Portalarium are, of course, hurriedly preparing for the first alpha test of Shroud of the Avatar, which will take place later this week. However, as the most recent update posted to the Shroud of the Avatar website explains, those who backed the game at the Developer level ($400 during the Kickstarter, $450 currently) can download the Windows game client ahead of schedule. Portalarium has decided to test the game’s installation and patch distribution system by releasing the client in this way:

Hello Dev Plus people! Today we have a special surprise for you! As you likely know, next week we are opening Release 1 up for the weekend so you guys can help us test a few things. Before we do that, we wanted to do a smaller test and let you guys help us test our installer and patcher system so we can verify it works for the vast majority of people and fix any major issues that come up before doing a larger roll out. If this all goes well then we’ll put out another patch early next week and open login to a small scene to verify dev plus people can login successfully.

You will not be able to login today but feel free to try. Early next week we’ll enable dev plus login only to help us test that system before Dec 12th.

Since you guys are dev plus and we’re trying to share as much dev stuff as possible I’ll give you some info on how it works. There is a standards installer that runs first and installs the app. When you run the Shroud app it starts up a bootstrap patcher that checks to see if the patcher needs to be updated and updates it if needed and then relaunches. Once you have the current patcher, it will start patching out the full game.

The patches are all deltas of previous versions and then compressed to keep them as tiny as possible. We also can package multiple updates into a single patch. Today’s path will be a “0 to 40” patch which means versions 0,1,2,3,4,5… 40 all rolled into one patch. We can also do things like a patch to take you from 40 to 50.

As for bandwidth, that is part of what we’re experimenting with today. To maximize patch speeds and minimize costs, by default the client uses a torrent like system so you’ll see that you’re uploading as well as downloading. In case you’re wondering, YES, we could track how much people have uploaded and yes, we’re talking about awards and achievements for people who upload the most. For those who are in secure locations or locations that try and block torrent traffic through packet inspection that mistakenly block the client, after 5 minutes of low or no downloading it switches over to a fallback. The fall back uses a more standard http type download direct connection through port 80.

For seeding, we’re using 5 dedicated boxes each with dedicated 100mbit connections in a few different locations. Depending on how much sharing we see, we might add a few more seed boxes before release 1.

Sadly, today’s test will be for Windows only.

The above was posted to the Shroud of the Avatar Dev+ forums by Chris Spears. Developer Ken Pfile later went on to explain that the success case for the test would be reaching the login screen for the game:

At present, nobody can actually log in to the game, however.

Additionally, Starr Long posted an update to the Shroud of the Avatar general forums, in which the aims, goals, and limitations of the first alpha release are explained in detail. Sadly, Portalarium weren’t able to get Linux or OS X builds of Shroud of the Avatar to a release-ready state in time for this first alpha test; this week will be a Windows-only test. Future alpha tests should see cross-platform support, however.