R13 Postmortem rough transcript & minutes

0:00 FireLotus. Greetings to the community. They’re here to talk about R13, take questions, and give answers. Passes to Richard.

0:23 Lord British. It’s been an exciting month for everybody because the game has been persistent online for a long period of time. Passes to Starr and Chris –

1:04 Lord British sees problems on their end. It looks like they had a hiccup. Further into his impressions: the servers were left on for a long period of time to see what would happen, which was a multi-faceted decision. One reason was to see that people buying on Steam could come in on random days of the during the test would be able to actually get in and play. Also, to see what would happen to the servers over the long term, as well as to see how the environment would evolve in terms of the economy, as limited as it currently is. This was a risk because there weren’t many maps in the game and not too much to craft, so the long period of time might have given the community some burnout. But all of the times he’s jumped in, he’s been stunned to see how many community events have been happening and the constant influx of people in Braemar. He continues to friend everyone he sees to measure the rate of influx as well as to let backers know that the developers are playing alongside them. Notes that that Starr and Chris are online, passes back to them.

3:48 Starr. Explains that the disconnect was his fault; he asked Chris to unplug the refrigerator so it wouldn’t make as much noise during the hangout.

3:57 Chris. Rebuts. Takes the blame, since he unplugged the wrong thing.

4:04 Starr. Both he and Chris are such gentlemen to want to take the blame – though one should see them together designing things, where they don’t get along as much.

4:20 Starr. Thanks to the community for their support. Release 13 went as well as they could hope for; even though there’s a lot of things they can do with performance and optimization, they’re making really steady progress. For the size of the team, he’s incredibly impressed by the amount of progress they’ve been able to make in such a short amount of time. Leaving the game open for longer amounts of time had a slowdown effect on the game development, as they turned their attention to what was going on in the game. On the other hand, it provided a lot more data for them, and also awareness of issues they need to track down. In all, the good outweighed the bad. One of the issues the server persistence allowed them to discover was that while lot expiration works correctly, items aren’t stored for the same amount of time as the lot expiration. For a lot of people, the items not only expired, but were permanently lost, causing them some pain.

6:00 Chris. On the positive side, it’s good that these things are happening now, rather than later, so the problems can be sorted out now.

6:11 Starr. That sums up his general overview for R13. Passes to Chris.

6:19 Chris. His is pretty positive, considering the schedule that they had – it felt like a two week release, except it was for a four week release, since the holidays came up. Things felt more rushed than usual. Usually one of the things he does in the last week is do a sanity check on performance and everything else; he was not able to do that this release, so there were a bunch of issues that went unnoticed, with CPU and GPU drains. They’ll continue to work on that, although some of that players might see the same problems for a release or two. They will put out a few low memory fix type items, but the people are focusing on those issues normally, including himself, are now focusing on Unity 5, and transitioning the game to using that. Because they’re splitting their time, less focus will be on performance and optimization.

7:43 Chris. He did play in Release 13 quite a bit, but tried to play as a different character just to try to stay in the shadows. Some of the things that went in he felt were good, including the combat stances, but it needs a lot of tuning. The tuning they did in last release, just by the numbers, definitely appeared to have improved how often things were being used. Making things not useless definitely does help.

8:24 Lord British. Notes they should roll over into questions. Passes to FireLotus.

8:31 FireLotus. Smack wants to know what new features of Unity 5 will be scene in Release 4, and whether they’ll be leveraged to improve polish, performance, and stability.

8:48 Lord British. Release 14, he hopes.

8:50 Starr. Yes. Chris. It hasn’t been fully decided what they’re going to do with Unity 5 for the next release; most likely, they’ll put out a build for Dev+ so people can try it out, rather than building the general release on Unity 5, just because they know it’s going to be ugly, and as the higher backers to the project, they let them see the ugliest parts of the sausage-making. There probably won’t be a lot of things visible, discounting bugs. One of the big things happening is that shaders will be changed out. They’ve been converting a lot of their shaders, and have been doing side-by-side tests with textures on the same models, and there’s a very noticeable difference in quality. More importantly, though, it gives the artists a lot of options; they have more features to use at their disposal. It’s uncertain that we’ll see GI (Global Illumination) in Release 14, because the current beta of Unity has some bugs in it that make the building process incredibly slow. For those who don’t know what this is: lights are usually done as dynamic and static – they can’t do the static, because they’re usually done baked in – that’s what the majority of games use so they can simulate bounce lighting, and better simulate ambient lightning and do all the calculations ahead of time. So much lighting in the game is dynamic, when you turn on a light, turn off lights, have the sun move, and so on, where everything changes in the game. They really can’t use the baked-in lights. What GI has options for is you can pre-bake how things will map, and they can use generated reflected light on the fly. This gives them some of the nicer parts of baked lighting, even though everything seems dynamic. They might do a scene or two where they have that in, but they haven’t done that in their build process yet, and it’s running really slow right now – slow on the building side, not on the running side. Dev+ will be able to try that out and give them feedback. It still has a way to go.

