Good Morning Friends and Fellow Avatars! Happy Mother’s Day Weekend!
So it is a crazy busy weekend here in GolemDragon’s Wyymlair, but we have some great new info from Portalarium so before I prep for today’s activities as well as driving for a few hours to get there, I wanted to make sure to get the Update of the Avatar info posted. As always we have a variety of topics, which should give you some fun content to catch up on this weekend. Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
- The Building of the PaxLair Maze
- Birko’s Customized Map of Novia
- Community Created Street Names
- Player Owned Town Submission Form
- Steam Achievements
- Bob’s Bell Tower
- Thou hast been invited to the Release 17 Postmortem
- Richard & Starr on the Past, Present, and Future of Game Development
- Blade of the Avatar Pledge Reward and Add-Ons Expire May 31
The Building of the PaxLair Maze
Arianna posted this amazing time lapse video in the R17 Screenshot Gallery of the building of the PaxLair Maze in Release 17. Spanning 3 lots, this is (to our knowledge) the largest 3D maze ever constructed in SotA. It was designed by Net and and then was constructed by Net and Sindariya (“Riya”) in the Player Owned Town of PaxLair:
Riya and Net have four events planned for their maze this Release. The next event is scheduled for this Sunday, May 10, at 1:30 pm CST. See Sindariya’s R17 Events Forum post for more details.
Birko’s Customized Map of Novia
Community member Birko recently posted a customized map of Novia in the forums. As a fan of cartography it needed to be included this morning.
Community Created Street Names in Release 17
A special thanks went out to everyone that posted street name suggestions in the forums. Below is a list of 24 of those community contributed names that Portalarium selected for streets in Release 17, and the community members that contributed them. They have many more community contributed street names approved for use so look for them in future Releases.
Player Owned Town Submission Form
The staff at Portalarium are putting some finishing touches on the first iteration of the Player Owned Town Submission Web Form and hope to make it available to all PoT owners sometime next week. It should be on the forums as soon as it goes live, and you’ll find a link to the submission form on your SotA Account Page next to the Player Owned Town that you purchased. Here is just a small snippet of the submission form:
Steam Achievements
With the launch of Release 17, players were able to start earning Steam Achievements, of which there are currently sixteen, not counting a few hidden ones.
These achievements are for Steam only. We do not currently plan for them to be visible in-game for Episode 1.
Bob’s Bell Tower
Bob Cooksey recently built this beautiful Bell Tower to Lord British’s specifications (including the future ability to ring the bells by pulling on the ropes). Look for this NPC building in an upcoming release!
Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Thou hast been invited to the Release 17 Postmortem
Please join us Thursday, May 14th at 3:00 PM Central (20:00 GMT) for the next Hangout of the Avatar! Richard, Starr, and Chris (and some very special guests!) will be chatting about Release 17 and looking ahead to Release 18. And, of course, FireLotus will be taking your questions and feedback live in the chat-room and also in advance right here in the comments section.*
As always, the link to the hangout will be posted here directly before the hangout begins.
*Please keep in mind that questions and feedback related to Release 17 specific topics will be given priority and really verbose questions may be skipped, as they can be a challenge to shorten and summarize live on the air. In brief… please keep your questions… brief.
Richard & Starr on the Past, Present, and Future of Game DevelopmentLast year while attending Dragon Con one of our Developer level backers (and a longtime Ultima fan), Dr. Aaron Lanterman, invited Richard and Starr to speak at Georgia Tech where Dr. Lanterman serves on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The title of the talk was “Video Game Development: Past, Present, and Future” and was combination of two different talks including Richard’s Unite Keynote and Starr’s “Tech Trends in Videogames”. Marion Crowder, Lead Instructional Media Designer in the School of ECE, recorded and edited the talk for our viewing pleasure.
