And thus, although I'd like to say a lot more and give every person individually who go us to this point a shout-out, it'll have to wait because I'm sure those same people would much prefer us to be working instead of dicking around blabbing on a dev blog. Therefore, without further ado:
Divergence: Online
Alpha 2
v0.07
Known Issues:
- First-Gen Solitus eyes don't display the color they should. This is do to the replacement of their unique shader and the fact that we have to modify character customization code to compensate for it now.
- Something's up with Androids, so don't try making an Android for the time being because it won't work, and I don't have time to "fix" people who tried it anyway.
- You'll notice that the vast majority of craftable items require a very small amount of raw materials, and in many cases, the same materials. This is purely for ease-of-testing and very temporary. We can modify and assign any crafting schematic for any item at any time to be as simple or complex as we choose to allow for those items to be quickly made and tested in game. So feel free to play around with them and the crafting tool, but don't get spoiled because when Divergence launches, you won't exactly be able to build a starship engine out of five pounds of copper.
- IGNORE THE PLANTS. We're fully aware that crazy amounts of grass, trees, and flowers aren't meant to be springing up from tundra. However, we needed to test our upcoming foliage system in a live-game setting and didn't want to wait until after we were ready to unlock the other continents, so we just threw some down here purely for testing.
- Previously, the game patcher would CRC check every single file individually front to back. This resulted in wait times of up to ten minutes and was totally unacceptable. Although the patcher has been completely upgraded to reduce that time to less than two seconds now, it is, on occasion, forcing the player to re-download the entire game. Therefore, the likelihood is high that we're going to just have to replace the whole stupid thing with something that won't give us so many problems. Therefore, if you choose to install the game now from the updated installer, be forewarned that you may also be required to re-install the game entirely if we do, in-fact, replace the patcher in the coming weeks.
- Some of the new items in the crafting tool appear up in the air or otherwise not perfect. Some of these needed to be re-oriented but we didn't feel like further delaying this update just for minor cosmetic blemishes so we'll be cleaning those up after the fact.
- You must uninstall the current game in its entirety, as the above line mentions the entire patching system has been re-worked, and re-install via the link below.
Download Current Build Here
Having gotten that out of the way, what follows are the official patch notes!
Patch Description:
Originally, we'd planned on making it all about the addition of one major feature integral to the game; Automated Harvesting Machinery. However, once we began that process we realized that it really would be best if we, instead, built a system of powering devices first that would, in turn, be used to power objects such as these; Generators.But... Once we'd gotten into that, again, then did we realize that it would also be beneficial to go ahead and create our desired system for managing all electrical devices in your area; A system of creating and managing power grids, or just "Grids" for short.
While this originally sounded like the kind of infrastructure that could take up to six months to develop, it became obvious early on that our ability to maintain a six-day workweek (and 7 for some) of no less than ten hours each day was resulting in rapid progress that grew steadily more efficient as time progressed.
It's that Goldilocks-zone that professional project managers regard as their white whale; Desperately trying to obtain but always out of reach. So when I looked around and realized we were in that valley, my job became overwhelmingly apparent; Stay in the god damn valley at any cost.
The result was that as of yesterday, we have functional, in the current version of the game, not one or two but all three features released in a single big patch.
What we're talking about is a fully-functional structure that allows for, as far as any of us are aware, the most advanced and expandable system of local and civic management in any MMO to date. It surpasses Star Wars Galaxies in its prime in many regards which will all be outlined below.
Coupled with our advanced crafting system already released what this allows the player to do is:
- Locate resource locations throughout the game world of varying characteristics.
- Survey, sample, and draw those materials from the terrain.
- Use those base materials to craft fully-automated harvesting machinery, each item with vastly differing stats of its own based on the what resources you fed into its crafting, such as its energy efficiency, its maximum durability, the rate at which it can draw resources from the ground and other characteristics.
- Use those same materials to custom-make your own power-generators and reactors with complimentary stats of their own, such as their own strengths, efficiencies, and capabilities such as how much power they can output at maximum.
- Feed one, or several of your power sources into a centralized power-grid system.
- Use a power-grid interface item, placed in the world, to manage both incoming power sources and outgoing power-consuming devices in realtime.
- Turn on and off many devices, or even whole structures throughout your town from the grid interface, such as street lamps, cloning buildings, reactors, factories, and harvesters.
Power Generators:
Power, in the form of electrical energy, can come from many sources. The primary source being electrical power generators.
These generators, themselves can come in the form of anything from a small appliance-sized portable generator, or a large starship reactor such as the (pictured) Komatsu Series-8000 Starship-Grade Reactor.
Generators may also run in a number of modes of operation. Currently in game, they have two possible modes;
- Power-Cell Charge Mode - This mode allows the generator to, when empty power cells of the appropriate size (small, medium, large) are placed inside the generator's input hopper, the generator can then charge these cells at a rate illustrated in it's inspection panel and controlled by the quality of components which went into it's construction. The purpose of this mode is to charge portable power cells which can then be used in other equipment which is desired to function without the need to be connected to an external power source, such as a generator or grid.