11:40 Starr. Longer term, some of the things he’s most excited about with Unity 5 are the ways assets are loaded and memory is used, and the way things are done with animations, that will both improve memory utilization, leading to increased runtime performance, but it’ll also affect how much they have to load in the beginning or cache and use on the fly, so that will reduce load times when going from scene to scene. That requires some rework on their part, in terms of how the data gets put in the scenes. But as that gets in the game in the next few releases, you’ll not only see improvements in the visuals, but also in performance, load-times, et cetera.

12:45 Chris. There’s also a number of things that frustrate people internally, and probably externally… like cake fixes, and animation fixes, and all of the audio stuff. When people ask when something is going to get done, often the answer is that they’re waiting for Unity 5. That’s a big part of why a lot of the audio hasn’t been done, because Unity 5 has some fixes on this issue; they’ve completely reworked some of those systems. It’ll open up the opportunity also to fix all those broken things.

13:27 Starr. There’s a lot of components that they want to do a lot of work on to improve visuals, but because of some of the fundamentals of how they’re doing lighting and shaders are going to change, they’ve held off from investing too much in that. For instance, the way hair is done, the way water is done, and the way cloth is done – all of that will change in one way or another in Unity 5. So they’ve been holding over until the switch to invest the time in improving those assets. There’s also a new foliage system, where for instance, you can do things like move the grass as you walk through it. What that means for players, is there’ll probably be a temporary stalling on forward progress in visual improvements in the main version, but you’ll start to see a steady improvement in visuals on the Unity 5 version. That probably knocked out a bunch of questions related to Unity 5.

15:03 Chris. Again, there are a lot of things in Unity 5 that will improve load-times. He tries to tell people not to worry too much about load times, because they’ll improve. There are a lot of things they know they’re doing wrong. One of the big ones that Unity 5 will improve is with collision geometry. That is not only a run-time issue, but also a load-time issue, because it loads the 3D model, makes a copy of that 3D model, and makes a collision object from that. Unity 5 lets them pre-bake a lot of that stuff, which will lead to performance improvements. Also, there’ll be better threading, better background loading – a lot more async features – just general across the board improvements. Better, better, better. Magic. Starr. Magic! Chris. Yep. Starr passes back to FireLotus.

16:26 FireLotus. Smack wants to know when we can expect to explore the Novia overworld map in the game.

16:35 Starr. Work will be done on the first pass of that this Thursday, with the goal that it’s available in Release 15. They hope to have a first pass of the Novia map with the scenes attached to it for Release 15, in February.

17:08 FireLotus. The next question will be taken from the chat room. If you’re not on the chatrooms, join them, for the full hangout experience. The first question is from Riya, who wants to know what they think will be the biggest challenge for the upcoming order one to get finished.

17:36 Starr. How about everything? The serious answer is that the biggest challenge is untangling the complex question of pledge rewards, banks, encumbrance, and economy, because they’re all pretty intertwined with each other. For Release 14, that’s the most challenging issue, taking up most of their time. Then, the transition over to Unity 5 is probably going to be even bigger than that, because not only is it a fundamental technology change, but also a fundamental change in the way they load and render content.

18:34 Chris. He talked about this a little earlier on the forums; a lot of people assumed that Unity 5 would just load and convert and do everything for them. It does to some extent a lot of shaders – but if you look at scenes like Owl’s Head, there’s 5,000+ unique items for every scene, many of which have their own unique textures and shaders, and they have to do a lot of hand-tweaking. Even the ones that auto-convert they have to do a lot of hand touch ups on. The bigger problem is that they have to create a whole branch of the project, and convert to everything over there, since the data is not compatible, and at some point they need to have everybody dive in, the entire team to move over, and everybody re-integrate all the data for the changes, and then have everybody work from that. So they basically have two projects going on now, and moving data back and forth. It’s extremely time-consuming and difficult, because sometimes, some of the things they fix on Unity 5 were already changed on Unity 4, and then someone tries to move it over and make the change, and it un-dos the first changes. Every one of those files needs to be hand-scrutinized. He’s had to do that a couple of times, he had 1,600 files to look at, and look at what was different between the two versions. But – good times, lots of fun!

