With another pre-alpha test release — the seventeenth successive monthly release, as it happens — of Shroud of the Avatar imminent, Starr Long has once again composed his obligatory post concerning how to get set up to play the Release, and what changes it features:

We are far from launch, and in a constant state of change, and we do not yet have in-game systems to inform players of these changes, or to share ways to help them to explore new content and systems. This means we rely entirely on this message, and the linked instructions and known issuesto convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports, because players elect not to read this valuable information. By taking a few moments to read through this information, a great deal of our time and efforts can be redirected to focus on new “unanswered” questions, and addressing critical issues impacting each release. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to review this post, and for all the truly valuable feedback you continue to provide.

As mentioned last release, we are still having to pay some debt incurred by our move to Unity 5. However, even with that factored in, we still managed to deliver quite a bit of new content, including our first Player Owned Town, Crafting Events, Player Titles, and Lot Access Permissions. Unfortunately, the amount of architectural changes in this release required us to do a full wipe of everything except Friends and Guilds. To slightly decrease the pain of this, we implemented an Experience Doubler that will temporarily speed up leveling (see details below).

Also, remember that while we are providing new content with each release, our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. So, be sure to check out a couple of the Community Events Calendars run by our community members (via in game book or the player run websites Avatars CircleCommunity Events and Events of the Avatars calendar).

You should click on through to read the lengthy list of change notes for Release 17, but here are a couple highlights:

• Player Owned Town Test: We hope to have our first example of a Player Owned Town in the game with the PaxLair Metropolis.
  • First Template Complete: We have completed the first phase of our prototyping the production process for Player Owned Towns, using PaxLair as the first template. Our goal is to create at least 12 different templates based on biome, location, and layout. When we begin accepting submissions in R18, we will use the submitted layouts to help us determine the mix of these templates. You can visit PaxLair in the northern Novia past the Grunvald desert.
  • Access Permissions: The first round of basic functionality allows the owner to control lot ownership, and delegate some of that responsibility to others. Additional functionality like blessings will come online in future releases.

• Overworld Camera Changes: We are doing an experiment with the camera in the Overworld that makes it operate more like the camera does in regular scenes. This means you can now move the camera around freely and even look up at the sky. Some Overworld assets were not built for closer viewing and therefore do not appear correctly with these new camera angles but we will address them over time in future releases.

Release 17 begins tomorrow morning, starting at about 10:30 AM Central Time. Portalarium caution that the Shroud of the Avatar servers will be offline for a few hours prior to the release, so that all of the new content can be uploaded thereto.