News

Updates to 32bit Meovanni

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Created: Monday, 08 September 2014 01:47

Written by James

Hey guys!

I wanted to show you how AMAZING the Pixels have been lately! We've been working hard on remaking all the default art in Furcadia (6000+ assets!) into a fresh, clean, 32bit style, which will be available for everyone to use eventually. We are using Photoshop to make the art into two different sizes: one at the current Furcadia size, and the other size at 200% size for the Web Client! Meovanni has been the first main map to receive this polished art, and if you scroll down you'll see the original 8bit version compared to the 32bitized one. We've made a lot of art since the last time you saw Meovanni, and soon this week the new version will be loaded into Furcadia for you guys to walk around in!

This is still a work in progress though, as some of the items shown in Meovanni haven't been converted to 32bit yet. But we've made a huge dent in the workload lately! The lovely artists involved in this project so far are Allen, Arialonomus, Deathdog, Degu, Dream Dancer, Farren Dustfur, Gar, Goregoat, Heimdall, Dainilli, Juliet, Kono, SylverNight, Rew, Linnet, myself, Intellectual Music, Rat The Unloved, Suzy, Tarra, The Shadow Rider, Tiponya, and Wani! Talk about a group project! ;)

Click to see a bigger version:

Jackalope

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Created: Wednesday, 03 September 2014 07:53

Written by Emerald Flame

Happy September! I thought you all might like to know what goes into a new avatar and its promotion! As you may or may not know, the money from Digo Market goes directly to pay for servers, payroll and business expenses. The Second Dreaming money is kept separate so it is important for us to keep the sales up and new avatars coming out.

The Jackalope is a great one to talk about! This bunny started its conception as a snow rabbit or hare. Easter was coming and the tiny Rabben needed a larger, more detailed version. Majas assigned the making of it to Darling. As the concept sketch was being made with the longer proportions, it reminded us of a jackrabbit. Darling asked if antlers could be put on it. Well then, we had to have a discussion! If we added the antlers it became a Jackalope, which is a Mythical being, one we had actually considered making before. It was just too cute with the antlers though, so our minds were made for us.Â

Most of the avatar, portraits and Butler were made early last Spring, but the main artists got busy with other things, so it got put on a back burner. Sync took the avatar over in late Spring to finish it all up. All Furcadia avatars are really a group project. Majas often does the concept sketch after she and I have talked about what we are looking for. Usually Lobsel Vith does the Butlers, but sometimes Degu helps too, as was the case with this one. Often different artists do the portraits. In this case Darling started them and Sync did the backgrounds and polish work.

After being assigned, the main artist does a 'first standing' (SW facing) pose. This is the hardest frame of the avatar! Majas and I work closely with the artist to get the style as we envisioned and make sure the avatar is in correct isometric perspective. Back standing is probably more difficult though, because we have to break isometric perspective a bit to make it look appealing. The 'Lope hops, so its animation frames were especially challenging. Hopping avatars have a different frame order, stand-stretch-stand-bunch-stand, with the avatar always landing on standing. So after standing, sitting, hopping, back standing, sitting and hopping, there were four laying poses to do. Each frame has multiple checks by both Majas (sometimes Rat) and I to make sure it is on model and perspective. After all of that, it still needs its markings/clothing done and propagated to all the frames, as well as shadows. Often another artist will help with those, but Sync did all the 'Lope ones. Then there's final polish and tweaks, and then Gar does the final positioning. It takes a lot of patience and tenacity to be an avatar artist!

Mythicals always have some kind of magical power, although Mythical Ferians usually fly. Obviously a Jackalope wouldn't fly, so Team Dragon brainstormed for ideas. Gar thought of the 'Lope changing places, but several other ideas were considered too! Then I needed to ask the Coders, Ninja specifically, how hard the new 'magic power' would be and if it would require client or server code. We can add server code with a restart, but client code would need a forced client update. We had an issue though because Ninja had a lot of Second Dreaming work to do and didn't have time right away to program in the Magic effect.

