[Late] R12 Postmortem rough transcript & minutes

0:00 FireLotus. Welcomes everyone to Cyber Monday and the Telethon. The show will be broken up into four separate hangouts because Google Hangout only allows a live stream to run four hours at a time. Everyone should grab their Mountain Dew — Lord British gives two thumbs up — and your Cheetos and get ready to have fun. They'll kick off with a post-mortem for R12.

0:40 Lord British. Thanks to all of the backers who have joined the development team on this project, for their support, ideas, and their feedback, which have helped the project enormously, and which will help Shroud of the Avatar be a true landmark in gaming. The partnership between the developers and backers has led to a much better game than could have been made otherwise. Passes to the team in Austin.

1:37 Starr. Chris gives a thumbs up from behind him. Introduces himself and says the others will too, for the new viewers. The most exciting thing that he saw in R12 was the number of new players coming in. The best part about it was that the community stepped up and helped all of the new players. For instance, the Phoenix Republic took it on themselves to hang out in Braemar and ask incoming players if they needed help, potions, gold, or directions. He would pop in now and then to hang out with them and do AMAs — ask-me-anythings — with them and supply them with gold and potions they could give out. It was a testament to the amazing community. Thanks the community for being positive and supportive.

3:17 Chris. He’s the tech director, but also does a lot of other things on the project. New backers should head over to the Shroud website and check into the forums, where daily standups are posted, and where they talk directly to the backers and have conversations about the game. The development team does that directly. Starr asks what Chris’ user name is on Steam. Its catnipgames on Steam; Chris on the forums. The developers can’t avoid listening to the backers, and can’t avoid making the changes we want, though it’s most usually what they want also. He’ll be on for at about six of the twelve hours of the telethon, and looks forward to answering questions.

5:23 Mike. He’s Michael Hutchinson, the leading artist on the project, does a lot of scene building and world building and helps organize the tasks among the art team and for asset building. Looks forward to the involvement of the new backers in the project.

6:08 Starr. Before they go into questions, he wanted to discuss their general impressions. In addition to the supportive community and the player events, he was able to attend one of Amber Raine’s sermons in the Church of the Dark Starr. He happened to have a cousin visiting, and made him sit and watch. He explained to his cousin how a player was broadcasting over the radio, for others in the game to hear, and this was happening in a player run town with lots that was built and decorated by players. Release 12 went really well; a lot of new people were in because of a smooth Steam launch. It did however highlight a lot of things they needed to do. One of the interesting things for them to see was how people worked with the new player quest. They want to preserve the sandbox feel, with as little hand holding as possible, but at the same time need to guide the new players and make the experience very intuitive. It’s a delicate balance that they haven’t quite reached yet. It was also the first build where they started to push on options in crafting; different types of materials with secondary effects were put in. This was a quickest path to domination. He made the mistake of dueling Leviathan, getting destroyed even though he was higher level — partly because Leviathan had accumulated the best player made gear — but also because he was able to optimize his build. This was a great learning experience for them.

10:11 Chris. The new user experience is very rudimentary, but will continue to be improved. This was one of the first releases where they got to see a lot of new players, which helped a lot with feedback, in contrast to players who’ve already gotten used to the systems and are only seeing iterative differences between each release. For the crafting, what players see is only a fraction of what gets done. A lot of this only got in at the last minute, and the balance was way off. This isn’t an item focused game; that hasn’t changed — the balance just has to be adjusted. Some of the numbers were mistakenly off in the beginning by a factor of 100 because a percentage was typed as a number. There were also some magic updates that went in. He wanted to make magic much more powerful than it should be, so they could come halfway back in adjusting the balance, but he still undershot. Currently, if you’re a magic user, there’s not enough fast cast options to go against a warrior that’s attacking you. This is still not practicably playable, especially for PvP.

13:44 Mike. For R12, they continued the process of expanding the number of particular scene maps instead of generic scenes for the hexes. Three new forest maps were completed, as well as the exterior and interior for the Tower of the Shuttered Eye. They got into a good flow in the development, getting about five maps out in the space of three weeks. He’s working with Artie a lot in defining what each of the map scenes are in terms of the spawn levels, so everything can feel as if they belong in the area. Like Chris said, in addition to that, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, like the development of new biome types, which we’ll see more of in R13. Desert will be the next major environment type.

16:11 Starr. It looks amazing.

16:16 Mike. The desert scene was adapted from an asset pack bought off the Unity Store. The developers use a lot of crowdsourced and purchased asset packs to help flesh out their environments, for the interests of time and expense. If they can get a desert constructed quickly by purchasing an asset pack, they can get it done in a matter of weeks instead of months.

17:16 Starr. Asks Lord British for general impressions.

