Good Morning Friends and Avatars!  A blessed cool weather day here in the Midwest, which is awesome at the moment.  I hope you all checked out the blood red moon last night as well.

Today, I am pleased to bring to a post I have been waiting for, for a while now.  As a heraldric artist in the SotA College of Arms, a good post by one of the devs was something I was looking forward to.  Just like in my feelings with the Overland Map, communication between the dev team and the community is important.  In this case, we are now getting more details from the dev team as to why and how they are implementing the family crest system that was a backer reward at the Virtual Collector level on up.

Starr Long writes:

Greetings Avatars:

Founders receive the following pledge reward at the Virtual Collector Tier:

Custom Crest In Game: Get your own Family Crest for display on your shield, tabard and house flag, made from a customized image uploaded by YOU! (Submitted Art subject to Developer Approval).

We are very excited to announce that we have a great tool in development from the College of Arms for all of you to create your Crest. As some of you are aware Lord British recently awarded the College of Arms a Royal Warrant and therefore they are our chosen curator of crests. Therefore we expect them to be treated with the respect due their office.

Using this tool is an extremely positive way for us to accomplish this goal. Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Performance: Adding 4,000+ more textures to the game would exacerbate our texture memory size issues because we’re already fighting memory overheads. Those of you playing on 32-bit systems have already experienced memory issues. With the College of Arms solution, we can composite the image on the fly from a single image, no matter how many variations there are.
• Support: As you all know we are trying to keep our budget focused on game content development so we are keeping cost like marketing and support very tight right now. If we were to support a completely open image submission process, we would have to hire staff to review each and every image to make sure it is appropriate.
• Thematic & Cohesive: The College of Arms generator is loosely based on historically accurate models of heraldry and, in the end, we feel will create a much more cohesive world than if we left this completely open. From a fiction/lore standpoint the Avatars are from a different world, but in-universe these arms are being built for those outsiders by people who are native to New Britannia, meaning that a ‘New Britannian style’ will be common to them, again resulting in a cohesive look.
• Community: As with other examples like the Bards of Poet’s Circle, doing works like this with the community makes the work we are creating a work created by all of us, not just the professional developers. In the end we feel this makes a better product.

Please note that the tool is still very much in development but as soon as it is ready for official crest creation we will let you know. In the meantime, the members of the College of Arms will be happy to answer any questions you may have and can assist you with creating your arms here on the College of Arms sub forum. Please also note we will not accept any submissions that potentially infringe on copyrighted material.

-Darkstarr

There has been some questioning of why the process of using the College of Arms as the “go to organization” for community members to design their coat of arms.  Optimization is really the major focus and I think by outsourcing and encouraging community engagement on this front is a brilliant way to do this.

Also, heraldry has always served as a means of identification, especially on the battlefield. In fact, we can date many heraldry back to as early as the 8th century. An artistic style that was always important was the ability for the design to be clear and easily seen both up close and far away on the battlefield. It is a great thing to include in a game, in which the setting would fit the use of such a device in it.  In fact, allowing us the community to have our own, allows just another way to help make New Britannia our own.

For an example of just some of the unique ways coats of arms were made in the past, here is a great chart by Balec Fares de Cani that was posted by the always awesome Sir Frank of both the SotA Forums and the College of Arms.

If you are at the Virtual Collector level pledge or higher, please create a thread on the SotA CoA sub forum with what your goals and thoughts are. One of our heralds will work with you to design your coat of arms.

I am also pleased to share that there will be a generator that will be on the CoA website, to help you make your coat of arms yourself  so then you can just submit it directly in a thread on the forum for acceptance.  This will be great because it will help you, the community, get to be even more hands on as you design your coat of arms.  Currently, it has limited charges in it.  Members of the college of the college are continuing to add more charges that can be added into this generator for the community to use. I think when the community sees all the possible charges and variations that will exist, they will be excited for this unique tool.

Personally I would like to thank the CoA Sovereigns, the artists in the CoA, and especially Coren, Grant, and Ronan for their hard work in working towards this great goal of a blazonry generator.  If not for the hard work before I asked to join and help, this would have never gotten as far as it has.  I am just grateful I get to jump in and help take some of the load off of some of these hard working men and women.

As a historian and an artist, it has been a joy to get to know the College of Arms members and I hope to continue to work with them as my busy schedule allows. As a historian, I get to put my study of history to help educate as well as provide guidance to create an awesome identifier in this new world we get to explore together.  As an artist, I get to help create unique charges that will actually be in a published video game that is being developed by an amazing team at Portalarium.  It is a true blessing to be able to use my gifts in the areas of art and history to help the college and the community make some amazing coats of arms.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask here and on the SotA CoA sub forum.