In the mean time, Rei-Jin and I brainstormed about the promotion and release of the avatar. The Primes Heros vs Villains promotion was so popular this Summer that we thought it would be fun to bring in the community on the Jackalope too. Since we had several ideas for the magic effect, it just made sense to have those buying the avatar help decide which power it would have. After we talked it through, Rei wrote up a backstory for the 'Lope that included the Primes. Dark Prime Erigon was an obvious choice, being a sneaky rabbit character, but we didn't want it too dark, so we brought in some Light Primes to offset that. Pye did the color job for Erigon really fast for us. Then Muun worked her web magic and put the versus page together! A Coder put in the pre-sale Dragonsbreath Orbs and Rei puts in the new sales.

Now it is almost time for the release party for the Jackalope, or Kindling Party, as we call them these days. The new magic power is not yet set in stone, so you can still influence the outcome by getting a pre-sale Lope! Ninja is currently programming both effects into the server, so we can attach the winning on to the avatar, and they will go live during the restart later this week. Bugge Hunters will need to test the code to be sure it works right in test world. Gar just needs to do final positioning and then the avatar will be ready. Rei and I still need to decide what fun game we will do at the party, so people can win a trial version of the new avatar. And finally, after months of work and the whole Team in on it, this week the Jackalope will hop into its place in a long line Furcadia avatars!Â

Jemmion's Rameen Festival!

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Created: Friday, 29 August 2014 11:23

Written by Emerald Flame

Good morning again! Jemmion's Rameen Festival opened last night and I thought you all might like to hear the history of this celebration. While Talzhemir was writing the backstory of the Primes in 1995/96 and her and Felorin were creating Furcadia, things were a bit lean. Lets just say they ate a lot of ramen! So she wrote of a festival for Prime Jemmion that celebrated good eating, the oceanside, summer nights and fun and named it after the always plentiful ramen noodle.Â

In Furcadia, this was the first official festival that we celebrated. I used to hold the party in Sanctuary and at some point Zephyr and I borrowed a Dream the early Beekins made for one of their parties and fixed it up for the festival. No one could get the surfing, one the main attractions early on, to work right until Ryhn came in to help. He was always the one who got the complicated rides and games to work on main maps. He did the turtles in SS Showcase, the barge in the Sun Fest, and the flowers in Naia too! A few years later when Gar and I created the Festival Grounds map, we didn't move the Rameen into it like the other festivals, because not even Ryhn could get the waves to work in the new map. I think it is Prime's magic! After all you can often catch site of Prime Jemmion, himself, attending the festival.

Each year we add something new to the festival! Indigo Nightfall made the lovely skin we use one year and Gar made the Parrot Trivia another year. Very early on the Pixels lead by Mara~Fae FireHeart made the Underwater Dream with all the fishy avatars. Nommad put in his awesome Guitar Hero-like game some years back and another year Gar added a message in a bottle quest with the help of Kaelin'yFaie. This year Crunchward, Althia, and the Masons updated the DS and added a few of the 32-bit patches, including the Bouncy Castle pictured, which Talzie made and Rat turned 32-bit! I even added in the lovely nighttime lighting for this summer night beach party!

It takes a whole community to make a festival. Muun moved the Rameen page into the new CMS Site this year. Re-jin, Xxy, Epitome, and other Eventers ran the events last night and should have more of them planned for the coming weeks. Majas and Treeki helps get the 32-bit patches in and Majas also made this fun little gif of us on the Bouncy Castle with the lighting shown. And of course, it isn't a festival without the community there so come party with us!

Furcadia.com

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Created: Thursday, 28 August 2014 11:41

Written by Emerald Flame

Woooo! We are so excited to announce the official release of the new website funded by The Second Dreaming! It is still in development but we have many pages ready or close enough to release! The home page is live and even shows different things if you are a new player (not logged in) or if you are logged in. Most of the new player and help links are already to go. Now you can be proud to show them off to your friends! Any pages that are not on the new site are still linked on the old, so all the content is still available as we refurbish.

Muunokhoi is the main drive in this project and runs the Scribes that are working on the pages. Muun, Majas, Tigger Fellini, Crunchward, Kamata, Kitasu, Koolpin, Kedessa, Ceus, Elso, Ani and others are doing the work to move the old pages over. They update the code and content while they are at it, creating contemporary and fresh pages! Cironir does much of the writing for the new pages, keeping the voice and style consistent. We had over 900 pages on the old site, all of which needed to be sorted and evaluated as to which we would move to the new site. These guys have done a really kickass job of putting this together! Be sure to watch every week for more new pages that are ready!

