Greetings Friends! Sorry for the delay in a post from me this month, I won’t go into the details so we can move right into the news.  With two releases and some other news, I hope you find today’s post informative.

• Releases 72
• Release 3
• Dec 13th Livestream

Releases 72

November 21st was the launch of release 72 for Shroud of the Avatar. There were a few updates of note that stood out for me. They are the following:

• Phase 1 integration of Lua. For those of you who have made mods for games before, there is a chance you have used Lua. For those who don’t know, Lua is a rather simple scripting language that can be so useful not only in game development but in mods as well. Elder Scrolls Online and World of Warcraft both support Lua mods, which has been a boon in the growth of the mod making community for those games.  It is used by players in games as well, such as with ComputerCraft – one popular mod for the game, Minecraft.
• A separate forum section was created for players interested in making use of the SotA Lua API for add-ons. Obviously such mods for SotA are not going to be allowed to change game functions mechanically.
• Unicorn Stews – Unicorns can now be harvested for light or dark unicorn meat depending on the unicorn type.  This sounds like a wonderful addition. Certainly not the first time players can slaughter Unicorns for useful materials.

Release 73

December 12th was the launch of Release 73 for Shroud of the Avatar. As always, I will give you the notable updates from the notes. We

have the following updates of note:

• Lua integration polish
• Soltown and Tartarus scene polish
• Player GM tools (phase 1)

With the player GM tools, let’s take a look at the details in the Release 73 instructions in more depth.  Obviously the first thing to note is this is a “Phase 1” edition. Things will inevitably change. The notes mentioned that Players will need to apply for a “VIP Flag” of which they must message Atos/Chris Spears in the forums or on Discord to start the approval process.  For each even the player wants to run they will get a single no trade potion that will last for only 4 hours. The commands used by the player at this point are all logged to a channel which will be supposedly monitored by the devs.

The commands/powers the player hosting the event can use are:

• gmghost: Become invisible!
• slew: “Free camera” mode similar to what dungeon owners and POT owners currently have, but with the bonus of teleporting to the location of your camera upon exiting the mode.
• teleport to player: Quickly move to another player’s location.
• summon player: Instantly move another player to your location.
• set weather over ride: Set the weather for all players in the scene to a new value. Options are:
  • Clear
  • LightClouds
  • HeavyClouds
  • LightPrecipitation
  • HeavyPrecipitation
  • Storm
  • Foggy
  • Custom1
  • Custom2
• summon monster: Summon a monster from a preset list (NOTE: there is no loot nor experience points gained from killing these monsters to prevent exploits). To use simply type /summonmonster # monsterName where # is the number you wish to summon. For example, “/summonmonster 3 bear1” will summon 3 of the lowest tier bears. Currently available summons include the following and will expand over time:
  • Spider1-5
  • KoboldArcher1-5
  • KoboldMage1-5
  • KoboldWarrior1-5
  • Dragon1-5
  • Bear1-5
  • Llama1
• timescale: Changes the time scale in the entire scene. Legal values are 0.25 – 4
• resurrect: This give player GMs the ability to resurrect players in their scene. The valid options are:
  • me – resurrects the player GM
  • selected – resurrects the player the GM has targeted
  • all – resurrects all players and creatures in the scene

Initial questions that come up are the following: Could the teleport and summon ones be used to grief other players? What if the players teleport to a normal game scene and get experience points and loot, instead of summoning monsters that don’t give experience or loot? Can some of these powers be used to cause problems for players not part of your event if they happen to be in the same scene?

These lead to the obvious question, will these powers and events be limited to scenes that will NOT influence the gameplay experience of other players NOT participating in the event?

Dec 13th Livestream

On December 13th, the SotA Devs did a live stream. Below is the vid for that stream from Youtube. The Episode 2 updated map in their announcement post looks the same as before when I looked at it. I would assume not much has changed on this front.  The promise with the Kickstarter was that the map of the world would greatly increase the size of the world each episode. Richard even confirmed that to Forbes in an article where the reporter stated Richard said “each release will expand around the world’s original core, essentially tripling its size. The second installment will be twice the size of the first; the third twice the size of the second, and so on and so forth.” Certainly the few islands we see for Episode 2 do not fullfill any promises, however since Portalarium no longer owns the game. Catnip Games has no obligation to these promises, same goes with the print books backers were promised.