Good Evening Friends and Fellow Avatars!
Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
- Come Play Release 6 Now!
- The (voice) of the Guardian Returns!
- Founder Teachable Emotes
- March Duke’s Roundtable, V.I.P. Picnic, & Duel
- Wood & Plaster 2-Story with Front Porch Town Home
- Only 2 BotA Chapters Left!
- Alienware $20 Pledge Upgrade Coupons
- Upcoming Events
Come Play Release 6 Now!
Release 6 successfully launched yesterday, May 23rd, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and checking out the new changes!
Release 6 is the inaugural, once per quarter release, focused mostly on polish and iteration. Many of the polish changes were behind the scenes, but some visible changes include: lighting fine-tuning, improved bump mapping shaders, character improvements (skin, anims, movement during combat, etc.), increased environment polys, more crafting anims, looping emotes (dances), new & improved player homes, and more!
Players have posted some great screen shots in the forum showcasing the visual enhancements in Release 6 (like the image shown above)! Here are a few samples:
You may want to checkout Fire Lotus Tavern in Owl’s head and see if the Dance Rave is still in full swing!
Release 6 Patches
Early players are helping the team uncover bugs and so far we already have had two patches that include the following fixes:
May 23, 2014
Build Numbers:
- Linux: 29
- Mac: 25
- PC: 102
Notes:
- Added chat message for when you zone to another player
- Added a chatlog response if you try to summon your party but you aren’t in a party
- Fixed bug where Female heads were disconnected in character creation
- Double clicking on hostile NPCs now correctly starts combat with them.
- Fixed recipe book not putting ingredients on the crafting table
- Female eye animation no longer looks up too far during combat.
- Fix for crafting stacks of items
- Fix for dark progress bar in patch client
- Fix hair color showing incorrectly in character sheet.
- Fixed females eyes rolling in the back of her head on magic combos
- Fixed seams on male avatar head type 1
- Fix for forcing un-equip item when swimming.
- Harvesting VFX and SFX for mining and tree chopping
- Bow VFX and SFX fixes
- Lich VFX fix
- Fix for glowing shrubbery (Elderberry bush)
- Inventory and performance fixes for recipe book
- Make effects cull distance match object’s cull distance
- Non-combat skills (like Light) no longer put you into combat.
- NPCs should now play animations across clients
- Updates to outdoor fog, new shader to test out lighting improvements for smoke / fog
- Fixed incorrect shader for facial hair.
- House LODs / culling turned back on, should improve performance
- Fix where NPCs would not initialize properly on map startup so they would not attack players (except first in the map)
- Fixed error where some “For Sale” signs were tied to a single lot (creating two conflicting owners)
May 22, 2014
Build Numbers:
- Linux: 28
- Mac: 24
- PC: 101
Notes:
- Add /summon command for GMs / Devs
- Fixed pathfinding problem with cotton resource nodes that would lock players to the cotton bushes
- Combat hold pose fixes for female avatar holding shields
- Eye Animation fixes for female avatars
- Fix for chest oddness
- Fix to prevent triggering skills in hotbar with Shift + mapped key when typing in chat
- Materials fix for glowing window frames in Rustic Village house in Braemar.
- Inventory fix for take all button.
- Fix for NPCs and resources not respawning where respawn function was broken if master switched.
- Rebuilt all pathfinding and culling for underground areas
- Looping emotes trimmed for begin and end so they better loop
- Water updates didn’t work with shadow changes also checked in yesterday. Removed shadow casting from water planes and re-tuned water material. Also added a saturate to final alpha value in the shader to prevent crazy values.
- How To Train Your Kobold:
- Kobold now only barks when in combat. He has about 15 annoying barks that no one was seeing due to faction issues. Now you can see them.
- Kobold spawns with his warhammer out because HE IS READY FOR YOU
- Kobold was trying to leash and failing, causing him to heal very rapidly in place. Now he will chase you through the dungeon. There is no escape from Kobold.
Remember peeps, that the dev team needs all your help with testing the new patches, putting more stress on our multiplayer servers, and testing the new game content, so please join us in playing Release 6 and posting to the forums under bugs and feedback for R6 so the team can have all of our feedback and details from our experiances.
[Note: This early release contains both multiplayer and single player online mode. Release 6 access will end on Sunday, May 25, at 10:00 PM Central Time]
If you have not backed the game yet, you will need to register and login at www.shroudoftheavatar.com, select the “Pledge or Send Gift!” button in the right side-bar, and purchase a pledge at the $45 Adventurer level or above. For a limited time, you can get the Adventurer pledge for only $25 with the Alienware Pledge Upgrade Coupon (see details below).
The (voice) of the Guardian Returns!
Last night the dev team did the first voice recording for Shroud of the Avatar. They taped voice overs for our upcoming promotional trailer which will be used at E3, as well as a first pass at the intro cinematic. The actor was none other than Bill Johnson who was the voice of The Guardian in Ultima as well as the narrator for Ultima Online’s intro. Since Origin was one of the very first companies to ever use voice in their games Bill is one of the very first voice actors in our industry. Bill is probably more famous for his role as Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2! You can learn more about Bill over at his Facebook page.
Personally, I am super excited for this as I still remember my joy the first time i heard a real voice in video games when I first played Ultima 7: The Black Gate. Even my Father was in awe at real voice acting being used in a video game, back in 1992 (when Ultima 7 came out on PC). I still remember him rushing downstairs and me replaying the opening just so we could watch and listen to it again… I feel old suddenly….
Founder Teachable Emotes
Get ready to show off (and teach) your unique emote, included in the Founder rewards of every pledge tier! Here are four screenshots of those emotes:
Citizen: Dance 1 (dances a jig)
Edelmann: Dance 2 (dances an allemande)
March Duke’s Roundtable, V.I.P. Picnic, & Duel
One of the most valued rewards for the Duke pledge tier is:
Friday March 7th, 2014 kicked off a weekend full of fun for visitors and Portalarium employees alike. Taking place in the middle of SXSW, backers were treated to a tour of Portalarium, a talk from Starr Long and Richard Garriott at Hackney House, and an epic duel between Lord British and Darkstarr during a Portalarium picnic at Richard Garriott’s scenic Lake Austin property.
Wood & Plaster 2-Story with Front Porch Town Home
Next up in the line of Wood & Plaster homes is this 2-story, 2-room with second-story loft, town home, now available in the Add-On Store (this home is also used as the Fire Lotus Tavern in Owl’s Head):