Can't have webpages without art and our new pages are gorgeous! The initial template design was done by Majas, Gar and myself. We kept the branded Furcadia colors, toning them down a bit and modernizing the interface. The base UI tells a story of Light and Dark woven together with the breath of The Dragon to encompass our content and community. Many of the artists in the Pixels have lent their time to create all the lovely interface pieces and the treasure trove of Prime art and Butlers which decorate the pages!

Of course, none of this would work without our awesome Coders! Frostyfrog is the main guy doing the front end coding and making sure all the Joomla modules are working. He's a very busy frog and even just fixed the bug that was causing troubles uploading custom tags! Kashi Commodore is the power behind the backend of the system. He is the one who does most of the coding and maintenance for the engines. Yasabu and most of the other Coders also help with parts of the page code. Watch for better services, improved Groups, Character pages, Howl and much more coming soon!

Can you find the page with the art below on it? :)

Encryption!

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Created: Tuesday, 26 August 2014 10:06

Written by Emerald Flame

Hello! Just a short note today! Treeki told you a bit more about the new sprite sheet Fox format the Coders are working on. They are coming along nicely on that and in fact, Dewi has just made the new way we will be encrypting art. I thought you all might like to see! First one is a new sprite sheet of item3.fox. The second image is what that sprite sheet would look like after encryption! I'm , of course, not going to give you any details as to how! This does take care of a huge worry we've had with images being encrypted on the Web Client. It will also work nicely on the windows client to tighten security for your patches!

I will have more pics of the new Default Avatars, a bit on the new Jackalope, the latest of the 32-bit default patch work and a piece on the restart this week. Be sure to check back often! :)

FOX Editor Updates!

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Created: Sunday, 24 August 2014 02:08

Written by Treeki

Treeki here with some news about patches!

My current project involves getting support for Sprite Sheets into the Horus library that underpins our Windows client and editors. Emmie talked about this a little last month, but I thought you might want to know a bit more!

Sprite Sheets are what we call the latest version of the Fox format, which Farrier/Dewi has designed with input from the rest of the Coders. Of course, we wouldn't have made a change like this without good reasons, and there's quite a few: faster loading (especially in the new web client), smaller downloads, and various updates to prepare for releasing features like lighting effects and double-size art.

The latter introduces a new component to Fox files, which we're currently calling "Aspects". Each Shape can include multiple Aspects - for instance, normal-size and double-size versions of a pillow or table - and Furcadia will automatically pick the correct one. This has required a redesign of the way patches are handled behind-the-scenes, and that's what I've been working on over the past month. I'm quite proud of my efforts so far - even though this new system supports more features, my new code is smaller, cleaner, and faster! Or at least I think it is... I may be a little biased ;)

The Dream Editor and Furcadia client can be moved over to this system fairly easily - I've already got the former up and running with spritesheets! - but the FOX Editor has proven to be a little more difficult, because its editing features use so many parts of Horus that the other tools don't need.

This isn't the only issue: We need to make some changes to the interface to add in support for features like Aspects and the settings used for the lighting system. Gar has been lending a very helpful paw with interface design for these, but all of this stuff needs to be programmed as well.

In order to make this easier, we've decided to rewrite the FOX Editor using the Qt framework. This is a system I've worked with a lot in the past, and it allows us to develop a modern and user-friendly interface with much less work than the older libraries we currently use - which is a boon with our limited resources, and means we can get these updates done faster and create a better end product!

You can see a prototype of what this looks like here! It's still very much a work in progress, and the final version will look much more like the editor we have now - I've only been working on this version for a couple of days - but nevertheless I'm quite excited about it. The difference between developing with Qt and the older framework we were using before is like night and day!

I think I've rambled enough now ;) Time to dig my grubby paws back into C++ code!

~ Treeki

The Dragon

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Created: Saturday, 23 August 2014 09:17

Written by Emerald Flame

I've been talking about the Pixels a lot lately and this is because they are really on fire right now! We've had five new ones just this week; Sylvernight, Arialonomus, Suzy, Intellectual Music, and The Shadow Rider! Also Tiponya has come back to help as well! Most of the new ones are working on the project to get all of the default patch double sized and into 32-bit. Furcadia will be so pretty once we do! Of course many of the other Pixels are also helping with the default patch and other projects, including the Butlers I mentioned last, the 32-bit default Avatars, sales graphics, interface art and art for the new webpages! Dainilli/Hythen, Degu, Farren Dustfur, Goregoat, Heimdall, Juliet, Linnet, Wani, Deathdog, Rew, Rat, Alluvial, Gar, Majas, and Tarra are all working on the default patch and avatars!

