Early Access Schedule

My business answering machine message this week: "the office has been closed for the next three days due to a super secret testing of a super secret project. I will be completely unavailable - off the grid. Leave a message and when I return from my super secret project, if I am able, I will return your call." I wonder if I could convince my husband to get a taxi from the airport on Friday. Think that's pushing it???

 

So instanced housing is allowed in the game.

 

Nice try, but no. A map (scene) load does not equal "instanced housing". Basements, just like houses, are globally persistent.

 

No, the basements will be where they should be under the house, but because of a current limitation in Unity you can't actually pass through the terrain, you will probably even be able to hear what's going on in the house above depending on how they implement the sound generators, therefore you would need to be teleported through the hatch to the cellar rather than be able to open it and drop down. For one of my scene jam entries I used a hack to get a dungeon entrance to work on the terrain without teleporters but it was a pain in the butt and took the better part of a day to get it looking right, imagine trying to do that for every housing lot on the map hehe....

 

In SPO in the persistent world if more than one person is the same house in décor mode will I see things being moved by other players.
Or is it a separate layer of the instance for each player.
If separate layering if you have full access to a house/Guild house. If they are in MMO mode and you log in SPO could you in theory steal from the house without being seen.

 

As the basements are right under each persons house and fit within the lot, I would love to see them eventually be able to connect to City Sewers or Underground passages to the Underworld.

 

I hope they can figure this out for Ep 2. Having seamless transitions into the basement would be a nice feature. Sure there are the terrain issues, but I'm sure there are clever approaches to make that work properly.

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@wagram, the housing is and is not instanced. It comes down to terminology. It is instanced in that when you're playing you'll be running around in your own (or on someone else's machine) instance of that house. Everyone is not at the same time connecting to a central server and existing in the same instance of the house. It is not instanced in that there is a single house/lot/basement that everyone sees. Usually instanced housing in MMOs implies that a given lot can be duplicated many times and you're only seeing one of those copies. Here, yes you are in an instance, but the single house/lot/basement persists across all those instances.

It actually becomes difficult to give a clear explanation of it I think Yes, housing and everything else are instanced, but not in the same sense you'd normally think of it in an MMO when that term is used due to the persistence aspect.

Obviously the houses and all other areas in the game are instanced or else you'd always see anyone else in those areas when you were in them. There will be many instances of an area running at once on people's machines and you're only seeing people in your instance. That goes for housing as well.

 

My understanding is that in the world instance map I am in an instance run from my computer or someone else.
But V/T/C areas are the persistent world on the Portalarium servers so when I'm in town we are all on the same server, yes we may be in SPO MMO but the town is persistent and housing in not instanced in this game.

 

I think with SotA the terminology has to be stretched a little bit. They're doing something new here, so simply saying "housing is not instanced" doesn't tell the full story. If when saying that you mean that there's only a single 120 Main St. address with only a single owner and the housing state there persists and propagates to all other players, then yes that is correct. Usually "instanced housing" implies more that the lots aren't unique. There can be hundreds of copies of a neighborhood and you having 120 Main St. is just in your neighborhood instance. Not so with SotA.

Having said that, my understanding is that when you're in the game in any area, you'll be in an instance with a limited # of people and that instance may be running on your machine or someone else's machine. So if you're in Owl's Head you won't see every single person in Owl's Head only those in your instance. So in that sense it is instanced.

Again, its a bit of a hybrid and its something new they're doing here, so the common use of some of these terms has to be stretched a bit.

 

Changes to that house will persist in OPO, FPO, and SPO. But they haven't said the interval at which changes are streamed to every client. I would imagine it being immediate minus lag/latency. In that regard, two players in SPO that are in the house are no different than if they were in FPO or OPO in that house, as selective multiplayer doesn't guarantee they'll be in the same game. The key aspect is that any and all changes persist in that house.

As far as stealing, we'll need to wait until they reveal that aspect of the game. It's quite likely that stealing, subterfuge and other things against other players and their property will not be allowed in SPO or even FPO. But you never know, perhaps they have some innovative way of solving that regardless of multiplayer mode.

 

If the changes are not immediate then if 3 friends/guildmates are in the same house but one is in OPO 1 FPO 1 MMO they could all pickup an object move it and place it somewhere else and when the game catches up do we have 3 of the same object in different places. I play in games with dynamic layering so you may not see everyone and so you are doing different things in the same place you could both kill the same mob.,but that is not a persistent object placed in a specific place by a player

 

No, I don't think there will be 3 objects in different places. Eventually the client would sync to whatever the "correct" state is and snap to where it should be or disappear entirely. Or, it wouldn't allow the action until it syncs to ensure the object or whatever isn't already "in use". It's like the rubber banding effect due to lag. It's a complex system but I'm not worried as the devs have tons of experience with issues like this. But I'm sure there will be bugs and exploits as nothing is perfect, but yeah...playtesting. I'm sure all of us veteran UO players loved the rubber banding back in the day!

 

so 2 of you will think the place is haunted because it as moved from were you put it.

 

SotA client download
Looking at the latest message on DEV+ looks like they have downloaded and are about to login and create a character.

 

Logged on and created a character. Ran around chasing chickens, no action with sword except putting into inventory. All is good congrats to all SOTA staff.
Thanks

 

Is it normal that when you put items from your inventory on the ground, they don't show up and reappear in inventory ?

The icon on the far right doesn't do anything, I guess it's a journal ?

 

You can put items on the ground...? How?

 

Drag from the inventory window to the screen. It looks like it will one day work that way.

 

I assume the access will be granted on the digital download section of "My account", yes?

~JC

 

I would just keep an eye on the announcements thread as they may just release a URL to download it.