Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #152

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Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Play Release 24 Now!
  • Celebrate 2 Years of Releases at FireLotus Release 24 Party!
  • R24 Patch Notes
  • The Making of Brittany Graveyard
  • Going Public With SotA Daily Standup Notes

Play Release 24 Now!

[A scene from the FireLotus Release 24 Party!]

Release 24 successfully launched yesterday, November 19, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and checking out the new changes! Lots of new content to explore, including:

  • New scenes including Nightshade Pass, Mariah Overlook, Britanny Outlander Graveyard, and Etceter
  • Lots of Winter Holiday content
  • Localization started
  • More types of weather coming online
  • More combat balancing and new skills
  • Guild Chapter Houses
  • Over 15 new Player Owned Towns
  • …and more!

Check out the Release 24 Instructions update for detailed information about all the new R24 content.

The Grand Tour Quest

You will be able to get the Pilgrim Bonnet by completing the Release 24 Grand Tour Quest. This reward can only be unlocked during Release 24 (did someone say rares?), so be sure to log in soon and talk to all the Tour Guides!

Release 24 Player Instructions

Release 24 Known Issues

Avatars Radio Presents: The FireLotus Release 24 Party – Celebrating Two Years of SotA Releases!

Release 24 is a major milestone for SotA, marking two years of monthly Releases! This month’s traditional FireLotus Release Party was held in the Garden in the center of Hometown, an island town just south of Solace Bridge in the southeast quadrant of Novia! Special thanks to all the players that have beautifully decorated Hometown, to Avatars Radio for producing these Release Parties, Lord Blake Blackstone for hosting the party, and to Lady FireLotus for her most excellent DJing!

R24 Patch Notes

Thanks to all our community members that jumped right into this Release and started reporting bugs. We’ve already fixed quite a few of them and pushed out several patches. Click here for the most up-to-date Patch Notes.

November 20, 2015  

Build Number 354 10:00 PM CST: 

Fixes:

  • Player Owned Towns: Fixed naming, connection, and ownership issues that were blocking access to almost all PoTs in the game
  • Brittany Graveyard now has proper exits to Novia

Known Issues:

  • Mystery boxes are not always working properly
  • There are two versions of Etceter in the game. If you claim property there you will have to zone to your home to get to the proper version.
  • Aether Amplifiers do not work on Mac nor Linux clients
  • Players are unable to interact with triggers with weapons
  • We do not yet officially support Windows 10. If you have upgraded to Windows 10 you may experience instability
  • Lighting and fog levels are still being tuned to work with the new weather system, expect anomalies
  • Weather has not been propagated to all scenes yet so there may be mismatches
  • Some skills have not been fully adjusted to work properly with the new use based system
  • Sound effects are not always playing properly
  • Death and Resurrection do not work properly in the team arena
  • Water lots in Dynamic Player Owned Towns can currently only be placed along shorelines, not on docks
  • If you upgrade from a property owning pledge between data wipes you will receive extra lot deeds.
  • Time is not in synchronized between scenes that have the new sky vs. the old sky
  • If your video drivers are out of date characters will appear as if they are covered in triangles.
  • Some cities are experiencing performance spikes
  • Many pledge, add on, and stretch goal items have not yet been built and/or do not yet have tech support.
  • The update to Unity 5 caused a host of general texture and lighting related issues, and not all of these have been resolved.
  • Distant tree billboards may have a white outline that is especially noticeable at night, and some trees may shimmer with white at night.
  • Skin tone will sometimes not match properly on different parts of the body
  • ALT key can no longer be bound. This was necessary to re-enable quick self cast with ALT
  • Unity 5 Engine Bug: Objects in the foreground sort incorrectly against objects in the distance like trees and the horizon

[Complete Patch Notes…]

The Making of Brittany Graveyard

SotA_Brittany_Graveyard1

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Esteben “SorcerousSteve” Zaldivar]

Brittany Outlander Graveyard

“The Avatars now flooding the land are not the first Outlanders who have visited Novia. An earlier wave of Outlanders appeared in Novia, but did not share the immortality of the current visitors. When they eventually met their demise, they were interred in this massive graveyard on the outskirts of Brittany where most had made their homes. Most Outlanders were buried in this separate graveyard from other Novians due to the inherent distrust most Novians harbor towards Outlanders.”

In a future release, these gravestones will contain the names that Ancestor and above backers choose to represent their “ancestors”, but for now these gravestones are blank.

Inspiration for the Brittany Graveyard was heavily drawn upon from the Arlington National Cemetery:

SotA_Brittany_Graveyard2

Chatting with Art Lead, Michael Hutchison, we came to the idea that we wanted this to be a place to honor those who have fallen.

SotA_Brittany_Graveyard3

Placing 5000 tombstones was no quick task…well at first. Through the use of a tool by Tech Director Chris Spears, we were able to speed up the process and snap the tombs to terrain level.

SotA_Brittany_Graveyard4

The winding paths through perfectly aligned tombstones and little gardens nestled between tall oaks provide a serene experience.

SotA_Brittany_Graveyard5

SotA_Brittany_Graveyard6

Esteben Zaldivar
Level Designer

[NOTE: If you want your name permanently recorded on a tombstone in the Britanny Graveyard, then make sure you have pledged at the Ancestor pledge tier or higher before that reward expires on January 4, 2016]

 

Going Public With SotA Daily Standup Notes

As many of you know from what Richard, Dallas, and Chris have said from the beginning, that they want to strive to be as transparent as possible to our backers through weekly updates, monthly releases, and quarterly schedule updates. One of the things they have been doing has been to also post their Daily Standup notes to the Founder section of the forums. That read only forums section was created to satisfy the Founder pledge reward of “Developer Blog Access” which promised: “You will be privy to the game development progress before it is live! As concepts are created, screenshots are taken, and news is delivered for the game, they will be posted to a private Developer’s Blog page to which you will have access.” Among other content, this was the place we put our Daily Standup Notes. This unfortunately placed them behind a $65 paywall (a $20 increase from the base pledge). On top of that, because this section was Read Only, the only way backers could discuss the standup notes was to be Dev+ which put conversations about standups behind a $550 paywall.

After some very pointed feedback from our backers, and some serious soul searching, the dev team has decided that the standup notes should be public information and not behind any paywalls. Additionally, discussion about them should be available to all those with forum access ($5 and above). To that end, effective immediately, they are eliminating the Founder section of the forum and removing the “Developer Blog Access” reward from Founders pledge. All content in the Founder section will now be relocated to the “Shroud of the Avatar Announcements and Dev Posts” Forum (formerly “Community Announcements”) and our Daily Standup Notes will be posted there as a Read Only thread (to make it easier to go back and read each day if you have been away for a bit).

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