20:06 Starr. Yea. Chris. And like Starr said, the other thing is the biggest thing is all of the issues taken together. He often uses the term “being pecked by ducks” – this is really more like being torn apart by many mini-lions – there’s a lot of really big things in there – and those big things turn into a lot of little things due to a lot of moving parts. Starr. Yea. Passes to FireLotus.

20:48 FireLotus. Myrcello would like to know when we’re going to see actual bank locations in the towns – will that be in R14?

20:57 Starr. Yes. In Release 14, you’ll be seeing their first pass at banks, and the major towns will have both a banker and a bank building where players can store items. That’s also where, if you unclaim a lot, all your housing items will go. For Release 14, banks are all local, but you’ll be able to see your items in banks in other locations. Crosstalk. So there’ll be a bank in Owl’s Head, in Kingsport, in Ardoris, and for instance, when you put something in the bank in Ardoris and go to Kingsport, you can’t access that item from Ardoris, but you can see it so you know you left it there. And the main reason local banks are being done is because they want part of the economy being driven by location. So scarcity and abundance of resources, and player concentration, etc.

22:20 Lord British. It’s a good time to mention the developers’ thoughts about the main map of Novia and travel time. They’re working very hard to find the right balance between letting people get where they want to go for convenience, and also trying to make the map scale seem relevant and expansive. The main map is broken up by mountain ranges, and a lot of those are segregated by control points, and there are some lunar rifts across that, which have their destinations cycle. While they likely will have some faster travel capabilities under certain circumstances, there’ll be a cost or cool-down timer associated with those. And they’re doing that specifically so they can make areas like the Graff Gem Mines be an area of the Northeast, where gems can be plentiful, and swamps be areas were reagents are plentiful, and there’s a reason for the cost of items in various parts of the world to differentiate, and that brings in some economic flow and reasons to carry things from one place to another – to go to distant places to search for reagents to bring back to certain locales.

23:51 FireLotus. The community is very excited about local banking – there’s a lot of cheering going on in the chat room – they like the idea that they can’t claim the items from any old bank – that they have to go to the bank where they actually left it. Starr. Cool. FireLotus. The next question is from redfish: he wants to know about how people feel decision behind the map style. There was originally a lot of debate about the style of the overland map, and some people wanted to stay with the paper map. He’d like to know after seeing the 3D map progress, what is the consensus from the dev team.

24:27 Starr. He still loves the stylized magical paper map style – but is incredibly pleased with the visuals on the overland map. They did a foundational pass, and then one of their world builders, Abe, did the polish pass of the visuals. It’s really a beautiful space to go in. No regrets – he still thinks the pop out map maybe might work for another game he works on someday – but the 3D map is something a lot of the players wanted, and he’s glad that the players are happy with the direction it took.

25:31 Chris. He’s still a fan of the paper map, purely because it’s stylized, and it’s hard to pick at and find flaws with realism in it – with it, people don’t expect reality, and it gives a separation between the different ways things in the game are presented – for instance, so you don’t expect to be able to do things like use objects on that scale. But the new map does look fabulous, and based on what he’s seen, the vast majority of the player base seems to like it.

26:09 Starr. And subtle tweaks made to make the control and movement feel more like the control and movement inside individual scenes has also helped a lot in usability. The big final missing part is the roaming encounters, like the pack wolves, and roaming encounters. Once they get that in, that will complete the picture.

26:42 Lord British. The discussion is in some degree moot – everyone will pine for the things that might have been, especially on close calls. They went back and forth on this issue, and it’s probably the system that they spent the most time wasted on, regardless of which side they picked, because they put a fair bit of time into both directions, but compared to UO, where they threw away person-years worth of work on systems that they never ended up using, this was still a minor loss compared to what could have been. They’re really devoted now to the 3D map, he thinks it’s going to work really nicely, and completely concurs with Starr: once people can see their friends moving around, enemies, and encounters, then they’ll finish that curve – and he’ll be really happy.

27:50 FireLotus. The next question is from Logain and redfish, who would like to know whether they’ll be able to invite friends and family for limited times – as either part of a pledge reward or some type of free access pass.