17:20 Lord British. His favorite thing about R12 was all the new player. Every few hours, whenever he got a break in his Thanksgiving family activities, he stopped by Braemar to meet new people. He friends every new person he meets in the game. This gives him a sense of the influx of people. Braemar was always filled with new people, but he was struck by the constant flow of people. He also friends everybody — and asks them to friend him back — because they want to make sure people know they’re playing in the world alongside all of the backers. He wants people to feel like the developers are citizens of the world, and that the players are also involved in the development of the game. He stopped by Wody’s Bar in Kingsport to have a pint of mead, already seeing the groups from Avatar’s Radio, and a half a dozen new people he never met before. A rich tapestry of people in the game world that he finds inspirational, that gives the development team a sense of both joy and responsibility. Progress is very fast, the team listens thoroughly, and they play besides everyone, so understand where critiques are coming from.

20:52 Starr. At least 30% of every monthly release is spent just directly responding to feedback or issues the player has found, or suggestions the players have made, or polls the players have put up. Redirects to about 30 minutes of questions on R12. A great suggestion: that in the post-mortem write-up we list the number of players in the game from every pledge level. That will be posted on the forum. He’s still blown away by the number and sizes of player owned towns now – which are up to over 60. In the initial design and brainstorming, they thought they would sell maybe a dozen at the most; were not prepared for over 60. Asks FireLotus for a question. Recognizes they lost her from the live stream.

23:06 Chris. Says goodbye to FireLotus.

23:07 Starr. Another question is about the map and navigation system and whether loading times will increase. The dual-scale map is the new most contentious issues in the game, after PvP and the deck combat system. The dual-scale map provides them a lot of opportunities. For instance it allows everyone to be on the same server – managing that with a contiguous world would be very challenging versus with the dual-scale map where scenes are instanced out. What’s more exciting is it allows them to dynamically update the state of a given scene without requiring everyone to download that update, regardless of where they are in the game. It allows a dynamic environment, with a scale of changes manageable from player to player. That won’t change. They recognize, however, one of the thing that makes it challenging for players is the loading time, because it pulls them out of what they were doing. They want to make this as close to instant as possible, and they feel this will remove a lot of the problems people feel with it in the game. They’ll continue with optimizations to decrease load times.

25:39 Chris. The load times will continue to get better as they do optimizations. Currently they haven’t done any such optimizations. About 50-70% of the content used in one scene is used in the next scene, but due to problems internally that haven’t been optimized, about 80% of the things in the scene are unloaded, and then reloaded. There’s also a lot of networking issues that can be optimized to speed up the loading. There were a couple of maps this was particularly a problem on, due to bugs, like Vertas Pass, and the Veiled Swamp, but this will get better and better. For the new players, a rundown on instancing — this allows them to have a shard-less world that has a million or more players in the game at once and it’ll still not feel overcrowded in any scene you’re in. The reverse is also true, that they can have towns feel like they’re adequately populated rather than as a ghost town. The removal of sharding allows them to have better population control and make the population visible in the game feel much more balanced. That’s one advantage that the dual-scale map gives. They know that it’s a sacrifice, because it breaks immersion for a lot of people, but it allows a lot of benefits. Players also won’t have to figure out which friends they’re going to play with on what server. It also helps more generally with server architecture. In some cases, some elements are shared across instances, so there may be many Owl’s Heads each with 30 or 40 people in it, but the same houses are visible in each instance, and when decoration is put down on their lot on one instance, it shows up in all instances. The same technology also would allow a member of the dev team, like Lord British, to show up in all instances if they want to give a speech, because of the split concept between instances and scenes.

29:36 Lord British. What Chris said is incredibly important. The game quietly and invisibly creates these temporary, multiple instances, which keep up to date with each other in real time — this is an extremely important piece of technology for creating a massively multi-player environment that allows everyone to be part of the same experience. He never can tell when instancing can happening, even when it works and is hopeful this will be a powerful tool, not just for this game, but for future games.

30:45 Starr. A question from Ronan: how soon will sound be updated? A lot of people have an issue with this. They had a similar issue to this happen with music, where they were using a lot of royalty free music off the internet that wasn’t very good. The players then organized the Bard’s Circle and submitted music, and now the music in the game is wonderful. They’re now doing the same thing with sound effects, where they’re using royalty free sound effects in the game. So far, it’s currently been the last thing on their list that they cram in before they do a patch. However, they’re planning to pay more attention to this issue and give it a higher priority than they have in the past. Plus, one of the community members has audio and video studio that he’ll put to use for them. Starting with the next release, players should notice a slow and steady improvement in the number and quality of sound effects in the game.

32:46 Chris. This is one of the benefits from them getting on Steam. The new players made it clear that the audio sucks and needs to be fixed.

