Second Dreaming Journal

Wolf Howl Fun!

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Created: Saturday, 25 October 2014 19:58

Written by Emerald Flame

Wolf Howl is many people's favorite Festival and even as busy as we are with TSD, we put together a good one for you this year! Majas, Althia, Crunchward, Degu, and I worked on a nice Festival Grounds upgrade! You've got to come see the 32-bit night and fog effects Majas and I added! Majas also added other 32-bit art and did a lovely job adding new sounds! Make sure you have your sounds on while exploring the Dream!

As you probably know, there is a Dragon's Eye Productions Haunted Mansion where spooky version of the game's Creators give you quests! Since I run the staff, I am an evil Kitterwing who enchants all the Team Dragon members to work for me! Crunch helped us update that part this year with all the new Associates and such, so make sure you bump all of them to hear what they say too! Althia also helped a bunch in the patches and DS, fixing bugs, upating, and adding a whole new quest! Xxy, Juliet and the Eventers have been running lots of fun events there too!

Speaking of that new quest, it is pretty exciting. Sylvernight is a 3D artists that runs their own company, Kinzart Productions, making avatars for SL. Sylver played Furcadia a fair bit way back when and when they found out we are working to upgrade Furcadia, came to volunteer as a Pixel! I can't wait to show you the water they made! Sylver has a character and avatar design started back in 2007 called the Darastryx, a dragon-like creature which you can see a 3D model of here. They used isometric still shots of the 3D model to create a Furcadia avatar and agreed to let us use it for free in a Wolf Howl Quest! This makes for awesome cross promotion for us best, as well as giving is a cool way to promote our Social Media sites! Make sure you look for all the quest clues on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. Gar used Sylver's art to make the quest pictures.

Besides the in Dream fun of Wolf Howl, we also have some really awesome contest entries for everyone to enjoy! "Basking in the Moonlight" is the theme this year, which is plenty broad to include most types of Halloween and seasonal Dreams! We are also asking around this year for old WH contest winners that we can put up for exhibit so new people can try them and vets can reminisce. We already have some really lovely Art Contest entries which we have been featuring on Facebook along with entries from the Ode Writing Contest! We also have a spooky Sounds Contest which is a lot of fun. The Participation Contest this time is taking a picture of the Moon and posting it on a Social Media site! I hope people got pics of the big orange moon during the eclipse. There's on a couple of days left but you still have time to enter and get your share of the over 2,000 GDS we usually give out at these seasonal contests!

Rat the Unloved and Majas also came up with another kind of contest following a meme I actually hadn't heard of yet, but which has turned out to be great fun, Spoopy vs Spooky! Like most of are promotions it started as an idea and we all chatted about it and refined the details. Rat made to cool little desctags and Majas drew up adore cat, mouse and bat character in the graphic. Degu colored it up for us and Juliet helped with the promotion graphics! Muunokhoi got the versus pages all ready to go after Majas and I wrote it. There are prizes to be won too! Make sure you get you vote so everyone know if you really scary Spooky or that special kind of Spoopy fun!

Oh! Be sure to check out the cool new graphics Majas has been doing for Digo Market! Lobsel Vith, Brooke, Degu, Rat, and Majas have been working on new Butlers as well to use there and all over! Aren't these new ones for the Wolven and Wolfing amazing? Allen and Pye also got Lokira the Lady of Cruelty, Dark Prime of Pain ready for the background pantheon of WH Primes on the CMS! So many busy Pixels!

The one other Wolf Howl surprise we have for you is our very first (if you don't count Hyoomans) primate avatar, the Lemurkin! We've been planning this one for awhile, but our new Minkin series, this was the perfect time to make it! Majas made the character design and Degu and Rat are helping to make it. Lobsel Vith worked on the Butler and Pye worked in its exclusive black crystal horn desctag. Artex put the special presale Dragonbreath Orbs that Rat made for Minkins in the datebase. Cironir wrote and got the sales up in Digo Market and Majas and Julz worked on the promotional graphics. Yay for Teamwork! I think this avatar made one of my Guardian friends, Heavens Cat, the happiest though as he's always wanted a monkey avatar! Help support Furcadia and go get yours now in Digo Market! Fly my Pretties!

Fox and the Demon!

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Created: Tuesday, 21 October 2014 06:23

Written by Kashi Commodore

Hey there, we often talk about Furcadia and The Second Dreaming on this blog but I'd like to give you some news about Digo Market as well.

