It’s 2017!

Folks,

A belated Happy New Year to everybody! It was another great week at CSE, and I’m happy to announce that we’ll be having two series of tests this weekend for all of our Alpha and IT Backers. Let’s start this update off with our Top Tenish™ list:

Top Ten-ish

Two successful Impromptu tests to end the week: On Thursday, we invited our Alpha and IT folks to join 1020 Bots and run around in our Fall biome. Performance of the client/server were rock-solid, with the server exceeding our expectations. The test ran without incident for six+ hours before we shut it down at the end of the day. Today’s earlier building and destruction test also went very well. The only negative was that our chat server decided to be a bit ornery, but that doesn’t matter because we will be moving to Discord in the coming months.

Building combat up and running again: Rob revisited our old building code this week, dusted the cruft off, and verified we can still wreak havoc on structures. Player testing will aid in giving us a baseline measurement to compare against our upcoming performance improvements.

WIP Items: The first step towards making awesome crafting for Beta is to make sure our item tech is rock solid. This week we’ve started focusing on cleaning up weapon handedness and exposing more equipment slots on the players, giving players even more character customization options.

WIP Upgrade Windows Server from 2012 to 2016: Marc has continued to upgrade our server tech to significantly decrease our hard launch by 40 minutes, which also saves us money when running servers. This vastly increases iteration speed for all our server-related testing.

WIP Tool usage improvements: Bull has been hard at work setting up special tags in our editor. He’s adding a ‘trash’ tag to hide old data from the user. This will allow someone like Mike to cruise through the editor and make twinkly things at a faster pace.

WIP UI for guilds: JB has been working on the underlying framework to hit our guild MVP feature set. The next step is to build a first-pass UI to expose those features to players. We’re excited about the progress on this, and hope to test it in the next few weeks!

WIP Ability and stance change sound effects: dB is composing and hooking up Physician sound effects, which will help make this class stand out from the others. dB is also working on stance transition sounds,, giving players more feedback about which stance they, and their opponents, are in.

WIP Place of Power: We’ve completed our rough pass layout, taken notes, and moving into changes before we begin on final geo and materials. We’ve also completed a vfx concept pass and begun working on the vfx assets themselves.

WIP Deeper Darker forest: We’ve fleshed out a rough pass of our very large, walk-on-able trees to do some prelim look and feel testing with. Once we get the idea working we’ll begin on the smaller details of the biome.

Art – Armor: Completed modeling and rigging of the Fall court heavy TDD armor for the female TDD, as well as the male and female Luchorpan.

Art – Armor: Updated the heavy Arthurian armor for our female, using far less polys with no visual degradation.

WIP Animation: Slashing, piercing, crushing, offensive and defensive, mid target, combat animations for polearms. As well as, slashing and piercing offensive and defensive, mid target, great sword animations.

WIP Crafting System: The crafting system continues to be rounded into shape for Beta 1. The focus this week was on the alloy making system and it is looking good for inclusion in the opening of Beta 1, with a bit more depth than was originally anticipated.

A perfectly fine way to start off the new year. But, it gets even better! This weekend we will be running two tests. The first test will be an Alpha/IT Building Construction and Destruction test with abilities enabled, on Wyrmling Prep. The second test will be a series of two, three-hour, Big Bot Battle tests on Wyrmling, Saturday and Sunday afternoon, Eastern Time. Those will also be open to our Alpha & IT Backers. I’ll be sending out a testing invitation shortly after this email. We hope our Alpha and IT Backers will join us over this weekend. If you haven’t seen 1020 Backers and Bots running around in a small area, it’s worth the price of admission. 🙂

For today’s art update, let’s start with some set poses from our animation files. These weapons are to scale, and you’ll be able to see the animations that they are captured from at the opening of Beta 1 if not before.

Next up, a concept piece on our updated Place of Power with added VFX. This is, of course, just one of the many places of power that will be scattered around the world.

Now, here’s what it looks like in the game as of today!

Pretty good right? Huge, imposing, impressive, most impressive,right?

Okay, yeah, I was only joking. Needless to say, this is not what it will look like in the game. 🙂 Here’s a link to Ben and Tyler discussing the real Place of Power layout for Beta 1 (https://www.twitch.tv/ citystategames/v/112367234). Have to start off the new year with some humor, especially considering how bad the end of 2016 was for so many people in the US and around the world (Carrie Fisher and her mom, Debbie Reynolds and way too many other people, famous or not) and 2017 isn’t off to a better start.

Let’s end with an in-game screenshot of a couple of Luchorpans, wearing their best Fall Court armor. That, unlike the previous image, is really coming together nicely, even if the mask-less Luchorpan has those “crazy eyes” but, OTOH, note the results of our building destruction in the rear. Maybe that’s why that Luchorpan looked a bit nuts.

The end of the week also saw us get together with a number of Backers who came to Magfest and a quick trip to the studio. We hung out, ate some mediocre food at a faux Irish pub (the beer was good though) and the company was worth it. And, as you saw on the stream (https://www.twitch.tv/ citystategames/v/112601377), the wonderful folks at Clan Sverker sent us a fantastic gift to start off 2017, ten drinking horns. When we get them mounted, we’ll post a photo of it!

That’s it for today’s update. I will see many of you in the game over this weekend. If things go well with either the Bot or Building testing, Beta 1 Backers you will be joining us next week for even more testing.

As always, we thank you for your patience and support!

-Mark