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!
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