As you probably know, Digo Market is the Furcadia 'store' for all your Digos, subscriptions and items. With all this focus on The Second Dreaming it may seem that Digo Market is being overlooked, but I assure you thats not the case. Digo Market is just as much a part of The Second Dreaming as the rest. Recently, we experienced a few bugs with Digo Market, caused primarily by all the upgrades we've been doing to it behind the scenes. Subscriptions were not getting renewed correctly, the site was getting slow, and some emails were not getting sent when they should. Sorry to all those who experienced any problems (and if you did I hope you told us in a Support Ticket!)

I got to work alongside a good friend and local legend in Furcadia, Fox (also known as sanctimonious). He designed the original Digo Market, and also ran it for several years. So he was a natural choice of a person to work with us correcting some of the problems we noticed. Within a few hours we had the market totally upgraded to a new webserver software to tackle the delays. And we figured out the email and subscription problems were the same problem! It seems the Nightwind server wasn't processing the notifications properly! No wonder we never noticed, we were looking at the wrong place. Most Digo Market functions are processed on the Golden Hour server that runs the Digo Market site, the Dragonfalls server that runs the databases or the Lightbringer game server.

You'll be happy to know we've got all those things resolved. As a reward, we have also fixed Fox's infamous lamp post in Naia Green.. say 'Hi' to him if you see him there! (Emmie: His lamp post was what inspired our Exclusive Turf Dark Dreaming reward! Oh, and Fox is currently single! >.>)

Soon, we hope to upgrade the Digo Market to better support our wonderful Gold Sponsors. I've been looking into the code that handles Sponsorship benefits and hope to write back here soon with more good news about that. Oh yes and we did fix the bug with the incorrect Gold Sponsorship tag being shown in your description. Thanks to Artex, Treeki and Dream Dancer for that one!

I mentioned Support Tickets earlier. Well they are very important to us. By filing tickets we become aware of problems much faster. And we are able to track issues, how they were resolved, and help out others with the same problem faster. So if you have an issue, or find a bug - please do file a support ticket! It helps us to help you all, better and faster!

Webpages Galore!

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Created: Tuesday, 14 October 2014 05:34

Written by Posteyam

Have you all noticed that furcadia.com directs you to the new CMS site now ? More and more pages of the regular website are being redirected to the new site instead. That is because the Scribes have been hard at work converting nearly 800 webpages into Joomla. It's nearly halfway done too! Every item in the sticky bar/service menu at the top of the site has been completed. The Community section is only missing a few beekin pages, and the Explore section is just about ready to go. Roleplay and Creations sections are coming up next, and will all be available very soon.

Kamata and Kitasu have been a huge help in converting all of these pages. Majas has been helping as well, and just recently has been pumping out pages like crazy ! Majas has also been going through and updating art, screenshots and content for the pages she converts. Just look at the difference between the old and new versions of the Dream Editor tutorial. We are still working hard on the new 32-bit editors too. Head to Meovanni to see just what they will be capable of. I have also been converting a lot of the pages myself, as well as perfecting, editing and approving the pages that everyone else makes. Emerald Flame and Cironir have also been going through to read, edit and approve every single new page that gets put live. Pye is the recent addition to the Scribes, and already she has been so amazingly helpful. She has not only just helped with adding entries to the Wolfhowl contest pages, she is working very hard to stay up to date and add new entries as they come in. The entries this year are especially exciting. Frostyfrog and Crunchward have been a huge help in combing through and debugging the CMS site. It is looking better and better every day. Frosty has been helping Kashi Commodore answer support tickets related to the website for a while now, and Kashi is continuing to code and develop our new web features every day!

The webpages are moving along nicely though. There is only a little bit of fine tuning left to do on the Community and Explore sections, and they will be completed very soon. Tigger Fellini has updated the Scribes class, and created a brand new Joomla Class for all of our Scribes, and now work is just flying along. The CMS site is looking great so far, thanks to the Scribes and all of the TSD backers!

Support Center

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Created: Monday, 06 October 2014 15:41

Written by Cironir

When we share information and news about The Second Dreaming, it's often about exciting features, fresh designs or gorgeous art. But TSD is really more than "just" a revolution on the technical level. There are also numerous community-related improvements, and one of them is the new Support Center. I'd like to talk a bit about how it works and what we've planned for the future.

We launched the Support Center in January already, a joint effort by Kashi Commodore, who worked the server and script magic, and myself, but it took a little while longer until it lost its generic, fresh-out-of-the-box look and got custom art and skins! Majas, Seley and Muunokhoi provided art. Crunchward and Muun helped with the skinning process. Â If you haven't looked at it in a while, you can visit here: http://support.furcadia.com.

