Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

• Hello One Far West
• Water Gets an Experimental Makeover in Release 23
• Sprichst Du Deutsch? Ou peut-être français? – My Personal Fav
• Small and Subtle: Tier Markers
• Starr Long Intel Buzz Presentation: Design Vision vs. Feedback: Developing in the Open
• Pianist Bernie Katzman Joins Markee Dragon Playing Shroud of the Avatar LIVE

Hello One Far West

Last week Portalarium bid farewell to the Greystone One office building, where they’ve been officing since the completion of the Kickstarter campaign in 2013. As mentioned before, they moved ourselves in order to conserve our backer funding. Fortunately for them, the BMC was holding their first annual Convention here in Austin on that very same weekend, with BMC guild members coming in from all points of the country.

True to the spirit of a backer funded project, Duke Ezekiel (BMC founder and leader) and the attending BMC members volunteered their services to help the team move! But they weren’t the only ones! Backers from all over Texas (and beyond) arrived by the car load to help the Shroud of the Avatar team with the move.

The dev team had planned on the move taking all day Saturday, and had worked out a 3-shift schedule starting at 9am. It didn’t quite work out as planned. Unlike most product development schedules, this endeavor came in way ahead of schedule! With so many volunteers helping us, everything was moved to the new office in about 3 hours! Wow!

There were well over 30 people that participated in the move throughout the day, with representatives from several SotA guilds, including the BMC, PaxLair, Phoenix Republic, Clan of the Wolf, and the Order of Drunken Elders. Here are a few photos that show many (but not all) of the volunteer movers:

Themo Lock and Winfield designed and printed a special “The Big Move” poster, all signed by Lord British and Darkstarr, that were given out to each of the volunteer backers that participated!

Water Gets an Experimental Makeover in Release 23SotA’s water system is getting an experimental makeover in Release 23 with the Ceto Ocean System for Unity. The new water will appear in a couple of island scenes, including Hometown, as an experiment until we can work out the kinks. Here are some of the features described in the Unity Asset Store:

Ceto brings advanced ocean effects to your game. From first person games where the ocean is just a back drop to fully interactive shipping simulations where the ocean is the focus of the application.

• Uses a projected grid as the mesh to provide you with a infinite ocean plane while still retaining enough detail in the mesh for small scale waves.
• Fast querying wave information (like wave height) at any location.
• Wave generation is decoupled from the rendering. So If you need a server to just generate the wave data for buoyancy calculations and not render anything you can.
• Wave generation using FFT. Option to run the FFT on the CPU using multi-threading or on the GPU. Allows the best performance options for your game needs.
• Ability to easily modify wave conditions in local areas using the overlay system. Mask out the waves near your shore lines, add foam trails to ships or clip away the ocean mesh for inland caves.
• Ability to change waves conditions quickly. Go from calm to rough seas in a instant.

Here is a short video snippet created by Chris Spears of how the water will appear in Release 23:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfM1awejqQs

Chris has been experimenting with the features of the Ceto Ocean System and created this video of choppy water during stormy weather, which might be implemented in a future SotA Release:

https://youtu.be/0n0VmKjudmw

Sprichst Du Deutsch? Ou peut-être français?

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Joaquin “wizardsmoke” Del Canto]

Hello everyone,

You might have noticed that Jason and I have been working on localization recently. For those of you who may not know, localization involves translating all of the text that exists in the game from English to various other languages. There is A LOT of text that needs to be translated, and that text is stored in various different formats and contexts throughout the project. The text is also constantly changing during the course of day-to-day development. Needless to say, localization of SotA has been a significant undertaking. In this post, I will share some of the specifics about the localization process that we have been developing.

GetLocalization

Translations will be crowd-sourced via a web service called GetLocalization. Sometime in the next few weeks, we plan on organizing volunteer translators from the SotA community and giving them access to the GetLocalization project. There, translators will be able to compose and collaborate on translations for individual pieces of text in the game.

In order to use a service like GetLocalization, we need a way to deliver all of our English text to that service, as well as a way to bring translated text from that service back into the game. Our goal has been to develop and automate this pipeline.

Exporting English Text

The first step in developing this pipeline was identifying all of the places where English text is stored in the project. We came up with a list of several main categories/places where text is stored:

• C# Scripts – Hard-coded strings throughout our C# code.
• Serialized Assets – This includes text stored in assets that are serialized by Unity, including Scenes, Prefabs, and ScriptableObjects.
• Books – Each book has an English text file associated with it.
• Help – Similar to books, help/hint windows each have an associated English text file.
• NPC Conversations – All of the things that NPCs can say.
• Skills – Names, descriptions, and related pieces of text for each skill. These are defined in a spreadsheet.
• Titles – Similar to skills, each title (Lord of the Manor, etc.) is defined in a spreadsheet.

With this list in hand, the next step was to develop automated processes for each category in the list that would aggregate the text for that category into a single file. We call these processes “generators”, since they generate a file. We have written generators for several of the categories on the list, such that we now have a small set of files; one file for each category.