28:11 Starr. That’s an interesting suggestion. Right now, they’re confining free access to promotions with their partners, or trade shows – where someone who comes up to their booth can sign up and get a weekend of access – and they do contests with Alienware and Plantronics, where they give away access. They did one in R13 with Alienware, and might do one for R14, or more likely R15 with Plantronics. Right now, that’s where they’re doing free access. There currently aren’t plans for friends and family passes, but they’ve bandied around that idea periodically. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it – just it isn’t on their short term plan.

29:10 Chris. There’s also the option to do free weekend or trial weekend – but you have to be careful, because the players who come in might think they can do anything they want to without repercussions. Starr. Yea.

29:25 FireLotus. The next question is from the chat room, from Themo Lock, who wants to know if we’ll see more mechanized creatures or races similar to the Watchers that are wandering about.

29:43 Starr. Yes – right now, we have the clockwork servants and eventually the clockwork pets will come online. The biggest place where we’ll see more of this going forward is with the kobolds. Richard will elaborate on that.

30:09 Lord British. The kobolds are their fictional conceit for the evolution of technology, including the Moon Towers that you see, and the electromagnetic fences defending the bigger towns. Those are all technology that humans acquired from the kobolds. In fact, he was reviewing some of the weapons that kobolds would use that the artists have drawn up, and he’s hoping that will be brought into the game. That collaboration will be a good excuse for everything from the Watchers to the automatons and pets, and even what you’ll see in the core of the Oracle as you see her and interact with her more. This interplay with clockpunk technology that’s starting to come onboard is going to be a central part the kobolds x fight with humans – the kobold use of this technology is part of the conflict between them that you’ll see unfold in the storyline. And as you see this further imbued in the game, you’ll also see the limits of some of this technology. Right now Avatar’s Radios can be used anywhere in the world – but in theory should only be able to operate where there’s a Moon Tower or other source of ethereally transmitted power. They shouldn’t necessarily work millions of miles from nowhere. All of that will evolve and get richer – more plentiful – and more fictionally accurate as more of the systems come online.

32:04 Starr. So far, a few of the power generation systems are in – wind power and hydro power – and the artist, Scott Jones, just finished the geothermal set – which includes contraptions built on the top of geysers and steam vents and pools, and have fans that generate power. Then there’s steam pipes, that channel steam directly, and that will connect to the power sources, and will also run through the sewers, and run into the backs of houses – for example, to radiators that you might have in the back of your house – Stream is shut down.

33:05 Lord British. It looks as if there’s a problem with Starr’s stream. Until he returns online, he’ll handle questions – looking at the chat logs. FireLotus interrupts. She was teasing a bit – the kobolds the players met don’t seem very intelligent yet, and they were wondering why that was. Lord British. That’s just because of how early they are in the evolution of kobolds. Players will begin to see some of that intelligence coming online in the outdoor map near the Graff Gem Mines that will be coming in the next release or two. The kobolds have sort of moved in and are squatting in what was the Graff properties, and you’ll be able to interact conversationally with kobolds, and see their outlook towards humanity and why they have it. So far, the kobold’s we’ve seen are purely enemies – they will get deeper as more maps and more of the story comes online.

34:20 Starr. Asks about where he was cut off. Lord British. Where the discussion was about Scott drawing them – the steam coming up and the rotating fans. Starr. It’s really just a cool set for them to build with that they hope to get online in Release 16, and includes everything from direct pipes that connect with the steam vents, and so on. Cool stuff. Passes to FireLotus.

35:02 FireLotus. The next question is from Lord Lonn, who wants to know about the sounds effects in the game. He specifically asks about death sound effects, but overall wants to know how close we are to getting new sound effects.

35:17 Lord British and Starr in unison. Chris!

35:21 Chris. Notes he missed the question. Lord British. Everybody’s asking when Chris is going to get more sound effects in the game.

35:30 Chris. Melchior has actually made them some new sound effects – some will be put in this next release, just because it's horrid they don’t have sound on a lot of things. But with Unity 5, they’ll be redoing the entire sound system, which will give them a lot of new options in terms of what they can do. So they’ll be getting more sounds – probably a few dozen more to fill in some gaps – but until Unity 5 comes out there’ll probably not be that much more. It’s one of the things that they’ve been kicking down the road until these systems get updated.

36:16 Lord British. Something that they’ve been talking about is getting more ways players can invoke audio into the game Right now one of only the ways that a player can invoke sound into the game is walking and maybe clapping – one of the things they’ll like to get in is a few more emotes, like boos, or others that allow players to make grunts or groans, with a few gender variations.