The new Support Center (we often call it "ticket system") is the one-stop for all your inquires about Furcadia that can't be solved directly in-game by contacting one of our Beekin volunteers! (Refresher: You can contact a Beekin volunteer by typing: "help" followed by your question or inquiry, minus the quotation marks.) It is also the replacement for ALL of our previous contact e-mail addresses. Most of them are no longer monitored, so it's important to only use the Support Center when you're looking to get in touch with us.

It is quite popular already, and thanks to its intuitive design many players have successfully used the Support Center for getting help. Over the past months, we had about 1500 individual support cases that resulted in more than 10,000 staff and player interactions. This represents much higher activity than we had registered in the previous support system. Let's look at how it all works!

From the front page, you can access the Knowledge Base, which features several categories that are filled with useful answers to questions that come up often. Kitasu, Gar, and Emerald Flame contributed to these. Please always check here before submitting a support request. There are already many FAQ articles here, and we keep adding new ones! Eventually, we hope that the Knowledge Base will have answers to the vast majority of questions that players are looking for. If anyone would like to submit a help article, please feel free to talk to me.

If your question isn't answered in the Knowledge Base, or your situation is rather individual and specific, e.g. you have an order-related issue, or you're looking for advice on a social matter, you can submit a new support request by clicking on "Open a New Ticket". After filling out the form, you'll receive an email with your ticket ID. Using this ID and your email address will allow you to look up answers to your ticket by clicking the "Check Ticket Status" button. You'll also get an email notification when your ticket is updated with a staff response (but you can only read the answer, and respond to it, through the Support Center, not via e-mail!).

Most of the tickets are responded to by me directly, though Kashi Commodore often swoops down to snatch up technical inquiries and reports. We try to answer every ticket within 24-48 hours, except when I'm off (usually one day a week), though sometimes it can take an extra day if it's very busy or if I have to get an answer for you first. But occasionally you'll also get a response within minutes! In very urgent cases, especially those related to payments and orders, you can of course also whisper me in the game. Similarly, for general inquiries, please consider using the Help channel and requesting help from a Beekin volunteer.

The future plans for the Support Center include a stronger tie-in of the ticket system into the CMS and our accounts database. You'll be able to log into the Support Center with your Furcadia account, which will open up a whole new world of possibilities. For example, you will be able to submit a ticket directly from within the game or the CMS, and when there is an answer, you'll receive a notification in the game. This will make it even easier to get help, though it's already fast and hassle-free -- but that doesn't mean we can't make it even more fun and consistent!

It is one of our goals to not only improve Furcadia's graphics, client(s), and feature sets, but also provide you with customer service that matches or exceeds that of much bigger companies. I believe we have made excellent progress toward this goal already during this year, and we'll keep up the work! If you have feedback, or ideas how we can improve in this area, please drop me a note. Right at http://support.furcadia.com! :)

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Kitsukin Kindling!

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Created: Thursday, 02 October 2014 06:44

Written by Emerald Flame

Winner for best ears ever on an avatar... Kitsukin Minkin! :) We are having the Kindling Party today for the Kitsukin Minkin! Majas and I worked on the design and Am'God is the artist that worked on this cute, little fennec fox kitsune. Degu did the adorable Butler and Gar did a final positioning pass. Majas and Rat did the exclusive desctag that comes with the presale! This is the second in our Minkin series of avatars and I hear that the Primes Jujinka, Beekin, and Syndira will come again to gather more magic for its making! A big 'Thank you' to Althia for helping to DragonSpeak the magic gathering game and to Juliet for getting the advertising graphics together! The event is tonight at 8 pm FST and we hope to see you there!

Majas has been leading the Pixels in getting yet another version update on the 32-bit default art ready for this party too! Arialonomus has been working on the floors and the new wood floors and cobblestones are amazing. Sylvernight has been working on the water, but I don't think that is quite ready for you all to see. Akoi Meexx has just joined the team and is learning our methods. The Shadow Rider and Degu have been heping Majas with the plants and trees. Suzy, Allen, Pye, and Muse have been busy with all kind of bits and bobs. You've got to come see all the loveliness! I can't wait until Treeki finishes getting the Double size working in the editor so we can see them that way too! Be sure to come see and thank the artists for this awesome work they are doing for all of you!