33:03 Starr. A question from melchiormeijer about the visibility of encounters, and whether open plains will make it harder to be ambushed; and another question from shadowrun asking about resource nodes in random encounter scenes. The random encounter experience in this release was the very first implementation. The base functionality of the system will be in first, and it’ll be iterated over several releases: this was just the most rudimentary aspects of the random encounter system and was set up in about a day.

34:13 Chris. What you’ll see is lot of the technology will come online, but the content won’t catch up until the next release. This is the case for random encounters, and the content for that probably won’t come online until about R14. It’s not staged properly.

34:51 Starr. Different terrains will have different percentages for the chance of encounters, so roads will have almost no chance during the day; time of day will influence the percentage chance of an encounter. The random encounter scenes will not just be a random pack of monsters, but an actual scene — like for instance, an ambush of a caravan by a group of undead, where the members of the caravan might be defending themselves against a horde of skeletons. The encounters will also have resources in them, for an added reward. Right now, random encounters are pure punishment that slow the player down, but they want players to be excited about encounters, because they would be a reward. Either resources will available in these scenes, or the monsters you encounter will have a higher loot yield than normal monsters.

36:20 Starr. Asks FireLotus if there are questions from outside the chat. FireLotus. She has all the questions up right now. Starr. Awesome. A question from enderandrew: with the number of players coming in from Steam, how does it look like the number of players for each instance will be? This is two questions; first on how the current system is splitting people up into instances, and when there are more players, whether that will mean that there will be more players in an instance. There’s also another question from Lord Lew, asking about lag increasing as player number increases in an instance. Chris is good at answering these questions about instance architecture.

37:36 Chris. Apologizes for being distracted because he’s on chat at the same time he’s trying to listen. Starr. Repeats the questions. Chris. There were a couple of issues that came up in this release, that have been issues in the past but were more of a problem because of the increase in players. They would sometimes get a very slow client or a client on a bad connection handling data for everybody; instead they need to pass off it off to better clients. That probably will be fixed by R14. People mean different things by lag, sometimes this is referring to a bad frame-rate and other times to slow updates of creatures. The low frame-rate problem for some people is something being pushed off because they know a lot of these problems will be solved for them by the next Unity release, and they don’t want to solve the problem now when there’ll be a solution ready for them in a month or two. The frame-rate problem has to do with the forward rendering, where things get slower when more is on the screen, plus every light that hits a character forces it to re-render. Unity 5 has some features that’ll fix that. One of the other things causing lag in a scene is a higher data rate. There was a bug causing jerky movement on creatures that would update occasionally. A bad fix was put in which would force every creature and player on the scene to send packets every one fifth of a second, and this would happen even if they were sitting idle and nothing had changed with them. For a lot of players, that caused a bandwidth overload, and they were getting updates late. The system handles that, it just means that the updates are received less often. They plan to fix this, and these will all be issues that will improve over time. It’ll be their top priority for R13, and will help fix this issue for 95% of the people out there who are experiencing problems with network lag. There’s also another issue, which is that it’s possible that if a client in a scene has other programs running in the background slowing down their frame-rate, it may slow the frame-rate down for everyone. They’re also working on that. Minor improvements will show up in R13, but also on to R14.

42:30 Starr begins to speak, Mike interrupts and takes over. On optimizations: one of the other things they run into is that because a lot of assets are purchased from external sources, they don’t have a lot of control over the textures that the assets use. If they were all built internally, they’d be able to share the textures across different kits, and keep the number down. When a lot of assets are purchased, it becomes more of a challenge to stay on top of memory usage. A lot of that has fallen on Chris to help keep under control, because as of now, more attention is being given on content creation than on content optimization. In traditional game models, the optimization of a level might come at the end of a project, right before release. This is a more difficult process in the way the game is being built, because they try to get new content out at each release as well as having it run as optimally as possible; so they’re pulling double duty to deal with it. But they are working on it, and trying to find new ways to keep performance in line with what it needs to be so it can be fun for players.

44:39 Mike. Another question: when can we expect new asset request lists for crowdsourcing? One of the art guys there – Scott – has been working with Lord British more and more to parse through his list of crafting requirements, to spit that out into an asset list, which will involve hundreds of assets. Currently, they’re only a third to a half way through them and they have over 300 hard assets. That can be expected shortly. They have at least 100 crowd-sourced assets ready to go once they’ve ironed out a few remaining things.

46:31 Starr. A couple more questions will be answered, and then a preview will be given of R13, and some prizes will be handed out. Chris wants them to call it a streamathon instead of a telethon. Chris. There’s no telephones involved! Starr and Mike. Hold up their phones. Starr. Points out he has a telephone.

