Hello Everyone
As always, a huge thank you to our amazing backers and supporters. The Kickstarter being a success is a huge win for the future of Renown. A big shout out to our moderators here on discord for their awesome help likewise.
So we’ve got a bit of a more wordy update for you. Given it's been a little bit, we figured it best to go into detail about what the team has been up to.
Kickstarter Send out waves – Xsolla store, and the future of our Crowdfund.
The first thing I wanted to clear up is how we’re currently handling Testing Key send outs for our Kickstarter and our PlayRenown store.
Due to how Kickstarter works, we need to “manually” send out the keys. This means that we take the data, extract anyone already sent a key, format that and send it off to Xsolla to distribute.
Learning from our previous Indiegogo, there isn’t really a way to directly automate this process from Kickstarter/Indiegogo. This also means we’re required to send Kickstarter keys in waves due to the volume of support we’re receiving. Currently Kickstarter waves are sent Wednesday at 9:00 AM CEST - 12:00 AM PDT - 6:00 PM AEDT.
The alternative we came up with is to use https://playrenown.com/ if you’d like to support our work. It has a much more limited range of tiers but has many more payment options including PayPal and others, alongside the keys being sent automatically on Backing.
As was promised to our original backers, the “legacy” skins will be unavailable for purchase and thus exclusive at the end of the month. We really appreciate the community's understanding in letting us bring those back for a short run. It directly helped with the success of this Kickstarter, and thus the future of our work.
We’ll likely do a fairly full swap over to the Xsolla storefront in the near future as well, so all backers are directly getting keys sent instead of waiting for a week.
Mental Health Break/Working Holiday
One thing I just wanted to raise with the community so anyone new doesn’t think we’re lazy buggers slacking off, is that we’re completely exhausted after this campaign. Preparation started in March, and we’ve been going full tilt since then.
Chatting about it as a team last week, the solution is a quick Mental Health Break/Working Holiday. Basically for the next two weeks, our work might be a bit slower and more random/fun (Mental Health part) but we’ll still be around doing tickets, chatting with the community and generally keeping on (Working Holiday part).
The downside of this, and the reason I bring it up, is things might be a bit slower for the next two weeks. We really appreciate the understanding of this community, and a quick rest will do wonders for future progress.
Onto some much more relevant updates, Mr. Z has been kind enough to do a big explanation of his recent work;
Update from Mr. Z
Mr. Z speaking here, today I’ll be going over some of the more technical aspects of our recent demo and how things have held up (or not!).
This current demo did surprise me quite a bit in how well it held up under stress. We had the help of modern server hardware on some of our servers and some very clutch optimizations.
We were able to achieve a player count of about 70-80 with stability for a much longer period of time than before. We even had working voice chat this time, the last demo the voice chat was causing massive server instability and had to be disabled.
Of course it wasn’t all good news, after about twenty thousand buildings were placed on the map, we started running into fairly serious performance issues. Fixing this is going to be the focus going forwards in the optimization department and once it's done I believe we can have a stable full week wipe with at least 64 player servers.
We may also need to enforce more sensible building limits as people built so large this time around that one extremely large clan base was costing up to 11% of the building performance on the server.
Due to the popularity of this demo we ran into another issue, Cheaters and griefers… Going forwards a lot of work is going to be done with Anti Cheat and Moderation measures. There's a lot of things cheaters can mess with currently and while not totally devastating, the fact there was no anti-cheat at all in the demo meant they could do it with impunity.
We’re glad to see the game got so much activity that this has finally become a high priority issue to deal with. Despite being a bad thing to have cheaters, it's a very good sign that we’re making good progress towards getting the game ready for early access.
Another thing that went quite well for us in this demo is the map expansion that KZ worked on, which gave players enough space to build out their bases this time. More of the map is spread out, perhaps too much right now for our current supported player counts, but once the game is stable at 100 players it should be an ideal size.
The additional POIs on the map added way more variety to the gameplay experience. It also made it so that smaller groups and solos could stick to the borders of the map and be relatively unmolested by larger clans who prefer to stick near the center, which has the higher concentration of loot and PvP encounters. One very hopeful thing to note is that the map expansion didn’t actually reduce performance by a perceptible amount, yet the map size is significantly bigger now.
In the next dev blog I’ll be discussing some game design (rather than technical) focused topics about how the demo went and what we’ll be making significant changes to. There's a lot to talk about between the combat and survival mechanics so it may need to be a two parter dev blog for next time…
KZ’s Progress Update
Kz has also been hard at work doing some majorly large arts tasks. So far hes:
Designing and optimizing more Interesting/bigger points of interest also planned to make current Point of interest more interesting alongside more interesting Npcs to go with
Here’s a list of what he has planned:
* Not currently on the map
· Winterhold
· Winterhold Village
· Safezone
· Fishing town
· Stronghold
· Coastal Keep
· Northwest Village
· Bandit camp
· *Trader camp
· *Rus camp
· *Mongol Camp
· *Viking Village
· *Port Village
· *Port Centre
· *Port docks
· *Port Keep
· Island Castle
· *Farm
· Tavern
· *Sewers
· *Mine caves with crumbled entrances
Npcs planned:
· Winterhold peasants
· Winterhold guards/archers
· Winterhold swordsmen
· Winterhold Knights
· Winterhold lord
· Dewsbury Guards
· Dewsbury Merchants
· Yarlford Fishermen
· Elkmire Soldiers
· Calchester Knights
· Calchester lord
· Caershire Villagers
· Thirsty Swan barkeep
· Thirsty Swan Drunkard
· Selasund Peasants
· Selasund Vikings
· Dannamore Nobles
· Dannamore Cooks
· Dannamore Knights
· Dannamore Lord
· Brimdurn Peasants
· Brimdurn Monks
· Brimdurn Champion
· Brimdurn Guards
· Brimdurn Knights
· Brimdurn Lord
· Brimdurn Sailors
· Woodland bandits
· Woodland Travellers
· Steppe Travellers
· Travelling merchants
· Street Riff Raff
He has also been working on cleaning up the armour system and killing as many Clipping issues as possible.
so far he has fixed:
· broken chainmail texture on Jupon
· Jupon under leathervest
· Jupon over Pauldrons
· Jupon over breastplate
· Jupon under certain breastplate
· all coifs sit correctly over armour now
· fixed Peasant vest under jupon
· fixed Coif clipping issues
· fixed emblems not working on jupons
· Fixed emblems not working on tabards
· Fixed hosen clipping through boots
· fixed character skin clipping on some characters skins
· fixed archer helmet clipping with arming cap
· fixed gambeson clipping with breastplate
· fixed Womens hosen clipping with shirt
· Fixed monk outfit bulging out
· fixed mail hauberk clipping through leather vest
· fixed overthrow rigging issue
· fixed gambeson broken under peasant vest
· fixed tunic clipping through leather gauntlets skin
· fixed broken tunic under peasant’s vest
· fixed broken women’s tunic
· Fixed peasant shirt clipping through leather vest
Once we have polished most of the clipping issues off he will look into getting all the backer skins up to scratch and ready for EA
We will show these off in game via sneak peaks. He also has plans for optimization work making sure nothing is detrimental to fps.
Of course, there’s also implementing all the points of interest and increasing map polish.
Again thank you so much for the awesome support folks. We’ll be putting out another dev blog in a couple of weeks with our overarching plan for the coming months.