News

"A Home for the Holidays"

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Created: Wednesday, 24 December 2014 05:07

Written by Emerald Flame

Hello Everyone!

We wish you Happy Holidays and a fantastic New Year! Thought you might like an update on all things Furcadia! We also hope that this note finds you well and in good spirits.

Just a few days ago, Furcadia celebrated its 18th Birthday! It's all grown up and legal now. :) We've had a magnificent party in 32-bit Meovanni Village with hundreds of players attending in the game and on Dr. Cat's Twitch Channel where Furcadia staff streamed for many hours into the early morning. Thanks to everyone who attended and celebrated with us, and thank you all for being a part of our community all this time.

Speaking of events! Danival's Winter Festival recently opened its snowy gates with creative contests for you to participation! This festival's contests are:

• Dreamweaving: Build a Dream that is a home for the holidays.
• Art: Draw a Furcadia home inside a snow globe.
• Writing: Write a store about giving a friend (or pet, or ferian) a home for the holidays.
• Social Media: Post a screenshot of your favorite holiday dream on an approved social network.

Read all about the different competitions here. There are only a few weeks left to enter!

As every year, Holiday Sales shine brightly on the Digo Market, too! We have an 8-week sale going on where every single For Life avatar gets discounted by up to 70%! The Digos on sale change weekly, with a different theme each week. New this year, you get a different Adoption Ribbon desctag FOR LIFE included in every sale, with a new ribbon each week! If there's an avatar you've always wanted, or that would put a big smile on a friend's face, now is the best time to make dreams come true.

Since our last newsletter in the hot summer, our family of Digo avatars has grown. The Minkin avatars have arrived with magical mini-furres that can be used in all areas of Furcadia. So far, the Minkin line includes the Drakkin (a little shoulder dragon), the Lemurkin with its colorful, ringed tail, the soon-to-hatch Jerbokin, and the very popular Kitsukin, perhaps cutest and fluffiest of all avatars!

Now for an update on The Second Dreaming! We are very close to our 250k Donations Goal that will fund 32-bit all over Furcadia, which is very exciting! We have already released the lovely new Pages and many of the promised web features! The newly designed Dream and Fox Editors are almost complete, they just need a few more features, and the 32-bit Fox files. Then the Editors and newly completed Lighting System will be ready for Backer testing! Our artists have over a thousand of the default objects done in 32-bit, double sized and are working on the rest. As well, the avatar upgrades and new Butlers are making good progress. You can see a lot of these already as we start to update many of the main maps!

As you know we are making a web client to increase our new players! This has been available for Backers to test for quite some time and as soon as the new Fox format is ready we will start applying the sexy, modern interfaces we've been working on. The big news though is that along with the Web Client, we will be releasing a C# Mobile Client! It will be made first for Android phones and tablets, but will port easily to iOS, Mac and even to Windows. So much excitement for this coming year! Furcadia will be mobile, modern and beautiful!

If you want to follow what is going on year 'round be sure to check out our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube and TwitchTV. You can also follow the Second Dreaming Blog (Make sure you are logged in as a Backer or Sponsor to view the exclusive articles) and of course, over system announcements in Furcadia. We are very happy to have you part of our Home for the Holidays!

~Felorin, Emmie, and Team Dragon

Ninja is Making a Mobile Client!

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Created: Friday, 19 December 2014 13:23

Written by Emerald Flame

Big news! In his spare time (as if a guy who is in University to be a doctor, flies planes, plays piano, sings, has somewhat of a social life and programs for Furcadia on the side, has extra time), Ninja has been working on a C# client for Furcadia! Originally this was to be the native Mac client, but he is currently focusing on it being an Android Client! We chose Android because it is the fastest growing market and easier to develop for than iOS! Though it will be fairly easy to port this client to iOS and Mac, or Windows for that matter! This is all very exciting and we will have our first test versions out next week and we can start having Second Dreaming Backers testing early in the new year!

We will be putting out both a phone version of Furcadia and a tablet version for mobile devices. The interface will be modified to work for touch screens and it will have a modern design with lots of fun bells and whistles. We are going for one interface for all OSs of which the style is somewhere in the middle of other common iOS and Android devices. Gar had a brilliant idea for making the very small screens of a phone (and smaller tablets) work well. Mostly on a phone you will want to whisper friends and chat with people, so the focus of the interface is on the portrait messaging side. It will have a small play screen with a larger text area in the portrait view to optimize space to type. However, if you want to explore or play a game in Furcadia, you just flip to the landscape view and you have a larger play window to move about. Majas and Muun are also helping with the interface!

Gar is Helping!

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Created: Wednesday, 10 December 2014 07:32

Written by Emerald Flame

We've all been very busy but I thought you might enjoy hearing about what each person has been working on lately in our journey towards TSD! I will do a different Team Dragon Member every few days.

I'm starting with Gar because while he often helps us out in his spare time, right now he is between jobs so he's been volunteering a lot. Gar is a professional Game Designer, working at game studios in San Francisco and Las Vegas. As many of you know he worked for DEP for over 10 years before he moved on to work at companies that actually have funding to pay him what he's worth! Primes know we could use him full time!

