Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #156

by GolemDragon · December 19, 2015

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

Happy Holidays!
Play Release 25 Now!
The FireLotus Release 25 Party – Christmas Edition!
R25 Patch Notes
Q1-2016 Schedule Update
SotA’s Dye System

Happy Holidays!

The entire Shroud of the Avatar Development team wish you the Happiest of Holidays!

We were especially diligent to make sure Release 25 launched successfully in time for all of you to enjoy it during your holidays. Fireworks were activated in this Release, and we have to admit, they were more fun than we expected. Darkstarr and Chaox were providing the fireworks show during the Traditional FireLotus Release Party, as shown in the image above!

We are honored to have such an amazing community of backers, and will never be able to thank you enough for all you do! For your enjoyment this holiday season, we are gifting all our current backers, plus any new backers between now and January 11, 2016 (see below for the significance of this date), with the 45-piece Rocket Fireworks Assortment. You will find it in your inventory when next you log into the game. We hope you have as much fun with them as we did today!

[NOTE: Portalarium offices are closed from December 21 thru December 25 ]

~Dallas

Play Release 25 Now!

Release 25 successfully launched yesterday, December 17, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and checking out the new changes! Lots of new content to explore, including:

New Agriculture System
Craftable Dyes
New scenes including Hilt Fortress, South Varisalla Foothills, North Naryad Pinelands, etc.
Lots of Winter Holiday content, including fireworks
More combat and skills balancing
Guild Warfare
New Player Owned Towns
…and more!

Check out the Release 25 Instructions update for detailed information about all the newcontent.

Release 25 Player Instructions

Release 25 Known Issues

Avatars Radio Presents: The FireLotus Release 25 Party – Christmas Edition!

This month’s traditional FireLotus Release Party was held in Silverhold, a beautiful snowy mountain town! This month’s party was especially colorful thanks to the fireworks displays! Avatar’s Radio was there as well to help with the event as always.. Here are a few screenshots:

R25 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.

December 18, 2015

Build Number 363, 4:45 PM

Fixes:

Hoe that comes with immortality fruit seed now gets full durability on delivery
Fixed walls with no colliders in Nighshade Pass
Filled in a rubble hole in Hilt Fortress to prevent getting stuck
Verdantis Shardfall: Removed boat teleporter to Port Mirren.
Fixed water not showing until you move camera issue
Fixed Clockwork Raven reward to correct clockwork raven (silver)
Minor typo fix – Braemar/Jarred
2015 Holiday Gift: Fireworks
Fixed wolf attack that were double spamming attacks occasionally
Hilt Fortress lava pools now cause damage
North Naryad Pinelands: Moved a harvestable pine tree that was in a house to the ground.
Troll Attack fixes: set attacks so they will not be interrupted and fixed timing on rock throw
Added messaging for players when their guild enters a guild war

Known Issues:

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.
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…]

Q1-2016 Schedule Update

[A forum post by Starr Long]

Greetings Avatars,

As we have stated previously, our goal is to once-per-quarter post an updated schedule for our monthly releases. Even though these goals will likely change somewhat as we react to feedback, we feel it is important to provide you an updated roadmap periodically.

Our goal continues to be to deliver our backers content each and every month so that we can get feedback and use it to iterate improvements. This continues to benefit the game, with sweeping changes like the change over to use-based advancement. Meeting that monthly goal is our highest priority, but we require flexibility in our deliverables in order to meet that goal. As you have seen in previous releases, sometimes we push things out, but we also often pull new things in.

The focus of the first quarter of 2016 is to get us as close to Alpha/Feature complete as possible as soon as we can. However we are balancing that Alpha goal with polish, performance, and service hardening to prepare for our final wipe as soon as mid-summer. If we have to make a choice at any point we will favor getting to final wipe over hitting Feature complete. That is why you will not see quite as much content listed as last quarter, despite our increased staff. We feel that it is better to get the game into a more polished, playable, and secure state sooner than it is to check off every single feature.