Some concern has been expressed about us continuing to put out new avatars when we don't have The Second Dreaming finished. I'll do a post soon about the state of TSD, but I wanted to explain again the difference between new Avatars and the development work. Money from Digo Market sales goes directly to Dragon's Eye Productions to pay for the day to day running of Furcadia. That would be new avatars and desctags and such. We have a minimum amount we need to run the company each month. Those sales pay for community staff, customer support, tech support, maintenance, events, health insurance, office expenses, taxes, accountants, server machines, softrware and everything else it takes to run a company. That is a lot more money than you might expect.

Since the recession, we've had to cut expenses over and over. That's why Gar, Felorin, Fox and Talz work elsewhere now. We could no longer afford them. While I have continued to work for DEP and Catnip, I haven't taken regular pay from either for over 3 years. Digo Sales have continued to drop though. Recently we also had to let Rei-jin go because we could no longer afford to pay her. Felorin had already been supplementing DEP funds from his own paycheck, but this month sales fell low enough that he needed that money to pay for the servers instead of Rei-jin. She also has a really excellent offer to work at another game company and I think this move will be wonderful for her. We will miss her so much though and it does add more work to the rest of the Team. However, we NEED to put out new avatars to keep sales up enough to keep the game running while we finish The Second Dreaming. DEP pays for the few artists who work on those avatars.

The Second Dreaming donations are actually kept in a totally separate bank account and are only used to pay for development on the new things. We have two full time contract Coders (Always our biggest expense), several part time staff members, and many lovely volunteers who are helping to save Furcadia using your donations. Felorin, Gar, Talz, and myself have not used any of TSD money for ourselves, even though we volunteer our time to the project as well. We also have to pay for taxes, accountants, software, fees and much else since this side of things are a business too. We are being very frugal and stretching the money as far as we can so there is time to finish everything! All of the staff works for way under the going rate for what they do, if they take money at all. Like those of you who donated, we do this for the love of the Furcadia community and all it has given us. We are confident that we will get TSD client out and Furcadia will grow again, but until it does, we need to keep the Digo Market bringing in money and donations to TSD fund help as well! Felorin likes to say, everyone wants to have fast, good and cheap, but you can only pick two. We have chosen quality and inexpensive, which means it will take longer to get work done but never fear, we are making excellent progress!

Streaming and Laptops and Feathers, oh my!

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Created: Thursday, 25 September 2014 03:47

Written by Dr. Cat

Hi everyone, Felorin here with a quick update. Some of you may remember I did a lot of video streaming last year, while working on various parts of the Furcadia programming. Well, I\ve been wanting to stream some more, but my computer won\t seem to work with any microphone any more.

Luckily, I figured out a MacGyverish but workable solution! I often bring a Macbook home from my day job on evenings and weekends. Tonight I tested using it as a \MicBook\ by getting on one Skype account, calling myself on my other Skype account, and letting my streaming software on my desktop computer listen in. Now the Mac is the most expensive, over-powered microphone I ever used, but it works!

I'll be streaming soon to finish up Parnieq's Feather, one of our Consulting Creator items we're adding for Second Dreaming backer Parnieq. Her character is a shape-changing vixiecorn who loses control of her shape-changing powers when she sneezes. Here's a picture of her character.

Some of you may remember I got the basics of Parnieq's Feather programmed last year while she was my special voice-chat guest on the video stream. Well, this summer she got us a list of dozens of random messages to put in to finish the job! I'll be live-streaming sometime soon while I put those in, and I can chat with you folks and answer questions while I'm working. Watch for announcements about the stream on Furcadia as well as on Twitter and Facebook!

Here's a couple of the messages from Parnieq I'll be adding in, to give you a preview:

"You eat the feather. There's a small parchment in the quill with Parnieq's favorite riddle scrawled on it: Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

"You use the feather. The birds go silent, time seems to stand still, and everything that creeps holds its breath. The air around you is charged with a strange energy! And nothing happens. It's just a feather."

I'm pleased to say that she put some Monty Python references in some of the messages as well. Parnieq's Feather should be available to everyone after our next server restart. And we'll be giving Parnieq a lifetime supply of them, so watch out or she might tickle your nose with one!

Talk Like a Pirate Day!

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Created: Friday, 19 September 2014 12:35

Written by Emerald Flame

Arrr Mateys! It be Talk Like a Pirate Day in ye ol' Furcadia! All ye scallywags better be gitten' yurselves into da gamer tur 'elp celebrate! We be thankin' der lovely Juliet and da Eventers fer 'elpin'! Ye land lubbbers can come ter da Rameen Festival an' get practicen bein' yon mightee pirate! Donna yer ferget ta be voten' Pirate on yonder duel wit ta Ninjas or we be splitten' yer gizards!

Double Size!