Gar is very versatile even for a Game Designer! Since he's been here more he's been helping Ciro and I to design and write sales and ads, as well as other bits of needed writing. He also has been helping me with the lighting effects for the Winter Festival and Snow Maps! (Be sure to check out the contests!) The lighting feature is still super buggy and Treeki had to come help us figure out ways around the bugs so we could make Christmas lights and a really cool frost effect in the dream! You can see what the frost effect does to the roads in the screenshot. It also frosts furres!

The big jobs we need Gar to do are all Second Dreaming though. Gar has the ability to work with the Coders, Artists, Community Staff and Administration, helping everyone to understand each other. As a designer this is hugely important! As Dewi and Treeki are working on the new editors and new Fox format implementation, Gar works with them on the design of the editors and helps make user friendly layouts. He's also helping with the designs of the interfaces for the Clients, Character Create, Dream Editor and any others that come up.

Besides all of that, he also helps with the move of the art to 32-bit that Rat, Majas and the Pixels are working so hard on. Right now he is developing an automated process to get all the avatars double sized, in 32-but shading and remapping. With about 100 avatars all with at least 20 frames each, this is a huge amount of work and his automated process will get the avatars most the way there. He also helps with avatar construction and critique, as well as doing things like helping Sync make the Vinca symbol portal piece for the amazing new Dream Portals she is making!

Gar does a lot more than this but it is a nice round sampling of his awesome help! If you see him around, be sure to thank Gar for working on The Second Dreaming to make Furcadia better for us all!

Felorin's Big Adventure

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Created: Saturday, 22 November 2014 05:25

Written by Dr. Cat

Hi everyone! I've been streaming some work on the 32 bit Dream Editor on Twitch TV, in their new Game Development category. Last weekend though, I took a little time off for a very special event. Talzhemir and I got to re-unite with some of the people we made the Ultima games with. We were the NPCs for a weekend of questing for 40 very dedicated fans!

Talzhemir played her Ultima character Penumbra the fortune teller, while I was Dr. Cat hosting the Cat's Lair Tavern! I served drinks and "Frasier's Folly Stew", and we gave out quests. (It looks like The Cat's Lair is going to be appearing in another computer game in the near future - more on that later.)

I also got to fight in a battle game between the pirate ship and the castle, all of this hosted at Lord British's miniature medieval village in Austin. Everybody had a great time! One of the players gave me a Lego version of Dr. Cat he made, complete with pointy purple wizard's hat, and a silver tabbycat at my feet. I even got knighted by Lord British at the closing ceremonies!

Here's a photo of me being a Chess-shire Cat. I'll be in Furcadia this weekend looking for another game of Chess or two in Sanctuary. So if you'd like to challenge me, come give me a shout.

Me and Talzhemir also gave out beautiful DragonScale certificates to some of the players as quest rewards. (Thanks to Gar for designing these at the last minute!) So we'll probably be seeing some long-time Ultima fans coming to Furcadia in the near future. Be sure and give them a warm welcome! The organizer of the event, Joseph (also known as Rustic Dragon) is even thinking of re-creating all the quests and locations and NPCs from the event in Furcadia. I think that would be a lot of fun!

I'll try to stream some more the next couple weekends on my Twitch TV channel as I work on the new Dream Editor, maybe some evenings too. Until then, I'll see you in Furcadia!

New Dragons!

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Created: Saturday, 01 November 2014 07:14

Written by Emerald Flame

We have some new help in Team Dragon! There are a couple of new Dragons and some promotions within the team! We also have had a lot of reassigning of duties lately as things change and everyone has been hugely busy as usual. As they say, we all wear many hats in TD! Let's start with the new and promoted ones!

First, we welcomed Kitasu in as a Junior Coder and TD member! Kit has been volunteering in Furcadia for many years and is a Head for the Bugge Hunters and a Scribe. She's been busy on other coding projects but still finds the time to help us out when she can. As she gets trained in, she will be focusing on coding needed for the webpages. The transition to the new pages is going well but we needed more help with fixing CSS, Javascript and PHP bugs that regular Scribes don't have access to handle. Thanks for agreeing to help, Kit!

Juliet is the next addition to TD! Julz has been helping for a long time in our Community Outreach Team and other Beekin Groups. She always willing to work on promotional art, holding events, social media, helping with sales and promotions and much more. In real life, she has worked as a 'Director of Advertising and Marketing' and has brought a lot of experience and knowledge to the team. Here's a graphic she created to promote an event on Facebook. You can also see some of he adorable new Butlers the Pixels have been working on!

Xxysthstris was added a bit ago but we should mention him too! Xxy has long been a strong supporter for Furcadia and the community. He's been helping in our Community Outreach Team for a long time and is a Head for the Eventers as well as assisting with many other community management tasks. His dedication to the Welcomers and new players in Furcadia has been exemplary though, so we were happy to ask him to be Associate in Charge (AIC) of the Welcomers. The Welcomers are one of our most important volunteer groups as new players are the life blood of Furcadia. We are very pleased Xxy agreed to manage this group!

We are also happy to announce that Treeki and Frostyfrog have moved up to full Coder and Associate status! These two guys have been working with us for over a year and have been absolutely fantastic with helping on coding, bug hunting and helping customers with technical issues. Treeki concentrates in the Windows Client and editors mainly, while Frosty works on the web pages, templates and services. I'll talk more about their current projects in another blog!

Be sure to thank all of these fantastic volunteers when you see them. They are a huge help to keeping Furcadia going and getting The Second Dreaming finished!

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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