As always, all dates, durations, and deliverables are subject to change as we adjust our designs based on direct feedback from you, our backers.

RELEASE 26, January 28, 2016

Full Wipe: Once again we are going to make some fundamental changes to item and quest architecture that require us to do a full wipe for Release 26. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please note that if you have been waiting to melt down add-ons, this is your chance to do so as long as you do NOT log into the game once R26 goes live (which automatically claims the items and prevents melt down).

Spells & Skills: We will continue to make a pass through the skill trees and add new skills, balance existing skills, and replace less useful skills.

Story: More polish passes will be made on existing maps for balance and story support. We will also continue to expand the story with new scenes, including the towns of Resolute and Aerie.

Player Homes and Player Owned Towns: We will add another town template along with some more tools to customize your town. We will also begin delivery of add-on store buildings.

Crafting: Agriculture will expand to include Public Gardens and foods will now have longer term effects (as well as more recipes). We will also create more armor and weapon recipes, including more critical success effects.

Creatures: The Chaos Daemon will lay waste to players with his Chaos Magic powers.

Metrics and Logging: We will greatly expand the data we record to better inform optimizations, balance issues, and necessary economic tweaks.

Performance: Major efforts will be done to optimize performance. This will include frame rate improvements, load time improvements, and memory footprint improvements.

Sound Effects: A thorough pass will begin through the starting scenes (Isle of Storms, etc.) to increase overall quality of the environmental sounds.

RELEASE 27, February 25, 2016:

Story: More polish passes will be made on existing maps for balance and story support. We will also continue to expand the story with new scenes, including the town of Xenos and the entrance to the dungeon of Artifice. Scenes in the Vale will start to get polish passes to bring them up to current dynamic spawning standards.

Player Owned Towns: We will add another town template and towns will begin to receive blessings based on buildings placed and population density. Music chosen in the PoT submission form will begin to be heard.

Roving Encounters: Roving encounters (patrolling creatures) will now appear on the overworld map and can be engaged (pulling you into a scene) or avoided if you wish to sneak past.

Crafting: The crafting system will expand with recipes for alcohol and teleportation. Additionally certain recipes can now be taught to other players. More resources will begin appearing in the game as well.

Job System: Public and player vendors will now take Job Orders. These jobs describe what players wish to purchase and how much they will pay for them.

Interactive Use Logging: Players will be able to view a log that tracks which players interacted with an interactive object (doors, containers, etc.) on a player’s lot or Player Owned Town location.

Combat: Balance passes will be made across most parts of combat including PVP.

Performance and Polish: Major efforts will be done to optimize performance and polish gameplay. We will also increase the breadth of metrics and logging.

RELEASE 28, March 31, 2016

Story: More polish passes will be made on existing maps for balance and story support. We will also continue to expand the story with new scenes, including the dungeon of Artifice and the Superstition Canyon control point.

Castle Defense Scenarios: Castle scenes will appear in the game along with siege weapons to attack and defend them.

Town Sieges: Towns will begin coming under siege from the eight Cabalists (also known as the Dark Lords). While towns are under siege players must fight, run, or sneak past the siege lines around the town.

Creatures: At least one Cabalist will begin wreaking havoc on besieged towns. Players using Moon magic will now be able to summon Wisps to support them.

Skills: The ability to forget a skill will now be available from trainers. Polish and balance passes will be made across all skills and spells.

Crafting: Polish and balance passes will be made on resources, recipes, and creature loot.

Single Player Offline: While Single Player Offline mode has been working internally since the start of the project, the work of making this available to players will begin. Additionally, features and content specific to Single Player Offline Mode will move into full production.

Service Hardening: We will begin a series of passes through the client, authentication, and server to harden the service for security and customer service. Special attention will be paid to the Patcher.

We continue to be incredibly thankful for the support we receive from this amazing community. While the funding you provide makes all of this possible, it pales in comparison with the faith you have in us, the feedback you provide us, and the content you are making for everyone to enjoy. We are humbly grateful, and we cannot wait to see you again in New Britannia!