37:07 Chris. Those will make it into R14 – many of the emotes.

37:12 Starr passes it to FireLotus.

37:13 FireLotus. Several people have asked about this – Tarsin would like to know a little more about the timeline of player owned towns.

37:34 Starr. They’re both incredibly pleased and frightened by the success of player owned towns. A lot more has been sold than they thought would be, which has helped them with their funding, and that’s an exciting added feature to the game. With that said, it’ll be a little while until they can work on that with earnest – since they have a lot of other things to do first. The summer is the earliest they can work on those – that’s the soonest people can expect a process to be in place for it also. Feel free to create ideas and discuss it amongst yourselves, but currently they’re not going to be working on that.

38:41 Chris. Probably a quarter to, they’ll be working on a couple, just to figure out how they’re going to get the things in place and understand how the process should be, so they can make it work smoothly for everyone. So they’ll work on a few and get feedback first, rather than doing everyone at once – a few lucky people will see some of this earlier.

39:05 Starr. The fundamental thing to remember is they’ll reach out to players to get the things they need. So if someone is submitting support tickets or suggestions it in the forums right now, please be patient and know that they won’t respond now. People need to wait until this summer. Passes to FireLotus.

39:34 FireLotus. Notes it helps if she unmutes. The next question is from Lady Amber Raine, who would like to know whether there’ll be any type of “I ban thee” or other permission setting that will prevent people from entering housing lots and keep them from griefing.

39:56 Starr. Yes. The permission system that’s in the game right now isn’t the final iteration – it’s a basic first pass. They hope to have in some ways for players to control access to the property and keep others from coming into your yard. They don’t know how exactly it will work, details are still being hashed through.

40:26 Chris. A lot of the talk is about the fiction – how to make it sound and feel natural.

40:35 Starr. Yea. They have the ability to do it technically now… it’s just a matter of how the UI is, what the permission looks like, how they handle it, and what happens to the person who’s already standing on the property – whether they’re teleported somewhere or what else happens.

40:54 FireLotus. She’s a fan of teleporting elsewhere. Mischievous grin. The next question is from chat, from enru, who doesn’t want the main plot to be spoiled, but wants to know if some point players will get a very basic overview of Novia and the setting and the basic, overarching story.

41:16 Starr. That’s a good question, and what he’ll put Richard on the hook for is scheduling a hangout sometime in the near future that’s a basic “Tour of Novia”, where they take the map and spend about an hour going through the highlights without giving away the story – talking about what’s going on and the conflicts that are happening in broad strokes.

42:00 Lord British. Great idea – he loves it.

42:05 Starr. Expect to see it in the near future.

42:13 Lord British. It should be done concurrent with the first release of Abe’s map, and that way it can be done by going around on that map.

42:28 Starr. That’ll be the February release; from late February to early March. Look at them – they’re scheduling things live!

42:42 FireLotus. Notes she even wrote it down. The next question comes from Beli Mawr, who wants to know if there are any plans for a decoration mode, where decorations can be toggled on and off.

42:49 Starr. Yes. It’s something he wants because of experiences firsthand where he wanted to do something with his interface, but accidentally picked up furniture and turned it around, and messed up decorations that he spent hours setting up. There’ll probably be a mode which can be turned off somehow. How they do that, they don’t know yet. Where it’ll get complicated is where you want to have a dinner party, where you may want to move some things – like a dish of food or a mug – but may not want to move other things, like a picture on the wall.

43:55 Lord British. Or it’s either open or closed.

43:56 Starr. So, they want to support some way to do that, but don’t know exactly how it’ll be.

44:10 FireLotus. Tarsin and someone else in chat wanted to know if there are plans for iterations on camera perspective when a player is speaking with an NPC. Sometimes when a dialogue occurs, and the camera zooms in, there are bugs that are involved in the transition.

44:35 Starr. The camera tries to pick the best angle where both the player and the NPC are in the shot, and if that can’t be done, then at least where the NPC is in the shot. This doesn’t always work – so they’re going to continue to polish and work on that. It’ll definitely be better than it is now... though might not be perfect at launch

45:12 Chris. The system that’s in now definitely should be considered first pass. Lum actually wrote that camera system in about a day. He’s the one who also does a lot of the story and conversation, and so camera and graphics programming is not his forte. Someone else who has more expertise is going to take a pass at that – it’s one of those areas were many improvements can be made. Starr passes to FireLotus.

