Today the new streamlined Divergence-Online website went online, replacing the original as the first page you will see when traveling to Divergence-Online.com
Compared to the current portal, the new site has a lot less clutter, fewer links, and is hopefully much easier to navigate by individuals without computer science degrees.
The new site frontend also contains several new images and info never before seen by mortal eyes. These are just a taste of what we hope to unleash in the coming weeks to the public.
The site is considered a work in progress since there is still much data to be uploaded, and a few old links need to be updated. Once the transition is complete, the "forum" link will simply take one to the forums themselves and not to the existing portal page, although a user may still use the portal if they wish by simply clicking the "portal" link at the top of the screen.
No forum data has been modified or deleted. All of your old rants are still there rest assured.
In the future, we hope to integrate login, messaging, and account administration with the new website frontend, which is the reason for the two empty boxes in the top right. This functionality will require us however hire someone who is fluent in php, so thanks in advance for your patience in accomplishing this.
Also on the menu are those long-promised outdoors area images such as the small amount of exterior media one can view from the new website, however what we wish to show is much much more than that, and we are only waiting on an update to your engine which will dramatically redefine the way trees, grass, and fauna are created in Divergence, so it's better for now if we just give it the time it needs rather than post up a ton of stuff that will ultimately just be removed and replaced with new stuff.
As a note to Internet Explorer users, we regret to say that certain tables and images might appear disorted when using Internet Explorer as opposed to Firefox.
As a remedy to this situation, we recommend that anyone still using Internet Explorer uninstall it in it's entirety at their earliest convenience and instead install a proper browser, such as Firefox. This is due to the fact that Internet Explorer sucks, and we really don't want to spend the time to support it.
Thanks for your patience up until this point and we hope you enjoy the new content and site. You guys make it all worthwhile.
I don't have time to use pretty words and come up with an eloquently assembled speech.
Here's what is up.
In the last month we've had a bunch of updates. Mostly good.
On the plus side, after wrestling with the 800-pound gorilla known as "mmo networking capability", we cheated, pulled a hidden knife from our trousers and stabbed the gorilla in the throat, killing it.
It wasn't a clean fight I'll admit, but we're in it to win and you know you'd have done the same.
Thanks to the excellent work of many people Divergence saw it's first successful login less than two weeks ago. then a few moments after that, it's second successful login and then it's 3rd, fourth, 5th, and so on.
To congratulate Jon, our lead programmer and commemorate the occasion, I pulled an assault rifle from my inventory, pointed it at his head and attempted to blow his face off, as is customary in American business. As it turned out however, Jons client didn't display the gun and instead all he saw was me pointing an "invisible gun" at him, making me look quite foolish in front of my subordinate.
This is still very good news though, because it means the majority of hard work associated with mmo networking is done, and only small things theoretically remain such as who sees what. We have to take some time and tie everything to the server that currently only exists locally such as npcs, equipped items, and those kinds of thing.
During the same relative period we also had a major breakthrough implementing and testing our chat system, which once again needs a lot of addition, but it is now safe to say that Divergence has had it's first conversation between players as well.
And now for the most challenging hurdle, humans.
They suck.
More accurately, they're incredibly difficult to implement when you figure in that humans and lokri have a hundred times the customizability as other races in Divergence.
On a more technical note, the abilities granted to us that provide the super sweet facial and body customization require exacting precision in vertex ordering, weights, skinning, and normals. The problem is that it appears to be nearly impossible to retain 100% of those specifications going from our raw models into the engine. It is possible that we may simply have to complete the rest of the game while we essentially wait on the engine to provide us with 1 or 2 updates to address these issues.
Currently it is possible to make a human of either gender, or breed and to do pretty much anything the other races can. This issue is entirely graphical in nature, and we don't want anyone to see the humans for a few more weeks until we've come closer to a fix.
In the meantime, the rest of the game will continue to be developed.
It brings me great pleasure to announce today the next video showcasing our project, Divergence-Online!
Despite 14-hour days and crippled social lives we finally managed to throw something together for the community as a way of saying thanks for these last few months of development. Soon the community and the development team alike will all share in the fruits of this labor.
