, and expand once again wherever you please. Keep in mind that this process eats a lot of maintenance, so it can get costly depending on the amount of stuff you have inside the hopper.

What about, can they move "in the game world" or are they purely stationary objects?

We built our systems from the ground up to be the best around, and keeping with that spirit, virtually any object in the game world can be built to contain a hopper of its own. A few examples would be:

Guns can be hoppers as well, allowing attachments to be saved to the gun itself the same way as anything else.

Vehicles such as boats and land vehicles can be reconfigured to the creators whim. Put lawn chairs on your yacht, a BBQ or remove the top and make it a convertible. Do whatever you like.

An example of this functioning right now in the game world is the absolutely huge DC ship parked on the ice of Arabast. The ship itself is one huge hopper, built to allow its owners to completely designed the interior as they see fit. Don't believe me? Fucking log in and see for yourself.

Am I the only one who can add and remove stuff on my property or can my friends help?

As of patch 0.062, Divergence now has a fully-functional "Admin System". This allows you to access and add or remove the names of any character currently in the game world that you'd like to also have the ability to add and remove from your property. You and your friends can collaborate on that big base just the way you were hoping, but be forewarned, the temptation to stab you in the back and steal your stuff will be great.

What's next?

Now that we have this beast wrangled, we're already knee-deep into developing functionality for both power generators (to power your fancy lights and base defenses) and automated harvesting installations. Expect to see those features outlined in our next devblog post.

Advanced Crafting NOW LIVE in Divergence!

You've waited for it, now you have it. At long last, fully-functional item crafting in Divergence!

But not just any crafting system. Version 0.05 and its subsequent patches introduce what could arguably be called the best crafting system we're aware of in any current mmorpg.

We're fully aware what a bold statement that is, but we really feel confident that once players begin to experiment with it that they'll quickly grasp the scope and magnitude of what we've managed to accomplish.

Behold, The Awesome:

Our crafting process begins with resource harvesting, the basics of which having been formally announced in our last blog post are already in the game.

Opening your "General Crafting Tool" will present you with a list of currently unlocked schematics. Right now, we just hard-coded some basic stuff to make until we expand on the professions-unlocks in the upcoming updates.

Selecting an item you wish to craft and proceeding to the next step will take you to the Item Assembly screen.

From here, you're given several items:

1. A mini-inventory window displaying the various resources and items you currently have in your possession, for use in crafting.
2. An examination window which displays the individual stats of each aspect of the resource or material, such as its conductivity or unit toughness.
3. The Draft Schematic Slots panel, which displays the various components required to satisfy before you can move onto the next step, detailed below.
4. A preview of the item you're making. We'd like to turn this into a 3D view but for right now it's purely an icon of the item you're trying to create.
5. A Schematics Overview panel which displays the various aspects of this schematic, such as what materials are required to make each of the components needed to craft it.

The Draft Schematic Slots Panel Displays:

1. The icon of the resource or component required
2. The quantity provided/required
3. The suitability of that particular harvested resource to craft the best quality item. In this case, the red line at the right of the "bindings" component signifies that the resulting stats based on this section will be poor. In this instance, the basic stat of "condition" that determines how much damage any item can take before being destroyed is determined by the "Unit Toughness" of the bindings component. Since the metal used here was of low toughness, the strength of the pants, before becoming destroyed, will be reduced.

Once you're satisfied with your results and click to Assemble the product, you'll be able to then name your item and review the final results/stats of the item(s) you just created. You can even use hex code to colorize the wording in the name of your item ;) (We felt your SWG players would appreciate that)

The Run-Down:

What our system enables is the ability to truly craft any item in the game with completely different stats to every other item, and create products vastly superior, or inferior, to your competitors. In a later publish, we'll be introducing factory schematics and factories, allowing you to mass-produce large numbers of the same item to help you create large amounts of items for personal use, trade, or sale.

Master crafters will scour the vast continents of the game, alone or in a group, surveying, sampling, and hoarding over newly-discovered resource locations; Always looking for a higher quality of this type of metal, or that type of polymer, to continually increase the quality of their end-created goods and grow their reputation as a true master of their trade.

It is, for lack of a better term, the best crafting system in any current game, and we have you guys to thank for it though relentless support of the game and the future for it we're slaving away to create.

What's Next?

Now that we have, arguably the most advanced part of the game thus-far, functionally developed, we'll be spending a week or so cleaning it up, replacing fonts, smoothing edges and overall making it run as perfect as we can, so we can move onto the next steps. Among them:

1. Expanding on our current "You can place stuff in the game world" system, to create a secondary layer for our "hoppers" (the button has already been added, which is the new one you'll see in the bottom right). What this allows players to do is, instead of saving all walls, floors, items, to just the game world itself, saving them TO what we call a "Hopper", which can then be uprooted, relocated, and re-expanded to essentially "take your entire estate with you". It's the basis for an entire tertiary economy built around player architects designing whole homes from individual parts, duplicating the estate's hopper, and then selling or trading that hopper to another player, who can then expand the hopper anywhere they like in the world.
2. Once we've crushed that step, we'll be moving on to automated objects, such as the much-in-demand "Harvesters" which allow players to collect resources via a peaceable object that continually draws a specified resource out of the game world without the player being required to participate.
3. Having finished that system, we'll then be free to expand the dynamic world objects system to include, at last, a series of non-player-managed vehicles, in the form of "boats" which will finally allow the player to travel to other continents across the ocean while we work on player vehicles.