45:57 FireLotus. The next question is a fun one from redfish – he’d like to know what everybody’s New Year’s resolutions were.

46:04 Starr. A group resolution is that each year they do a weight loss challenge to work off all the weight they gain over the holiday season. That was just kicked off this Monday – everybody puts money in, and if they meet their goal, they get their money back. People who don’t meet their goal, don’t get their money, and the people who do, get to take the pot. Last year he and FireLotus took the pot.

46:50 Chris. Notes that the pot was his money. He kicked it off by putting up about $200… but a lot of things got in the way, including being sick and having a baby.

47:04 FireLotus. Usually, when you’re sick you lose weight.

47:08 Chris. Not if you can’t exercise and have bronchitis.

47:14 FireLotus. Tell the community about the PvP component.

47:20 Starr. There’s definitely no rules about whether someone can, say, decide to bring a cake to the office, or bring in a dozen donuts, or fresh baked chocolate cookies from their wife, or order some pizzas – and encourage everyone else to eat these things. Starr and Chris sternly smile together. Starr. So, meanwhile, everyone who has to, eats health bars he thinks made from sawdust and water.

47:54 Chris. Starr also has to use his power sparingly, because he can also ask everyone to work overtime, which means they also have to stay overtime for food, when he might order barbeque or pizza. Hopefully, he’ll place nice.

48:12 Starr. He’ll order salads for everybody, and that’ll go over well. Chris agrees. As for individual resolutions, his was just to exercise more, and also to not use his mobile device in front of his daughter as much as he has in the past.

48:44 Chris. His was just to spend more quality time with his daughter, take more pictures and more videos with her, to read two books a night to her. For those who are Facebook friends with him, they’ll probably see he’s been doing good on videos and photos.

49:17 Lord British. He didn’t make any, but he liked theirs, so adopts theirs.

49:22 Starr. Good job!

49:26 FireLotus. Her resolution was to do more creative writing – her writing done for work loses something, and she misses the practice of creating the stories and worlds of her own.

49:48 Starr. Nice. Passes back to FireLotus for the next question.

49:50 FireLotus. The next question is from MartinE, who wants to know why there’ll be no Windows XP and Vista support planned.

49:58 Lord British, giving a hearty laughter. Ho Ho Ho! Christopher!

50:01 Chris. Technically, it does run on XP and Vista right now, but just like Microsoft has stopped supporting those operating systems, they don’t want to officially support those. The only problems it has running on those right now is memory limitations. There’s some work that they’ll get into the next release that should help with that, and some will help when they move to Unity 5. He knows that there are some people still running the game on these operating system, since he can see it on the running logs, but it’s below 1% of their audience. Most people are running Windows 7, and about 97% are running a 64-bit OS. They don’t technically support the earlier versions, because Microsoft has stopped supporting them, but it still runs and they hope it’ll run better.

51:01 Lord British. The memory management on those systems will always be difficult – so as much as many people might resist Windows 8 for a variety of reasons – Windows 7 is what they encourage people to upgrade to.

51:25 Chris. Windows 7 is the best Windows operating system that has been made in terms of support and developers – they got so many things right on it – and it’s the first one that’s 64-bit across the board. On Windows XP and Vista – XP is only limited to 2 GB of memory to process and he thinks Vista is 3 GB. So it can be run, but many zones won’t load. In the next release, there’ll probably be things in which will make it so it will run. There’ll be some changes that will cut down the texture loading in half that will get the memory down. But the final issue is they don’t want to support ten year old operating systems, at least not longer than Microsoft does. However, they’re not intentionally not supporting them – nobody there runs those operating systems, and they’re just a small fraction of the player base.

52:45 Starr. Seven minutes are left. Passes to FireLotus.

52:51 FireLotus. The next question is from Lordy, who wants to know about the tutorial system and ways that’ll improve moving forward.

53:01 Starr. As was stated before, normally something like a tutorial and hint systems is one of the last things that are implemented, because they want to be able to incorporate all of the systems that are in the game, and when those are in flux, what that means whenever something is changed, they have to go back and change the hint and tutorial system to reflect the changes, doubling their work. That said, they know the beginning of the game is quite challenging and sandboxy – not necessarily in a good way – but their investment in those systems will be deferred until closer to official launch. Some iterative improvements will be done over the next few releases – Stream is shut down.

54:21 FireLotus. There’s a lockup again – hopefully the team will be back.