Synopsis:
This is the first of several videos showcasing some of the environments found in the game: "The Shovel", a VRTek capital ship. The ship, as virtually all ships in Divergence, is its own self-contained world yet exists inside the larger world, allowing players to travel with, to, and from the ship(s) seamlessly and in most cases with zero load times between areas.
The Shovel serves several purposes, most notably being that of a training environment where players can get their bearings familiar with most MMOs and a social hub for interacting, purchasing and selling goods, and other activities.
The ship is first accessible in space while orbiting Lo, the Lokri homeworld, and once it has landed perched atop a hill in an abandoned metropolis (where this video takes place), players can venture to and from it to the wilderness beyond its confines at will, provided you haven't made too many enemies within the vessel itself.
We hope you'll enjoy thr video, and filming for the next - the wilderness itself - is next in line and begins tomorrow.
DISCLAIMER
This video is for the sole purposes of previewing the alpha state of Divergence-Online and does not necessarily represent the final quality of the game. Upon examining the video closely, it is redoubtable that the viewer can and will notice subtle imperfections and areas which should be improved. This is understood and the overwhelming majority of these minor glitches are slated to be addressed before launch.
The reason is has taken so long is that every day it seems something new comes around that "just has to make it in", and because of that it is difficult to decide when enough is enough. For instance, NPCs were recently removed (except for one it seems) when dual-wield was added last week, however rather than wait for even more improvements, we've decided to just release this video now, and simply do another when the characters look their best for the circumstance.
This video is just to give you hope.
This video was uploaded in HD, but you can't see it in HD when it's embedded in another webpage, so if you want to see it in it's highest quality click the link below this line to be taken to the youtube page with it and click on the "watch in HD" link
A couple weeks ago it was alluded to that there was a new video in the works and that we were simply waiting on some things to be completed before releasing it. This is still true. Several of those items have been completed and all projections indicate that the final features will become available very very soon. As always in software it's bad policy to give exact dates, however I wanted to personally make it known how close we are to that milestone.
And now for some brutal truth, just to let the public know what's up.
As much as I hate to say it, I don't like covering up ugly truths and the fact is there are common factors to the overwhelming majority of issues we've had in the past 6 months. The truth is that the engine simply does not support the features we were lead to believe would be implemented as much as ten months ago. Wanting to stay on the edge of state-of-the-art we designed almost all of our assets and features to utilize these engine-dependent features, which has turned out to be a real hurdle when the assets were completed long before the engine became able to handle them, many of which it still does not.
However in the interim, instead of sitting on our hands awaiting these things to be integrated, all areas of the game that can be worked on at the same time without these features have been for some time now.
Prototype Status:
SGL is now dangerously close to releasing our prototype to the world. Unfortunately though 99% of this requires small key features that the engine does not support. However we have begun the process of reassembling the game in a manner which is designed to, once these features are completed (we're now told before 2009) allow us to implement the things we need with great ease and efficiency. We've done almost all we can without them, not it's in the hands of the engine maker Terathon Software.
Funding Status:
SGL received a decent amount of funding last year earmarked for development of our prototype, which is intended to be used as a tool to pitch the larger Divergence IP to venture capital firms. We still have some money left however are always on the lookout for new potential investors. It's always good to have headroom and caffeine is expensive these days. We expect to spend another $20,000.00 on the prototype getting it to the point where it could be marketed over the course of the next few months. Some version of the game will be playable for loyal fans then though we're making no promises of what and how many features will be included.
It is believed that we can still complete the prototype with the funds we have left, however I will continue to entertain all investment options. I don't want to get within a month of completing it and fall short.
Two months ago we began working with a team of business folk to develop the business end of the company further to make it and us more appealing to larger investors. We've completed a new 30+ page professionally-created business plan available to all complete with projections.
State of the Game:
"Module 1", our prototype has been rough. Because a more appropriate engine for the game would have cost us in upwards of $1 million, that would have left us with absolutely nothing left for assets, art, or even salaries therefore we had to go with a newer and different engine, C4.
C4s graphical capabilities are extremely high-end. Divergence, as it is right now, has better graphics than any MMORPG currently on the market. The graphical engine can support virtually all of the same graphical features as Unreal 3, it just needs a few more updates which we are told will be released to developers very soon.