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Created: Thursday, 18 September 2014 08:34

Written by Emerald Flame

This week has been all about double size! As you all know, if you've been reading the blog, while the Pixels are busy fixing up the default art into 32-bit objects, they have also been making a 200% version of the art as well. Everything is so beautiful and detailed in these pieces! The Pixels are kicking some major butt! I foresee the default objects getting used a lot more after this. I've included some of the newer pieces below.

Now you might be a bit confused about the double art and how this will work. When Furcadia was new, we had a lot smaller screen resolutions and the game filled up the whole screen at 640 x 480. As time went by and screens could handle larger sizes, we could not change our size to match because pixel art does not look nice stretched to odd sizes. Pixels can stretch nicer if you double them though, that would be 4 pixels for every 1 we have now. However, even now, many screens do not support double that at 1280x960, especially on mobile and tablets. So that we can double size the art for The Second Dreaming, we are only double sizing the graphic screen and making a pretty, modern interface that is not double sized.

This of course means that we can either do the art in an automatic stretch or take the time to redraw it with more colors and details. We've chosen to do the extra work involved in redrawing the art for default. However, anything that doesn't get done before the client is released can be auto-stretched. This will be the same for players. They will have several choices. They can redraw their patches for 32-bit and double size, they can let the client stretch the art for them automatically, or they can choose for their Dreams to remain the same as now in 'classic mode'. We will make sure you have access to the new editors ahead of the double size release so you can work on your own 2x patches!

This also means that our clients and editors have to be able to support this new way of doing things! With so much art and Dream work going on, it has been getting hard to test things in 1x mode, so I asked the Coders this week to start focusing on 2x! Farrier is very busily working on getting double size art to work with the new fox file format. That is harder than it sounds because some sprite sheets with all the art at 200% are too big for PHP and other languages to handle. The last few days he's been figuring out how to break apart those huge sprite sheets and still make sure the Web Client can read them!

In the mean time, Treeki is working hard on the Fox Editor, making it support not only the double size but all the other fox format changes. Felorin has been helping out with the Dream Editor, fixing bugs, getting Live Edit working and also looking into the 200% Dreams! Ninja will also be helping to get the Windows Client ready, but we are not expecting full double size, 32-bit art there until Update 32!

There's a lot of little details that have to be ironed out as well. Gar has been working in how to double size floor tiles smoothly, for instance. Because the edges of floor tile now are over two pixels and up one, a straight double size means over 4 and up 2. That makes for ragged edged floors. We can fix that by hand and make them the right size and pretty, but since we *must* allow for auto-sizing, the fixed floors won't match the stretched floors. This can cause holes in the floors and we've all seen what happens when your floor tiles are the wrong size! Gar has also been helping Rat the Unloved to figure out all the technical details to 2x avatars! To make it all more difficult, we cannot use the FoxEd yet to get all this working!

So you see this is keeping everyone pretty busy! Often in the evenings you can watch the Pixels or Coders working on some of these things on live streams! Just watch for announcement in the game and on Facebook and Twitter! Thanks to Degu for putting this graphic together! :)

New Allegria Island!

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Created: Friday, 12 September 2014 07:56

Written by Emerald Flame

With the new FurN getting so much attention on our adult side, we felt that our next map focus should be on the T+ Allegria Island. AI was the first upload map in Furcadia and the only one for the first few years. You couldn't even upload in your own Dreams until the early 2000's! This simple island off the coast of Kasuria is the home of so many interesting Dreams, with a mixture of Social and Persona Play. You can find build-a-homes, dog pounds, help groups and large social communities along with many other themes. Many new players find their first home in one of the Dreams there. It is time to get AI ready for The Second Dreaming!

We have decided to go Ancient Greek Island themed with it, along the lines of how you see the Acropolis. In fact, we will be combining it with the old, unused Acropolis main map and our ideas for a social area there too. Heimdall helped with the initial design, but I will be taking over the map weaving and project management. Althia will be taking point on patch management and Crunchward on the Dragonspeak. Dream Dancer is working on a lovely new wall set. The Pixels and Masons will also be lending a paw on the patch and DS! We are really excited about this theme and it should be a lovely addition to Furcadia, without taking away from the simplicity of the old AI.

You can see by the blueprint and inspiration art the look and feel we are going for! There will be a big Dream Hall, a Bathhouse, a secluded cove, a stream running down the hill and a lovely island backdrop. We will be adding plenty of easy to use arches for uploading along the paths to help unclutter navigation to your favorite Dreams. I'm even hoping to get in a mosaic of the Primes in the bathhouse! We will be showing you more as we get farther along on the Dream!