- Grid Mode - This mode allows the general to feed into virtually any local power grid of which its manager has adequate permissions to do so. This allows the generator to power anything as small as a single overhead lamp to an entire structure or array of structures.
Power Grids:
Crafting a power grid item, placing it in the game world allows you to, through the use of it's Grid Interface Panel:
- Display all connected power sources and their current online/offline state in the left panel.
- Monitor all incoming and outgoing power demands, and sources, displayed in figures representing how much power you have available, compared against the maximum capacity of that hopper and also the total required load of connected devices on the right.
- Turn on and off power-demanding devices to manage and balance your total input and output, on the right.
Automated Harvesting Equipment:
"Harvesters", are automated machines, deployable from your inventory onto the world's surface, that when activated and provided a power source, will continue to draw a specified resource (provided that resource exists at the specified location) from the ground and place it, in stacks, into the harvesters' output hopper where it can then be transferred to the player's inventory.These devices, like others, can be powered by two means:
- Internal Power - This mode allows the device to be powered solely from internal power, which comes in the form of pre-charged power cells placed in its input hopper. When brought online, the installation begins to produce the specified resource while slowly (or at least, at the rate allowed by its quality of components specified during crafting) drains the power cells.
- Grid Mode - This allows the installation to draw its power from an external power source; A grid. This grid can be either a personal one you have set up yourself, or even a large, shared communal source fed by a multitude of individual power souces for you and your friends to use.
Visual Upgrades
- Added totally new tonemapping method, replacing the old "built-into Unity" standard with a new system that creates a much more cinematic visual experience with regards to color grading, depth, luminosity, and saturation.
- Added simulated retina-dilation effect. This effect simulates the expansion and contraction of the eye's iris when moving between areas of low and high brightness.
- Added totally new bloom method which replaces Unity's built-in system. Our new method isn't based on a simple brightness threshold like most "cheap" methods of bloom and instead is based on the way bloom actually occurs in real life; simulating bloom based on an overly-bright object or surface relative to it's surroundings.
- Added new dirty lens affect which becomes visible when looking into, or at, a very bright object or surface.
- Added a completely new and state-of-the-art method of SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) that totally replaces out previous method of simple ambient obscurance. This new method, in addition to accurately reproducing a much more natural and realistic effect, also brings to Divergence a brand-new experimental feature of color-bleeding; Which reproduces the known phenomenon of bright, or very richly-colored objects or surfaces bouncing some of their colored-lighting information to objects in near-proximity
- Enhanced Depth of Field effect has temporarily been disabled because some users reported it being "annoying".
- Improved all lighting on distant tree and foliage objects (billboards) to correctly shade these billboards based on the time of day.
- Increased default view distance to 3km (3000 meters) !
- Replaced night-time sky with our beloved night sky from the previous prototype.
- Reduced number of Malkavian Cormorants (The Birds) as they fly overhead by 50% of improve framerates. New separate flocks will be added in the future to create the same effect without hampering framerates.
Items
Added 37 new craftable items, including:
- Power Generators
- Harvesters
- Terminals (For Grids and ETC)
- Structure-building items such as floors, ceilings, walls, both internal and external.
Important Additional Notes:
This is some heavy stuff, and we're the first to admit that without some tutorials, very few people would figure out how to utilize all this crazy stuff on their own, so we're fully aware that videos explaining how to use all these features are a necessity.
The reality, however, is that we're flat broke and have been that way for a long time. And ecause we're flat broke, and several key items still need to be addressed, such as basic combat, the plain truth is that we're relying incredibly on our next and final financing campaign to provide the funding we need to finish the game and make it ready for Steam and an official launch. We need to make a maximum impact, during that campaign, and that means holding off on new videos until the time is right to do a "big unveil" to the whole public.
What we will be doing though, are several more blog posts, demonstrating, through imagery and instructions, how you navigate this system should you choose to have a look at it as-is instead of waiting.
What's next for Divergence?
The next few weeks will be spent on the following four tasks:
- Streamlining, squashing bugs, and overall cleaning up all of the features we added in this push. Many parts of the interface alone need to be improved to allow for an enjoyable and user-friendly experience.
- The long-awaited re-introduction of our popular blocks system from the original game prototype, but completely upgraded and re-imagined. While you're certainly able to build an entire civilization out of crafted items in Divergence, players loved the simplicity of building with blocks as well. Additionally, there are many benefits of using blocks to blueprint or construct a skeleton of a building before actually committing to it's construction. Re-introducing blocks into the game, we believe, will be one of the final steps (the other being basic combat) required to take the game from being a proof-of-concept piece to an actual game,
- New blog posts outlining the actual processes and steps required to use all of these crazy awesome tools we've just put into the game.
- Deciding on a more permanent solution to the patcher situation.
Thanks for reading this far and for your continual support. We couldn't have made it this far towards creating a truly revolutionary mmorpg without you!
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