One of the things we have wanted for the pages is lovely painted backgrounds like other sites have. Majas has started several of them but she is a busy lady and finding time to paint is hard! So we've asked one of the newer Pixels, Taikata Verloose, to paint for us. She does really amazing digital paintings and has started with painting The Dragon. As most of you know, The Dragon is the being who made all of the Dreaming, the universe that the Furcadia Canon takes place in. We've always had The Dragon on our webpages and we are thrilled with this lovely new rendition of it. The Dragon is meant to be a mix of male and female and represents the team of Felorin and Talzhemir, who originally created Furcadia! We are happy to do them honor with this exquisite new art piece for the pages and promotional material!

We highly encourage you all to come watch much of this lovely new art being worked on too! Most nights you can watch a live stream of Pixels working and even other staff and groups. Ninja and Treeki currently getting a batch of code ready for a server restart this week and Ninja will be live streaming on that tonight. Just log into Furcadia and listen for the announcements we make to SD Backers and Sponsors!

Butlers!

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Created: Thursday, 21 August 2014 06:13

Written by Emerald Flame

You know the fat little cat next to your portrait in Furcadia? You know the one that holds the items you pick up in Dreams? We call that little fluffball the Butler and one thing we are doing in TSD is making Butlers extra cool! Every avatar will have its own butler and we will even offer custom butlers at some point! So when you click on someone you will see their character's Butler like you see their portraits now. This does mean we have to go back for every avatar and made the butler for it though! Lobsel Vith can do these amazingly well ad so very fast and is heading up the team for Butlers. Allen, Goregoat, Darling, Brooke, Degu, Majas and others have been helping with them as well.

The very cool thing about the Butler art though, is we are not just making them as tiny butlers for the game interface. We can also use the art to advertise the Digos and as decorations on flyers and pages! They are a hugely valuable resource! You can see an example of one in use for our newest avatar, the Jackalope! We even have a contest on that page to choose what magic power this mischievous trickster will have!

The other thing we are making the Butler art for is the new Character Create/Edit! You will notice that each section of a Butler has a black outline around it. That is so that each remapping color can be selected while you are creating your character. This will make our Character Create so much more sexy and modern! It is , after all, one of the first things new players see about Furcadia! Yasabu and Frosty are working on getting the new Character Create made and we may be bringing in some extra help from an programmer from India that Yasa has worked with before. So much to do and so little time!

Right now Lobs is working through the Mythical avatar butlers. Isn't this Phoenix amazing? :)

Default Patch

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Created: Wednesday, 20 August 2014 08:57

Written by Emerald Flame

I mentioned in an earlier blog post about all the Pixels busy with the redo of the default Furcadia artwork but I'd like to give a few more details on this! Rew, Tarra and Rat the Unloved did the initial set up of this project and Majas has been doing a lot of the more recent management along with myself. :) This is one of the biggest of the art project for TSD with over 6,000 pieces of art needing to be double sized, cleaned up, outlined in the new style and new shadows done. We got a bit of a slow start but the paces has increased dramatically now with new Pixels to help and much excitement! Majas did a tutorial that shows how we do each object if you want to know how! You can also watch others working on this project as well as several other official ones most nights in a Youtube livestream (Announced in Furcadia). You will see how we do all of work in Photoshop or other art programs rather than the 32-bit editors.

(The editors are not quite ready to give out to the Pixels. Treeki and Ninja are still working on getting them all fixed up! They need to add in the new Fox file format that I mentioned in an earlier blog post too.)

If you follow the instructions on Majas' tutorial, you can start getting your patches ready for the update as well! If you don't, your Dream can be grandfathered to work in the same way it does now or you can choose to have your art auto-stretched at the time. We will be releasing the new editors to Backers and Sponsors before Update 31 too though!

Here is another group of patch work that has been redone by Majas, Degu, Intellectual Music, Deathdog, The Shadow Rider, Dream Dancer, and Farren Dustfur!