KickStarter Shroud of the Avatar - Lord British's Not-Ultima Online 2

[circ]

Now waiting for Unity to break a simple program written in Basic.

 

[Infinitron]

When is the projected release date? Give or take a year.

October.

Or not: http://ultimacodex.com/2014/04/shro...ons-october-release-date-may-be-not-feasible/

…we feel Release 5 was a resounding success. However we feel like the overall quality and polish of the game has decreased in many areas. Additionally we feel like we need to apply a more concerted effort on upgrading the visuals and user interface of the game. For those reasons we are in the process of rethinking our current release schedule and in particular we are going to refocus Release 6 on more polish and less content. We feel that about once per quarter we should have one of these polish releases to keep the quality of the game up to ours, and your, standards.

At this point many of you might be saying “Several systems have been pushed for more than one release now. How are all these changes affecting the stated goal of an October release?” Well thank you for the tough question. I have a mantra about ship dates: “No one remembers when you shipped but they always remember how you shipped.” With that in mind you should rest assured that we will launch when you tell us the product is ready. That might mean October is not feasible, but let’s focus on making the right product, not the when product.

 

[Infinitron]

CRISIS AVERTED: http://ultimacodex.com/2014/05/shro...ap-will-be-removed-3d-overland-map-to-return/

Shroud of the Avatar: Cloth Overland Map Will Be Removed; 3D Overland Map to Return



I was a bit surprised to see this post from Starr Long on the Shroud of the Avatar forumsyesterday. As some of you are probably aware, the overland map that was shown off in Release 4 and Release 5 was…not popular with everyone. It was, at the very least, different:

​

It’s a difference that…didn’t appeal to everyone, a fact that Long acknowledges:

As many of you may have noticed, our current version of the map looks different than the videos of prototypes we showed off during the earlier stages of our project. It was also the first time any of you got to interact with it, and the functionality of it was less than what was in the videos of prototypes you had seen.

The combination of art style change and lack of some expected functionality caused some concern, which is completely understandable. A few vocal community members even called for a class action lawsuit against us.

Because Internet, I suppose. Suffice it to say that while the cloth map style did have its defenders, and while some — myself included — expressed no particular fondness or dislike for either the cloth or the 3D style, the sudden nature of the stylistic change coupled with the dramatic reduction in functionality went over poorly with many, some of whom made a royal ruckus about it.

And of course, the question of why the change was made was raised. Long attempts to address this as well:

Our first attempt at the map was about trying to represent a very zoomed out view of the world with characters scaled up to gigantic size in a nod to the original Ultimas’ dual scale world. We were also attempting to automatically generate the terrain from data. We ran into several big issues.

The first was that the automatically generated terrain just did not look very good and we literally spent a couple of months trying to make it look better. It was not very flexible and the river and road pathways felt very “canned” and constrained, not natural at all. You can’t tell because of the lower resolution of the videos, but it really did not meet the standards we have for our visuals, especially the water. The next issue we ran into was scaling assets like trees, characters, etc. Simply scaling the assets meant for full scenes ended up looking really bad when they were shrunk down, and in most cases, did not work in that perspective.

Another issue we ran into was that the creature AI and pathfinding necessary to make the encounters work had to be completely different than how those systems worked in the main game. This made us very nervous about how much time it was going to take to make two versions of two major systems, so we started considering delaying some of those features until post Episode 1, which we mentioned in a video hangout.

It is also worth noting that the original programmer who worked on the map left soon after the Kickstarter campaign (it was a friendly departure!), and the map work fell on Chris, who’s plate was already quite full as the Tech Director! We got OneandOnly to jump in and work with Stephen Daniele to provide the version you have been playing with. The beauty of this style was that Stephen could create the map assets relatively quickly compared to the 3D assets we had been trying to use, so we are able to tweak and iterate fairly quickly. The team ended up falling in love with the style of the map, as it felt so much like the cloth map.

However, the cloth map is officially “no more”, as they say. Or nearly so:

The experiment with the cloth map solution solved a lot of problems that we ran into (described above) and we hoped it would be a change the community would embrace but that was not the case as we have seen.

We have heard your feedback and we are in the process of trying our best to recreate what was seen in our prototypes but to a higher visual quality. We will need to delay other features and content while we do this work so expect more schedule changes to R7 and beyond.

The implication I take away from this is that for Release 6, we will probably still be seeing the cloth map; I doubt that Portalarium can build a working, relatively non-buggy 3D overland map within the next three weeks. But for Release 7 and beyond…that’s over a month away…nearly two, really. It could happen.

The list of planned features, if nothing else, is pretty neat:

Here are our goals for the overworld map for Episode 1:

Zoomed out 3D version of the world
3D Avatar animating and walking around in the overworld
3D NPCs animating and moving around the overworld
Roving encounters that you can see moving around the overworld. If you intersect with them you are pulled into a scene.
Surprise encounters that pull you into a scene.
Indicators on map of world state including towns under siege, PVP encounters, etc.
Terrain Types determine movement speed
Party members visible on overworld (both moving around and indicators of which hex they have entered)
Obscurance of unexplored areas (i.e. fog of war or something like that)
It is worth noting that there are at least two activities on the overworld that we have never planned for nor do we intend to implement:

Resource harvesting
Combat
Post Episode 1 we would like to add things like vehicle/mounted travel.

