New Website is LIVE!

A promise is a promise ;)

As the title implies, the new site is finally live. I'll be taking feedback from a few internal sources heavily at first, and making tweaks here and there both in graphics and functionality, but so far it's by far one of the best sites I've ever put my name to. Several of the pages, especially in both the factions and civilizations tabs need to be improved and in some cases, finished.

I am not a godamn web developer! So please keep that in mind before offering criticism :P

I have it hosted off-site until I'm satisfied no major changes need to be made, but you can still get there from the trusty www.Divergence-Online.com link.

Enjoy, I hope!

Game and Funding Update

Hey gang. I thought I'd step in for a sec while i had a minute or two and catch everyone up to what's going on with the game, maybe clear up some inquiries I seem to be getting.

First off, I'm getting a lot of people saying, "There's only 5 1/2 weeks left and you still need over 40K, what happens when you don't meet that goal??"

Well the answer to that requires an understand of just how much coke you can get for $7,000. I'm waiting on a reply to an email I left Ozzy and it varies from state-to-state but at the very least our small dev team can have a weekend of ritual excess.

I jest, of course.

Here's the deal. It needs to get to at least $30,000 out of the 50. Why? Because if I absolutely had to, there's a place I didn't want to have to go to for money that I will if that's what it takes. Sure, I'll owe 20K, but what's the in the grand scheme of things. Besides, we can always do another campaign later on for much much less money to close the gap.

The campaign was still a very very good idea and I couldn't be more glad that we're doing it. It's brought not just funding but some very useful assets that found me through it who are making the technical side of it possible.

And now onto the state of the game:

Where are we at right now? What's going on? Well the answer to that is actually much simpler than you might suppose. We're working on the code to allow for the persistent state. This is absolutely necessary if we expect people's homes and harvesters to stay there when the server restarts. The upside is, we don't have to "create" hardly any of that, it already exists. Currently the server IS creating storage for both the world and objects,which it wasn't doing last week, it just isn't saving them yet. Progress is being made, but we spend a lot of time waiting on responses from our engine maker.

Regardless of how annoying I have to be to get what we need, it'll come. It took SOE years to get their persistent world working. Supporting us a few days or weeks won't kill you ;)

That's all for now. I need to get back to work on the world and then hopefully resolve this "post approval" deal on the forums.

Thanks for your support, please keep it coming!

Help Us Hype The Game!

Below is a cut and paste of an announcement I just made on the public forums incase anyone hasn't been over there yet. It's really important!
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Anyone who noticed our old listing on MMORPG.com will recognize why we gave up on there initially. Back in the day it was the nexus of all trolldom and just took too much to combat to make it worth it.

However it does happened to be a place where an insane number of individuals go to read up on upcoming MMORPGs so in the interest of doing what's right for the project, I've been in touch with their staff and got the project brought back "online" with them.

What helps these games a lot is if people go to your listing and "hype" the project up, once it reaches a certain amount it lists it on the front page. That's a huge help! So what I'm asking people to do from the deepest section of my guts, maybe the sub-cockel region, is to there as soon as they can go to mmorpg and show the game some love.

What I thought we might do is each week pick a website or publication and all "bomb" it with attention. It's not much but it's the best Idea I think is on the table right now and who knows, it might even help close the gap.

Time to spit on your hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats!

MMORPG.com Divergence Hype Page:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/269/view/hype

MMORPG.com "Rumors" Forum:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/f ... -Room.html

MMORPG.com "The Pub" General Forums:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/f ... PGCOM.html

Our Indiegogo Listing With Videos (If you want to post the link)
http://igg.me/at/divergence/x/2437573

Video 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trpmoQnE ... K3KT4AtPLg

Video 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAFJ8FxJ ... K3KT4AtPLg

New Forums Are Live!

Since finishing the website could take me a bit more time, what with the boon of having new team members to train and accommodate  I decided to go ahead and announce the forums right now so people can at least communicate with one another and we can start to build a healthy new community sooner rather than later.

Please have an open mind. I know they're basic but I just tacked on "webmaster" to an ever-increasing plate of jobs and at the very least they're a great starting point that we can build onto with more features at a later date should we choose to. I took the liberty of plugging in Youtube and Google video into the supported BBCode so that should keep you busy for a while eh?

As always, thanks a ton guys. Watch the forums for new announcements in the next few days! :)

http://www.Divergence-Online.com/forums

website update

Just popping in on my phone to say that i had to step away from my pc today to see a close friend out of town but ill be back tomorrow (sunday) to try and finish setting up the new website and forums as promised. Next video is at the 10k mark so thanks again for getting us this far guys and it feels great to be finally getting back to work on this insane project!

