Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Architecture of the Obsidians!
• One Month Countdown for Pledge Splits and Merges
• Do you have a Public Cache Chest Quest?
• NBNN Interview With Starr Long

Architecture of the Obsidians!

[This is a continuation of A Dev+ Forum Post by Scottie Jones first reported in Update #132]

Having created the primary building blocks for the large outer walls, I’m now moving forward with sets of smaller items I can use to decorate the scenes I’ll later be creating, and that others can use to add hints of Obsidian architecture to regions of the world that may have been touched by them. Here we have a set of items I’ve already determined we need based on some simple sketches I did for the Chamber of Souls.

In addition to these smaller items, I’ve also created a few new, larger building-block elements for use with the exterior map areas as well as the underground. The two you see below are some Barracks with an accessible guard tower above it, as well as my initial work-in-progress for the Chamber of Souls itself.

Here are these same items as seen in the game editor, placed on a somewhat starkly-lit test-art map I created to make sure all the materials were rendering properly. Eventually I’ll be testing them out on a much more environmentally rich map (such as Hutch’s swamp, as I did with the earlier wall pieces, to take full advantage of the softening effect of the atmospheric fog.

And lastly, we have the gloomy interior of the Chamber of Souls. The first image shows the scene from a floating point above, so you can enjoy the elaborate stone and inlaid metal floor dais where the Obsidian Council once met long ago. The second image is from the perspective of a player standing on the dais near one of the thrones, looking up into the domed ceiling.

 

Of course, as they say, “the devil’s in the details”… These spaces are all bare-bones and empty until I finish a few more details, additions, and decorations. I look forward to showing you more as I continue!

Scottie ^_^

One Month Countdown for Pledge Splits and Merges

As many of you know, the dev team have a very complicated pledge reward structure where backers with the same pledge tier get different rewards based on when they backed (i.e. the eras of Royal Founder, Founder, and Benefactor). With our announcement last week of certain pledge and pledge reward expirations, that complication just increased by an order of magnitude (or maybe several orders of magnitude). And over the rest of this year, there will be even more pledge and reward expirations, adding more and more orders of magnitude complexity to our ability to track which backer gets which rewards at which tiers.

Because of this growing complexity and the labor costs to manage it, the dev team no longer believe it is a good use of our backers funds to continue offering pledge splits or merges after the End of Summer Reward Expirations. Therefore, they are starting a 1-month countdown to get all pledge split and merger requests processed. Backers will have thru August 17, 2015 to request a pledge split or merger, after which they will no longer be able to do them.

They will continue to transfer whole pledges from one account to another. The only exception will be pledges that were purchased on Steam, or those where the Steam key has been claimed. In those cases the Steam access is permanently attached to your personal Steam account and you will no longer be able to transfer or sell $45 of your pledge value.

Do you have a Public Cache Chest Quest?

[This message that Lord British shared in Update #129 bears repeating as a lead-in for this article]

Greetings Avatars,

Many months ago, I began to see the amazing creativity of our community in the creation of quests. They were hacked in by players despite little intentional support from us to make this easy or powerful. Until now, live players had to stand in real-time to be the waypoints along any quest line. Likewise live players had to take or give any items or be the obstacles along any quest path. We began to explore ways we could create tools to help increase the ease and power of such community created events. Our goal is to allow players to craft deeper quests directly into the game world itself, to be able to leave clues in the world 24/7, and to have treasure (and ultimately protection of those treasures) that do not demand 24/7 live players to be ever present.

In R19, we are releasing the 1st features along this path. Writable books & notes and chest permissions open a broad new pallet for community quest making. Imagine for example, a community purposefully spreading a rumor about the local grave digger and his sinister nocturnal activities… players could write and leave notes in the graveyard they created in their town, describing how this grave digger bargained for body parts of deceased pets in graveyards in allied towns graveyards, or a specific person’s home. Sequences of notes could be placed such that false leads abound, and only carefully following the trail from the start will lead through the correct sequence. Finally when the ultimate destination is found, a new cache chest could be placed (which allows all visitors to take anything out of or put anything into it). The creators of this quest could stock that chest with pet call whistles that summon the supposedly restored pet. Pets that the gravedigger may have brought back to life!

All of these notes and cache chests must be left on a player owned lot at the moment and all “treasure” left in the cache chest must be stocked by the owners as well, but I believe this is an important first step in creating tools for powerful player created quests.

Good luck in your quest building, I look forward to experiencing and celebrating some of the best ones created in each release!

– Lord British

Duke Gréagóir started a Release 19 Event Forum thread asking community members to post their public cache chest quests. As a fan of the public cache chests, here are a few excerpts:

Do you have a Public Cache Chest? Public Cache Chest Quest…

Duke Gréagóir: Let me know if you have one where I can get to it and I will drop off something for you in there…Mine is outside located in PaxLair downtown at the Pavilion with the Adobe Stables. Area: PaxLair (POT_forest_metropolis_01_paxlair) Loc: (51.4, 38.0, 197.7)…This is a NO HOST event as it is occurring all over Novia at any time.

Kendric Darrow: I have one in Owls Head, opposite Firelotus tavern, behind the lot which is used as a crafting centre. The chest is inside the house, left front corner…This is exciting!

Lained: I’ve one outside my home in Ashhaven, just follow the road left past the town crier.

Alexander: Finally have my community chest set up. I am located in Soltown in the Founders keep, near the cemetery. I also left a writable book in the chest with a simple message. The chest is outside, but not in plain sight. Look by the wind tower. Area: Soltown (Novia_R1_City_Soltown) Loc: (-147.0, 28.4, -96.5)

Spoon: Soltown. Right after the refugee camp on the right. Got them marked with baguettes, since folks don’t spot the difference between public and non-public chests. Usually fill them with good for new folks stuff and books in the other.

There are 4 pages to this thread, so be sure and check out all the community created quests!

NBNN Interview With Starr Long

Lazarus interviews Starr Long on twitch.tv about the upcoming Release 20! Starr talked about a wide range of subjects ranging from Chaotic philosophy to the challenges of building a narrative structure on top of a sandbox. Perhaps though the most intriguing topic was the news that we are experimenting with a new usage based advancement system for skills that we might see in game as soon as R21.