"Netdog", our networking middleware aimed at removing the need for multiple servers has been tested to support 5000 simultaneous connections with an average ping of 82 under simulated circumstances, which is very good. This currently means that though our game is incomplete, it can support twice as many players per server than World of Warcraft, which is something to brag about.
What we're waiting for:
Although considering our choice of engines a good one, the things we're waiting for are unfortunately fundamental. The engine does not support (for instance) what are called "morph targets", which are used to make characters fat, thin, and change the features of their face. As many have noticed no doubt in our facial customization video, we have accomplished this in "cheating the system" by taking a torch to the engine itself instead of waiting on it to be done for us. However the overhead this creates in a non-optimized situation would make it impossible to be used at retail. It's something that absolutely has to be done before we can launch Module 1.
Also on the list of upgrades is a total overhaul of the physics system. To this point, we've been using phys-x for psychic -related content. After the acquisition of Phys-X by Nvidia, things took a turn for the worse with Cuda that lead us to believe a proprietary physics system was the only way to go for an environment of thousands of players. This new optimized system will be released within the next month and re-integrated into the engine shortly afterward taking the place of our old system. The new physics system will also come equipped with a new collision system which is something we've been wanting for a while. During Melee combat characters can get stuck inside one another with is sort of important to work out before letting mass amounts of people beat each other into pulp.
Why haven't I seen anything lately:
Because as it stands, nothing you will see on the video, aside from the character model the player is, has been seen on the website. It's 100% new stuff. Showing images of it would detract from the overall "first time" value of seeing it in a video.
We're still getting our media album re-worked after the moved however I wanted to take the time to give a little look at what we're up to on the inside.
Below are a couple images from a new zone on the borderlands in a ruined former beacon of civilization; Now some 30 Earth years since Lokri actively inhabited, now being reclaimed by the forest.
You can't see a whole lot of anything in these, with good reason (this zone is less than two weeks old) but we figured that something was better than nothing so enjoy
NOTE: Also included below are uncompressed high-rez images straight from the engine with no compression and not cropped for size. Each image weighs in a 5mb so 56Kers beware!
This week we're going to be moving the website to a new host. During that time things may get a big wonky, however when we return we'll have a game update available to the public.
New screenshots have been added to the Media section, and more will continue to be added in the coming weeks as progress goes forward. Additional screenshots have been posted to the classified area of the forums for those of you with contributor accounts. We thank you for your continuing support; please stay tuned for future updates.
It's about time we put some new images up on the website as we're nearing our end of summer deadline.
New stuff for commoner and contributor alike!
The context of these new screenies will be a few interiors and a few exteriors. We are of course extremely limited in which areas we can show but in the spirit of "people would rather see something albeit work-in-progress-quality" rather than nothing at all, we're releasing some.
The outdoor scenes were taken from the Lokri city "Kalhar"; A combat zone where human factions and Lokri alike are devastating the cities once pristine appearance and drawing lines in the sand, or rubble as it were.
Kalhar also has a large subterranean zone where the majority of the cities inner workings can be found. Several of the screens were from one of these areas.
In the next couple days we will be releasing more content as more zones become closer to being "worthy" of showing off. In the meantime the contributors area will be graced with screenshots of player characters instead of just scenery.
We had a lot of fun this year at IMGDC, met a lot of new people, shook a lot of hands and generally had a great time. Among the folk we were fortunate enough to bump into were Rusty and Paul from PX Interactive; makers of their own MMORPG Server middleware. After a lengthy conversation at lunch involving the complexities of our engine and their server architecture, we all ended up blowing off the next workshop entirely to whip out our laptops and try out the software right there.
I'm relatively certain the people frantically clearing off the tables around us were at least mildly annoyed by our presence.
The very next day while showing off our demo to a group of onlookers including Bioware Austin's Gordon Walton, PX CEO Rusty Lee and I signed an officially binding contract licensing their groundbreaking new server software for use in our online game, "Divergence", shaving nearly half a year off of the development time of our game.
This week will be spent modifying our current schedule of improvements and additions to accomodate the adaptation of said server platform to C4 engine and Divergence.
( Left to Right )
Ethan - SGL
Rusty - PX
Paul - PX
Stephen - SGL
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