46:55 Lord British, jubilantly. A streamathon it is! In the game, he’s been asked about the crafting that came online. He was very excited to see the Thanksgiving feast that everybody laid out over the weekend, and took some humor in the fact that not only the traditional meals were made, but also in the Regicide Stovie. It was a bit of a play on the history of one of the Lords of the Manor, Professor Peter McOwen. Peter McOwen has a family in the northern part of the United Kingdom, who a few generations back, participated in a regicide. One of the traditions in royalty was to kill off one’s parents, to always make sure there was a young and virile person on the throne. Stovies are a one pot stew that are also popular in that region. The Regicide Stovie includes the ingredient of corpse-wax, which can be taken off the undead. He was also being asked in game about brewing – beers and wines and liquors. That’s all on the crafting list. A huge amount of them are already put in, but a lot more will continue to be put in over the next few iterations. Some of the items for brewing will be on the crowdsourcing list.

49:16 Starr. Release 13, and what you can expect there and what our goals are — there are a couple of big things we want to do. A big one is we want guilds to be working correctly. The base functionality was put in for R12, and we want to iterate over that for the next release. There was currently no way to manage a guild and anybody could join, without any input from the guild leader. Rustic Dragon comes up from behind Starr with a donut. Joseph Toschlog everyone! No licking! Looks over. He’s warmed up his liquor. Returns to the topic. So guilds will be functioning to give more control to the guild leader, where he can invite people to join, and others can request. The leader will manage and approve all members, and trolls won’t be able to join and ruin the guild’s reputation. Performance optimization will also be done both on a client and network latency side. New skills and new creatures will be in, including elementals. More refinements on the overland map should be in, as well as more polish on the random encounters. There’ll be more variety. A lot of polish will be given to the spawning. Currently, creatures are just standing still and not doing anything interesting, in arbitrary, random locations, just to get the appropriate level creatures in the scene. Then there are two passes after that. The first will involve propping, so in the area where spiders are, there’ll be webbing in the trees. Then, patrols will also be in, so packs of wolves will wander the map. At least one new map will be in. The surface map for the Graff Gem mines will be in, which will be the entrance, and that will go into the interior map. The first of the several desert scenes will be in the game.

53:56 Mike. They’ll have at least one desert map; probably more than that, in addition to the Graff Gem mines surface. They’ll also be problem solving some issues they’re having with the Ardoris map, with ideas on how to make it a smaller and more manageable space. It doesn’t run great for everybody.

54:46 Lord British. There are maps of strikingly different sizes in the game right now. Part of that is they didn’t know how big they could make them — and what would be too large or too small. The smallest ones were designed as encounter maps, where the player would be forced into it from a random encounter, and you would only need enough space to get out of it. They weren’t meant as exploration maps. About a release back, some of those maps were stand-ins for exploration maps, and people commented on their small size. On the other hand, they’re getting a feel on how big is too big. He likes the size of Kingsport; it has a good downtown with city services in the middle and a lot of lots for player housing to make it feel lively. You don’t have to go through an endless amount of player housing to get to the center of the town. That’s important because there’s a low chance for a homeowner to be online when you pass by their house. They’re trying to manage the feel of endless neighborhoods, and it’s his feeling that Ardoris will probably the biggest city they’ll ever have in the game and is probably bigger than is useful from a player experience standpoint. Let the developers know if you feel things are unbalanced.

57:45 Chris. On R13, one thing that players probably missed was the crashing in the 64-bit version. A lot of time was spent working on that, with help from Unity. It was one of the things that was blocking them from moving to Unity 5, which they’re now doing serious experimenting with.

58:58 Starr. The first round of prizes are coming up. The next section will be a tour of the office, where they’ll meet the teams. Lord British will go through the Ultima history. Calls out to Dallas to see if they’re ready for prizes.

59:47 Lord British. Go Gorn! FireLotus, as everyone is waiting and moving about. Dallas can certainly clear a room. Crosstalk as Dallas sits down in Starr’s chair. Lord British, fist pumping. Gorn, Gorn, Gorn! Dallas. It’s the Gorn Giveaway! Welcomes everyone who’s been watching the telethon. Cool stuff will be given away every hour. For the first hour, four things are being given out. Plantronics wireless music earbuds. Lord British. Chides Chris for stealing the camera by the noise he’s making. Asks him to mute himself. Dallas asks everyone to hold, realizing he forgot his pen. Lord British. Once again, thanks to everyone. Thanks to everyone for supporting the game, welcome to all of the new players from Steam. Everyone should participate in the community as a supporter and go to the website. Dallas lists the prize winners.

1:05:55 Lord British. Hurray for Gorn! Starr. Prompts everybody to wait a few seconds for the office tour, where the telethon continues.

 

Awesome, thanks redfish!

 

Good job redfish....so much text.