Tasks we'll also be performing while working on the items above include:

• Updating the aesthetics of several human breeds as well as Lokri to create more unique and individual texturing and details for their faces and bodies.
• Adding dozens of new schematics for testing over the course of the next few weeks to vastly increase the numbers of craftable items in our catalogue.
• New models and textures for existing assets, and also totally new ones.

That's all for now. As always, thanks a ton for your continued support while we continuously work towards building everything we need to prepare for our next crowdsourcing campaign!

Patch 043 Resource Harvesting Arrives In Divergence!

Version 0.043

Day/Night Cycle & Environment

• Improved overall cycle performance
• Added Aurora Borealis - You will see it begin to come into view at night based on your latitude (north/south). Normally you'd need to be much more northerly or southerly regions to be able to see it, but since this island you're on now has been temporarily placed at the equator to make development easier for us, we've reduced the latitude requirements to see it in the night sky. Enjoy!
• Added 3D positional cumulus clouds. They swell and dissipate (albeit a bit too fast right now which will require refinement) and once we're satisfied with them, we'll bring back the pre-existing stratus and cumulo-stratus clouds to add them all together.
• Added Atmospheric Fog to the existing basic distance fog.

Game Features:

Added Resource Surveying!

New in Alpha 2, version 0.043 is the backbone of the game's entire economy - Resource Surveying! After choosing Novice Artisan as a profession, players will now be given their first Multipurpose Survey Tool in their inventory for use. Covered in a future video detailing the process, the surveying tool will allow the crafter using it to locate pockets of exactly the type of resource(s) they're looking for, it's location, and relative concentration in the game world.

Added Resource Harvesting!

In addition to being able to locate resource types of your choosing, you can finally start to build that stockpile of ore you've been dreaming of by also pulling the resources out of the ground directly. "Resource Sampling" is how every newbie crafter get's their start - Locating pockets of good resources and drawing them out of the ground directly with use of the Multipurpose Survey Tool. Once you've improved your skill in the Artisan tree, you'll be able to implement automated harvesting rigs (Harvesters) to continually draw materials out of the ground while you're away.

Added Resources:

New Resource Types:

• Inorganic
• Mineral
• Metal
• Non-Ferrous
• Copper
• Aluminium
• Ferrous
• Steel
• Iron
• Gemstone
• Crystalline
• Amorphous
• Low Grade Ore
• Sedimentary
• Siliclastic
• Carbonate
• Igneous
• Extrusive
• Intrusive
• Radioactive
• Solid Petrochemical Fuel
• Chemical
• Fibroplast
• Malkavian Fibroplast
• Arabastian Fibroplast
• Inert Petrochemical
• Liquid Petrochemical Fuel
• Gas
• Inert Gas
• Reactive Gas
• Water
• Salt Water
• Purified Water

Added Resources Containers:

• Energy Gas
• Energy Liquid
• Energy Radioactive
• Energy Solid
• Inorganic Chemical
• Inorganic Gas
• Inorganic Mineral
• Inorganic Water
• Organic Food
• Organic Hide
• Organic Hide Bristly
• Organic Hide Leather
• Organic Hide Scaly
• Organic Hide Wooly
• Organic Structure

Skills Panel:
We've completely stripped out all the placeholder code for client-side-only "messing around with the panel" and as of today, you can actually begin to choose real professions from the menu that persist to your character indefinitely. This required us to completely remove the profession-selection from character creation (seeing as it didn't really do anything useful) and now you can choose a profession simply by opening the skills panel, finding it on the list, and clicking "learn". Right now, we're focusing on the foundations of the economy, so Novice Artisan is the only one that lets you do anything, so feel free to check it out! Additionally, the game now stores and recalls actual XP given from actions, such as sampling materials rewards you with surveying XP which you can use to purchase additional boxes in the Artisan profession tree.

What's Next?
Now that we have the absolute "ground floor" functioning in the game, the next step is to provide the tools necessary for players to combine those materials into crafted items such as clothing, weapons, homes and other types of structures. Therefore, in addition to regular bug-fixes and improvements on existing stuff, our focus is now on creating the actual crafting tools and schematics required for item assembly.

Additionally I'm working on new land masses that will be introduced once we've finished these two tasks and can move onto enabling the mass transit (vehicles) required to traverse open ocean and visit (and plunder) other continents as well.

As always I want to thank everyone in the community who has contributed to make this incredibly undertaking possible. The alpha has already surpassed the functionality of many "launched" game titles out there and we've never been more confident that one we've improved what we have and finished the crafting tool and the foundation required for basic combat, we'll be ready to make our presence truly known on the internets.

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

New Major Update Coming

Short update just to say that I've been planning on making a major update for the past two weeks but still waiting on one update to our internal system that'll allow me to show it functioning which I expect will be ready around Tuesday of next week if all goes well.

Keep your eyes open!

New Divergence Wallpaper: The Northstar

Just a quick update to disseminate a new image to everyone following the game.

What I love about this scene is that players of our prototype game will recognize the actual in-game geography of the setting, such as the "twin peaks".

They'll also finally understand why I went to such great lengths to convince people not to build houses in the area surrounding the actual crash site, so that their stuff wouldn't be smashed under the weight of a falling ship from space ;)

Here we have DC personnel, lead by Ennie guides, showing soldiers the crash location of other "offworlders"; In this case, the Omicron capital ship "OSV Northstar", Shortly after planetfall, OSI survivors are already busy trying to assemble some semblance of a base camp outside the wreckage of their ship. They should work fast, because who knows how long until survivors of other rival organizations (such as DC) will discover their location and find them in a quite vulnerable state.

Enjoy!