Player Cities v0.5 Q&A

For my first dev blog here, I thought I'd take a few minutes to outline some of the questions people have been asking about how Player Cities are intended to function in Divergence.
First off, try not to look at "a city" as if it were an object to be right-clicked and transferred into your ownership. A player city is nothing more than a collection of individual buildings placed by individual players in close proximity of one another. If those players with to share the expense of a mutually beneficial defensive network for their homes or buildings, they can decide among themselves someone who represents their interests, and that person can place a city hall.

The city hall serves numerous purposes. First and foremost it taxes all buildings within it's sphere of radius designated by it's owner and collects those fees. That revenue is pooled and added to it's own maintenance pool, which is the source of the services it can furnish.

The most common service a city hall can provide is to establish a militia or police force (depending on what the township wishes). A militia is typically a set of NPCs which are spawned and patrol within the city hall's sphere of influence. They're programmed to attack either individuals specified at the city hall, or can be extended to broader specifications such as "attack all non-OSI aligned" if the town wishes to be factionally affiliated.

This "militia" will patrol within it's boundaries, in between structures and attack anyone specified as "unwelcome". Once a member of it's ranks is killed, it is replaced by the city hall at the expense of it's maintenance pool.

The mayor (the owner of the city hall) can also place defensive structures as anyone else in the world can but any defensive structure (unless overridden such as a wealthy individual wishing to employ their own personal estate defenses at their own expense) placed within the sphere with maintenance from (once again) the city hall.

Q:"But what if our mayor quits the game or is being a douche?"
A: (Currently) there is only one way to replace an uncooperative mayor in Divergence. Armed rebellion.

A city hall is like any other structure in that it can be destroyed, either through controlled demolition or a simple self destruct sequence initiated by an AI or highly-skilled hacker. The mayor obviously can do anything in his power to stop this sequence from completing, including setting city defenses to target others at will, giving him time to access the panel and stop it's function. Once the city hall is destroyed, whatever was in the maintenance pool and internal bank (if that feature is enabled) is dropped to the ground for anyone to pick up. A new mayor can throw down a new city hall and the process repeats itself.

Q: "So what if someone sneaks through the main gate at my city, kills all the guards, destroys the defensive turrets, blows up the city hall and takes my money?"
A: Well then, it sucks to be you.

Remember that because a mayor can take measures to stop the destruction of his city hall, through personal action and city defenses that the only time when one individual should be able to totally take over a town is if that town is already virtually vacant and has no operational defenses of it's own. "Taking over" a township/town/city/metropolis requires a coordinated effort of several individuals willing to risk dying and losing their own inventory and equipment in the process. It also requires the commitment to, if necessary, maintain that effort in preventing the existing mayor from thwarting their attempts.

In other MMOs, the one's brave enough to attempt player cities, you always find their still remains scattered around. Ghost towns long since vacant, taking up prime real estate and always right where you wanted to mine a really good concentration of aluminum alloy. That won't happen in Divergence. "Don't try to take more than you're prepared to commit to defending" is the rule.

Q:"You said already that you don't impose a value set on players. Remember that stuff about player freedom? What if I want to name my town something ridiculous?"
A: You're more than welcome to name your city a disgusting array of personal attacks and/or racial slurs if you so wish. But as with everything in Divergence, be aware of the repercussions. A few might be:

1. A town named "Cuntville" or "Buttsecksopolis" isn't going to make it into the story. Neither will "Alderaan City" or anything else obviously named after something from another game or franchise. Don't expect my or anyone else on the dev team's help if your desire to be unoriginal and cliche.
2. For names that go beyond the beyond of offensiveness, such as racial slurs, you can expect no interference from anyone representing Stainglass Llama at that time. However keep in mind that we're developers by day, players by night, and if someone on my team wants to make it a personal mission to obliterate a city with a bigotous name, as long as they're operating at the capacity of a player and not a GM, they are well within their rights to do so.

I hope this has spelled out a few of the more pertinent questions people had about the player city system. Obviously there's a lot more I could get into but please understand that giving people info about a game you're in the process of making is a double-edged sword. On one side you want to give people as much info as possible, but on the other the moment you open your mouth you become liable for those features and at the time of this writing, there is just under a mere $5,000 in the development pool.

As always, thanks for your support and helping make Divergence: Online a reality!