54:27 Lord British. In the meantime, they’ll move forward.

54:32 FireLotus. The next question – Chris. They’re back! Asks if others can hear them. Lord British acknowledges them. Starr asks where he was lost. Lord British. Right at the end.

54:41 Starr. A subtle change that’ll be made for R14 is going to be that you can’t leave the starting keep area unless you grab the sword first, so you don’t screw yourself by going against the skeletons with only your fist.

54:52 Chris. Also, they would have probably not put in the tutorial experience except for the fact that they were getting on Steam, and they knew that the players coming in would be a little more casual, less hardcore, and less familiar with the game. They pushed that in a little earlier than they normally would have. It will improve.

55:18 FireLotus. The last few questions come from Duke Violation, who would like to know a lot of things – breaking them down into two categories: spells and pets – like, things you do as an avatar, -- and also about wands and staves – as well as gathering.

55:48 Starr. They plan to iterate on wands and staves in R14, including recipes to make them. The plans for wands and staves are is that they’ll be the auto-attack equivalent of a sword or a bow for a caster play-type. So they’re meant to be low damage, automatic attack, but they also want them to have lower damage than a bow, but also offer other benefits, like increasing more focus pool or decreasing fizzle chance, or things like that, so they’ll definitely be the weapon of choice for casters.

56:44 Chris. A couple of versions might make in for this release. It’s on the schedule, although they’re getting tight on time.

56:55 Lord British. Those wands and staves will add differing values to your fizzle and focus attributes to make them relevant.

57:13 Starr. Exactly. So, have those equipped will for instance, decrease fizzle chance for spells, or it’ll increase your overall focus pool, or it’ll increase your focus regeneration rate – everything that’ll help casters. Or, it might increase your intelligence, et cetera. Asks about the other groups of questions.

57:37 FireLotus. He wanted to know how they felt all the new spells that were added in R13 worked out.

57:50 Chris. They need a lot of tuning, though people are using more spells than last time, after he first tuned them up. Checking the logs, there were some spells that were still used less than a hundred times during the release, which was probably only done for trying them out. Many spells had much higher use. The stances were a bit like they expected, though they need a lot of tuning still. He actually planned on talking with a couple of people in game and trying to get some more specific feedback about spells, since they just sat down in a meeting on what’s going to be in for R14 combat. It was a two and a half hour long heated meeting, with many disagreements, which some player feedback can help them sort out. For the most part, it all worked out as expected; though there are still a lot of problems, casters are getting closer to being viable. He went in himself as a caster, though, and knows it’s still not where it should be, and not fully possible to play as a full caster – which they do want.

59:19 Starr. They know that summoned elementals and creatures need more tuning so that they’re more effective. They’re right now the best use of a player’s skill points, while they should be incredibly powerful, yet expensive in terms of skill points – while right now, they’re mediocre and ineffective. Having a fire mage summon a fire elemental should be a really big deal, where everyone goes “Oh no!” – or “Oh yes!”, depending on what side of the fight you’re on. They’ll eventually get there.

1:00:5 Chris. Violation was running some tournament and testing this, so he values his feedback on this, as someone who watches and talks to a lot of people. He plans to chat with him and a few others.

1:00:26 Starr. The hangout is out of time, but he’d like to get in at least three more questions.

1:00:32 FireLotus. There’s a question in chat from Raven Swiftbow, who wants to know if the pledge rewards will get into R14.

1:00:46 Lord British starts, Starr interrupts. He asks the same question every day, and so does Chris. This is one of the biggest challenges for the crew – to get this in. They’ve tried to get it in for several releases already, but it’s a very complex task that connects two relatively separate systems; your in-game inventory and your account information. Now, those have to become tightly connected to each other. In order to do that, they also have to work on banks, and that’s connected to encumbrance. There’s a lot of assurance that they’re on track to have a pass of it done in Release 14.

1:01:44 Chris. They made the mistake several releases in a row on banks and rewards, where they deferred the work because they thought it wouldn’t get done. Last release, they decided that even though it wouldn’t get done, they had to start working on it anyway. The rewards have far more dependencies than other things in terms of in-game systems : some players won’t be able to carry all the things that they get in rewards, so there really needed to be a bank system in place.

1:02:22 Starr. Right now, it’s their top priority, and their second priority is Unity 5.