Of course, this change in map style — and functionality — means that other features will have to be delayed somewhat, a point that Long makes above in fact. Indeed, I would expect Shroud of the Avatar to miss its planned October release date for sure, given this.

And while I’m happy to see the 3D overland map return, because it really did look neat in the demos, I’d be remiss if I didn’t express some concern about how this will impact the final shape of the game. Portalarium’s resources — human and financial — are far, far from infinite, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that some other planned game features may not be fully developed by the time the game needs to be shipped. Indeed, it’s possible that features will have to be cut from the final game. And my worry is that this change in overland map art style will come at the expense of things like NPC schedules or world interactivity, features that are complex and time-consuming to implement and test by their very nature.

Given the choice, I’d take a cloth overland map and fully scheduled NPCs over a 3D overland map and far more static NPCs.

​

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Tytus]

I want an option where after hitting my opponent with an axe, almost severing his shoulder from rest of the body, I can then masturbate and cum into his open wounds. I'm already killing him so there is no hyprocrisy there. Hell, the act should give me some points. Like introducing fame and infame system. I would urtinate, ejaculate, defecate and vomit into the orifices of my opponents. Do that enough times and the game would give me list of titles I could attach to the character like - Despoiler, Violator or some shit like that. And in return it would give me perks to unfair attacks, like backstabbing, kicking oponent in the crotch region, attacking the eyes with the thumb.

Yes this is what the game needs.

 

[Zep Zepo]

I want a "Two in the Pink one in the Stink" perk



Zep--

 

[Kane]

 

[Jaesun]

Congratulations, your name was drawn as part of our giveaways for our one-year celebration. Because of this, your account has been credited with a $45 pledge. (If you already had a pledge, it has been added to your existing pledge!)

Thank you for supporting Shroud of the Avatar!
-JT

Joseph Rustic Dragon Toschlog
Web Development / Community Relations
Portalarium, Inc.

 

[mindx2]

Has this thing gone beyond a real estate/ Barbie dress-up/ job simulator?

 

[Metro]

Looks about as exciting as Amalur.

 

[SuicideBunny]

heh, the druid house design is fucking lazy and lame on the inside...

 

[Infinitron]

raw posting old shit again: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...le-player-game-wat.80957/page-61#post-2938814

 

[bledcarrot]

Are they paying people for the scenes they use?

 

[Kane]

raw posting old shit again: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...le-player-game-wat.80957/page-61#post-2938814

Well, I am sorry that I don't know everything that happens on the Internet as opposed to some JEW that apparently is a personality created by the sentient AI that emerged from the NSA's server farms.

 

[Durwyn]

Are they planning to implement some gameplay finally ?

 

[Infinitron]

The Ultima Dragons react to SotA's E3 trailer:

 

[Kane]

sounds good.

@comments: autistic faggots all of them: the lack of story IS the story, you create the story while you play.

 

[groke]

@comments: narrativist faggots all of them: the lack of story IS the story, you create the story while you play.

ludist supremacy

 

[Infinitron]

The Ultima Dragons react to ELVES, PLAYABLE ELVES:

 

[Angthoron]

Boy am I glad I didn't back this one.

 

[Blaine]

A sandbox MMORPG with persistent land, a skill system, emergent gameplay, and player-driven crafting and economy sounds absolutely fantastic on paper, except that selling persistent plots of land and permanent titles of nobility to backers for cash months in advance pretty much fucks it all up.

Think what you will about Star Citizen's pledge revenue model, but a tiny minority of people having piles of non-persistent ships that are purchasable by anyone will have little or no effect on anything (unless you ask Grunker), especially as time wears on. Years down the road, Shroud of the Avatar whale backers will still be squatting in their manses with their unearned titles. Persistent land and rare titles are a very big deal in sandbox MMORPGs.

 

[Excidium]

Uh I thought this game was about player-ran servers

 

[Blaine]

Uh I thought this game was about player-ran servers

No, there's a slider of sorts between offline and online that determines how much interaction a player has with other players, but there will be no privately-hosted servers... unless I missed something.

Although if UO is any indication, there will be pirate servers at some point.

 

[buzz]

piles of non-persistent ships

Don't these ships have lifetime insurance? That essentially makes them persistent.

 

[m_s0]

Boy am I glad I didn't back this one.

I'm stunned so many people did. And that some of them seem to be surprised this is turning out this way.

Uh I thought this game was about player-ran servers

The game part of the pitch was always fuzzy (and, I'd argue, meaningless for devs and sheep players alike, albeit for different reasons), but the project in general was obviously about cashing in on the Ultima "brand", people's nostalgia for it and about ripping people off from day one of the campaign.

Garriott flipping through his old design docs in that one youtube video (and maybe that office tour vid as well) is pretty much the only good thing that came out of this entire project and you didn't even need to back it to see it.