Before I go, I wanted to include an excerpt from my original post about our Early Release Schedule that is important to set the framework for our ongoing schedule:

As a crowd funded and crowd sourced project, we feel it is incredibly important that we provide our backers with information and access well before game studios would normally do so in a traditional development model. Traditionally, the players are given information and access only after the development team has already decided exactly how things will be done, and at times, even after it has already been implemented. By the time the public normally has access to the product, there is usually no time to meaningfully react to the public feedback.

Shroud of the Avatar is different than the traditional model, as we intend to offer our backers extremely early access to information and even the game itself. With that said, we also want to be very careful that we only provide access to portions of the game when they are ready for a wider range of feedback. If we can play it internally and we know it is not ready, then there is nothing to be gained by having a wider audience come to the same conclusion. In fact, it could be quite damaging to do so.

Our strategy over the next few months is to provide you with focused and iterative releases of content. Your feedback during these releases will be critical to making the final product the best it can be, and we appreciate that you are all so willing to devote your time to helping us. With each release, we will have specific tests we will ask you all to make. As we get closer, we will send instructions on how to download, install, report bugs, etc. After each release we will review the results and reevaluate the plan including the duration of availability of each release. Please note that game data will be wiped periodically during early access.

It is important to note that all dates, durations, and deliverables are subject to change.

NOTE: Payment plans have been extended to June 2016

Sincerely,
Starr Long
Executive Producer
Shroud of the Avatar

SotA’s Dye System

[A Dev+ forum post by Geoff “Qball” Mellon]

Hey all,

The ideas behind being able to change the colors of some things without having to create two textures is something we started almost two years ago. When we started this originally the programmer (oneandonly) and I figured how best to set up a framework for us to build upon later. We now use some parts of this system in many places. For instance we use this system to control certain animals colors, and even use part of this for Avatar skin tones. Letting the players dye clothing is a whole different beast, and while we did original set up the structure back then we knew we’d want to come back to it.

When we recently added in several dyable capes to the game, it cause some bugs to pop up. Last release, I had the chance to dig down into the problem. The problem lead me to realize first we needed to have a more complete set of colors for the dyes. So that’s what I focused on.

Dyes use the RGB channels in all the textures. Those channels each act like an mask or stencil for anything in it. So anything in say the red channel would be replaced by whatever color we tell it to.

In the pictures below show how each channel looks and how the actual albedo texture looks.

ALBEDO

This is the whole map how it would look if you opened it….yuck. Don’t let it fool you, it’s just a map to tell the computer where to add what color….

RED CHANNEL

Anything in this channel that is white is full RED. This is the “Primary Color”.

GREEN CHANNEL

Anything in this channel that is white is full GREEN. This is the “Secondary Color”.

BLUE CHANNEL

Anything in this channel that is white is full BLUE. This is the “Tertiary Color”. This color for cloth is locked for metal and not changeable.

SPECULAR CHANNEL

There is more to the way the cloth looks than just color, we also have to define how reflective it is. To do that we use a second set of 3 channels called the “specular channels”. The specular defines how sharp/strong the highlight is and how reflective the material is. Basically, this one is frozen for cloth.

REPLACEMENT MAP

We have one final map that allows us to exclude the whole color dying system. Anything in this channel that is Black is ignored by the color changing. For cloth we use it for alternate materials we may want to keep consistent like leather straps or insignias for example.

So now that the colors are set up all I have to do is tell the game which color are Primary, Secondary and Tertiary…. and make every combo of it. In this menu….

COLOR SETUPS

Now that that is all settled we decided upon black/white and 9 base colors. Then we made lighter/darker versions of each and gave us a grand total of 32 unique colors. That would mean taking into account colors in both primary and secondary for customization, that would make 1024 possible combinations!

Here are all 32 colors put into the primary channel (white on the secondary):

Thanks again for your support, back to the demon……

Qball