1:02:29 Chris. It requires information from the website and the game server, the in-game side also required a lot of UI development, and there also needed to be a system in place so if you log into the game, the game server is told that you got your stuff, but where if there was a character wipe, you’d get it all back – which currently wouldn’t happen, as your character inventory gets deleted when your character does. There are a lot of edge cases to handle, and they have to make sure its rock solid, because otherwise, every time players don’t get a reward, it’ll mean a support ticket for them. It’s a big system – much bigger than most people think – about 171 data items that would be assigned to characters.

1:03:34 FireLotus. She might ask for donations of chocolate and booze when it does go up. Starr and Chris smile in glee. The last question is from Net, who wants to know about weight and encumbrance in R14, and how much players will actually be able to carry.

1:03:54 Chris begins, interrupted by Lord British. It’ll be 12 and half stones. Starr. He’s just making up a number. Chris asks Lord British how much a stone weighs. Lord British. About 12 pounds. Chris. 12 or 16? The fans will correct them. The current target is around 150 units, though that’ll probably changed. In the first few releases, they’ll probably go easy on people. It’s probably not the weight that’ll cause problems, but encumbrance, since some armor will be moved away from slugs. Some armor will not add slugs to a player’s deck if you play with that deck. It’ll instead add extra encumbrance, and there’ll be skills to reduce the extra encumbrance. The encumbrance will cause pain to the character in various ways, including speed. Pauses. 14 pounds! A stone weight is right in the middle of what he and Lord British said.

1:05:06 FireLotus. The people in chat are saying 14 pounds. Although, some people are saying 10, and one is saying a 20, so they don’t really know.

10:05:15 Chris. There are a lot of different stones out there. They haven’t set a final number on the amount you can carry, and whatever number they put will change. Now that there’s a bank, however, that system can finally be put into place, and find what feels good. There are a lot of different things that need to be tuned up, including with items and what items weigh. That hasn’t been given a lot of attention, and there isn’t currently good consistency. They also need to determine what feels good for an adventure – they don’t want to make it too painful, where you’re forced to go back every five minutes, but they do want to force decisions on players and have them make choices on both on what to take and what to leave, and what to wear – for example whether they want to wear heavy armor or light armor – one of the benefits of light armor, of course, is that its lighter. Again, there’s no set number, and it’ll change.

1:06:27 FireLotus. She wonders how someone who goes naked to carry more is actually carrying things.

1:06:40 Starr. That can’t be talked about in polite company.

1:06:42 FireLotus. The wrap up question is about what everyone is looking forward to in R14.

1:06:50 Starr. The same one players are looking forward to – which is pledge rewards and banks.

1:07:06 Chris. Encumbrance, and, as always, combat. He loves going in and seeing if the changes make a large difference and moves the dial towards a better system. A lot of good things are going in for combat, which he might talk about, or otherwise people will find out about in Starr’s post for R14. It’ll be exciting!

1:07:38 Lord British. He’s always looking forward to the crafting and the economy developments.

1:07:58 Starr. Just a reminder: they’ll be at PAX South at San Antonio next weekend. Friday, Richard and him will there, and Finn Staber will be there all weekend, and Scott Jennings – a.k.a. Lum the Mad – will be on a panel about trolls, of all things. If anyone is planning to attend, they should come and see them, and they’ll be giving out giveaways and prizes every day.

1:08:44 Lord British. Once again, thanks to the community for coming along on the journey. They owe a debt of gratitude, and it’s thrilling to log into the game and play right alongside everyone as the game develops. It’s turning out to be so much more than they could have done without the community.

1:09:38 Chris. Thanks to everyone. There people who reported bugs and exploits, and its great they have a mature audience who understands the value of that. It ended up being some obscure things, like text files that in English read one way, but in the EU read a different way, and periods became commas, and things that became .02 became 2.0. Just having an audience who understands all that is great – we have the largest QA team in the world – and also the best QA team in the world.

1:10:41 Starr. Thanks to the community for their support, who without them they wouldn’t be able to do this at all. The fact that the players are very prolific in feedback and bug reporting is invaluable. A lot of people will get into early access to play the game early and not submit feedback, but the vast majority is interested in doing that. This makes a better game for everyone.

11:11:41 FireLotus. Thanks to everyone for joining the hangout – everyone is looking forward to seeing the players in R14, and what they play and what they have to share, and all of the cool events. Signs off.

 

Excellent work as always!

 

Thanks Redfish.

 

Thank you, redfish!

 

Absolutely great. Many big thanks!

 

Thank you, redfish!

 

Thanks for your great works!