Updates

Update of the Avatar #61 – 02/21/14: Play Release 3 Now, Backer Plaques, Piano, BotA, White Raven, Loom Shuttle, Stretch Goals Reached, Pantheon, and More!

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Play Release 3 Now!
  • Property Owner Backer Plaques
  • Benefactor Citizen Piano
  • Combat-Ready Skeletons!
  • Blade of the Avatar Novel: Chapter 10
  • White Raven Pet
  • Loom Shuttle of Prosperity
  • Stretch Goal Success: Lord British vs. Darkstarr
  • Last Day for the Pantheon Kickstarter Special Cross-Game Cloak
  • Upcoming Events
  • This Week In the News
  • Only 45 Days Remain to Purchase/Upgrade/Gift Founder Pledges

Come Play Release 3 Now!

SotA_Release3c

Release 3 successfully launched yesterday, February 20, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and exploring the new content!

In this release we’ve added multiplayer mode, allowing players to see each other and interact through an enhanced chat system, friend list, and emotes. In addition to the towns of Owl’s Head and Kingsport, there is a new village to explore, Braemar. There are numerous crafting enhancements as well as merchants where you can sell your crafted goods. Also included are several new songs created by the community via The Bards of Poets’ Circle. The much requested ability to reconfigure the game controls has been added, and player housing and decorating can be fully experienced in the single player online mode.

SotA community member, The Mad Hermit, created an awesome walkthru video, Guide To Pre Alpha R3, highlighting many of the new multiplayer features and game enhancements. It’s an absolute “must see”, so take a few minutes, crank the video quality up to HD, and let The Mad Hermit give you the grand tour of Multiplayer Release 3:

Read more…



Release 3 Instructions

SotA_Release3c

[A Public Forum post by Starr Long]

Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 3 access for all backers at First Responder / Adventurer level and above begins this Thursday February 20 at 10:30 AM Central Time. Release 3 access will end on Saturday February 22 at 10:00 PM Central Time. Starting today you can begin installing and patching (see instructions below), but login will not be enabled until Thursday morning.

We are happy to say that not only are we are going to deliver almost every single Release 3 item but that we also were able to put in a bunch of extras. Here are those deliverables again, along with some extra notes and the bonus deliverables in italics.

RELEASE 3: February 20 – 22, 2014
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Dev+ Happy Hour with SotA: Another Early R3 Test, Feb 19, 5 pm CST

[A Dev+ forum post by Starr Long]

Hello Dev Plus people!

Our last test gave us a lot of data and highlighted issues we needed to fix. We believe most of those have been resolved so we need your help again to make sure!

We would like for the Dev Plus group to patch up and join us for “Happy Hour with SotA”. Wednesday, 5 – 6PM CST, we will open up the Live servers for 1 hour to do a limited load test. In honor of this test and to truly make it a happy hour, you can now equip your pint of ale for true toasting!

For those who haven’t installed it yet, you can get the client here: http://goo.gl/KVYzpF

And patch up early and often! We’ll probably release the latest patch around 2 hours before the test. We’ll try to get it out earlier but no matter how much planning we do, we always seem to come right down to the wire on releases.

-Darkstarr

 

toast2






Update of the Avatar #60 – 02/14/14: Valentine Poetry Contest, Lord Houseboat, BotA, Cabinet of Virtues, Tanning Knife, Pantheon, Events Page, and More!

Happy Valentine’s Day Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Hearts of Britannia Valentine’s Poetry Reading!
  • Extra, Extra Early R3 Test Results
  • Founder Lord Waterfront Houseboat
  • Blade of the Avatar Novel: Chapter 9
  • Hearth of Britannia Cabinet of Virtues
  • Tanning Knife of Prosperity
  • The 6-More Pack of Prosperity
  • Stretch Goals: Lord British vs. Darkstarr
  • Last Week for the Pantheon Kickstarter Special Cross-Game Cloak
  • New Events Page
  • Only 52 Days Remain to Purchase/Upgrade/Gift Founder Pledges

SotA_Hearts_of_Britannia

Hearts of Britannia Valentine’s Poetry Reading!

All the poetry submissions are in, and today, Valentine’s Day, the winners are being decided by Dame Lori, Sir Dom, Lord British, Firelotus, Stephen and Starr!

The winners will be announced and poems narrated by Holt on a special Live Hangout on February 15th. A Roast shall take place afterward where entertaining anonymous runner-ups are also narrated. The Hangout/Poetry Reading will begin at 7 pm CST, Saturday, February 15th. The hangout link will be announced 15-30 minutes ahead of time.

All winning entries will be bound into an in-game book which can be found in-game. The top winners of the Lord British and Darkstarr poems will receive the in-game Darkstarr or Lord British cloaks. We will also create a video of Richard, Starr, Gina, and Stephen reading the winning poems that were written to them.

MAY THE BEST POETS WIN LUV 4 ALL TIME!
Read more…


Calling All Developer+ Members: Extra, Extra Early R3 Test Friday the 14th!


As many of you already know, Release 3 is scheduled to launch next Thursday, February 20, at 10:30 am. The big new thing with R3 is multiplayer mode, which is a giant leap forward in technological complexity over single-player mode. We need some advance help to test our servers and are asking all our Developer (and above) members to help us out. Here’s the message Chris Spears posted on the Dev+ forum:

Hello Dev Plus people! We’re calling on you for another test before the test session! Actually, we might do two or three of these over the next week so don’t panic if you miss this one. We’ve been testing multiplayer on our internal servers and feel like we have things to a mostly stable state but we’re are a small lot and blind to our own flaws. We’ve tested the servers with 2 dozen people on single maps but we’re trying to sanity test how many people to enable per map for Release 3 next week.

We would like for the Dev Plus guys and gals to patch up and join us for “Lunch with SotA Bunch”. Friday, 2 – 3PM CST, we will open up the Live servers for 1 hour to do a limited load test. For tomorrow’s test we’ll cap the max players per map at 64 to see how well things work. We’ll be watching server load, data rates, and client performance during the test. If things go poorly, we should have data to fix the problem before the next test session. If things go better than expected, we’ll probably Turn the max per map up a bit and try again another day! Keep in mind, this build only has the most minimal of optimizations. Things will only get better and better with each build.

For those who haven’t installed it yet, you can get the client here: http://goo.gl/KVYzpF
And patch up early and often! We’ll probably release the latest patch around 2 hours before the test. We’ll try to get it out earlier but no matter how much planning we do, we always seem to come right down to the wire on releases.

Known issues for this build that we would love repro steps for:

  • Occasionally other players will be invisible to you
  • Sometimes dialogs will lose their borders
  • Sometimes you can get into a “locked” state while chatting where you can’t move

First people to post repro steps for any of those will get a gold star from me personally!

Oh, and since I know some of you will ask, yes, Richard will be in game and NO, you won’t be able to kill him…

Enjoy!

Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears

[Join the conversation over in the forums]