These generated files constitute our “source” localization database. In addition to the raw English text, these files store a revision number, a comment, a unique identifier, and some information about where the text came from.

With the source files in place, we were ready to upload text to GetLocalization. For each of our source files, we convert the file to a special format (XLIFF) that GetLocalization can understand before uploading it. After the files are uploaded, GetLocalization can then display the English text and accept translations.

Importing Translated Text

GetLocalization generates one translation file per language per source file. For example, if we were translating to German and Spanish, then for each source file, there would be a German translation file and a Spanish translation file.

After we download these translation files from GetLocalization, we then convert them to the same format that our source database files are stored in. These files constitute our “target” localization database.

From there, the last step was putting the text back into the Unity project. For the most part, this was a simple process of copying data from the target database to parallel files in the Unity project.

Going Forward

Now that we have this pipeline in place, we are almost ready to begin accepting translations. Tomorrow, we will have a meeting to decide how to begin organizing the community, and to determine a rough timeline for launching the GetLocalization project. (Stay tuned during the upcoming weeks for more information about how you can get involved! :))

It has been satisfying to see all of these processes come together, and I expect that it will be even more satisfying to see the whole system in motion when translators become involved. Once we do have active translators, we anticipate receiving feedback about the translation process that we can then use to improve it.

While I did not explain every detail, I hope that this has helped illuminate some of the work that we have been doing, beyond just “Localization” in the daily meeting reports.

-Joaquin / wizardsmoke

Starting with German, our first round of translations will include (with more to come later):

• German
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Portuguese

Look for a post soon where we will be looking for volunteers and community leaders for each language.

Small and Subtle: Tier Markers

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Keith “Sannio” Quinn]

As a level designer, I love working on little things that help make a game feel more like a world. Most of my adventure scene work is focused on making things feel natural and doesn’t get a lot of special attention, but I wanted to take some time to show off something small and subtle I’ve been working on. I call them “tier markers.”

Some of you may have noticed a few outdoor scenes now have a spike with skulls next to their exit archways, but maybe you didn’t. No one can blame you, they’re pretty unobtrusive. If you did see them, you may have blown them off thinking they were simply decorations, but you’d be wrong, my friend! Those skulls are the “tier markers” I’m talking about and they indicate the difficulty of nearby enemies; the more skulls on the spike, the more challenging the enemies. Only a few maps have these right now, and not every map will get them, but more and more will get these skulls over time.

Here are some screenshots of a few of them so you can see for yourself what I’m talking about.

Next time you enter a outdoor area, check with the spiked skulls to see if you’re ready for the challenges within!

Keith Quinn

Starr Long Intel Buzz Presentation: Design Vision vs. Feedback: Developing in the Open

The annual addition of the Intel Buzz Workshop was held in Austin, Texas for the first time, and Starr Long was one of their featured speakers. The Buzz Workshop provides technical sessions, panels, and networking to help game developers tackle their biggest challenges. Starr’s presentation was titled “Design Vision vs. Feedback: Developing in the Open.” Intel broadcast the presentations on twitch.tv. Here is Starr’s segment:

Starr at SXSW Interactive: Co-Development: Open and Agile Game Development

Starr’s speaking circuit is already filling in for next year as he was approved for a presentation at SXSW Interactive in March 2016. His talk is entitled “Co-Development: Open and Agile Game Development”, which contains some elements of his Intel Buzz presentation, but elaborates in other areas:

Traditional game development consists of the developer working behind closed doors on their vision. Periodically, and in very controlled circumstances, the customers can see the work in progress but that is mostly elaborate trailers, often not even showing actual game play. Most importantly the customers cannot give feedback while the game is still being developed.

Co-development by being Open and Agile completely changes that paradigm. Customers see the game at all stages and begin playing it as soon as it is possible, providing feedback that can change the game for the better. This method requires full transparency and a very regular cadence of content delivery.

A Moment in SXSW History

It’s good to see that Portalarian/Originites are still bookending SXSW Interactive as speakers/presenters. Starr is covering the 2016 bookend while Richard Garriott and Dallas Snell covered the beginning bookend as speakers at the inaugural, 1994 SXSW Film & Interactive:

Pianist Bernie Katzman Joins Markee Dragon Playing Shroud of the Avatar LIVE

[From a Release 22 Events Forum Post]

Professional Pianist, Singer and Composer Bernie Katzman aka Piano Improman will play the music live for Markee Dragon for a special show of Shroud of the Avatar. Bernie will be playing keyboard while Markee adventures through these new lands. Bernie has played at prestigious locations such as the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. Now for the first time he’ll be playing for a video game.

When: Saturday October 24th 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific, 18:00 UTC
Where: Simulcast to the following channels
Markee Dragon’s Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/markeedragon
Piano Improman’s Twitch (Bernie Katzman): http://www.twitch.tv/pianoimproman
Markee Dragon’s YouTube https://gaming.youtube.com/markeedragon

They will have about 2 hours of adventuring in game with Bernie improvisationally playing all of the music. Followed by Q and A with both Bernie and Markee.

Bernie’s version of “Stones” with lyrics