June 1 Progress Report

[Consultant]

Today is June 1st and we said we are targeting June for the time of the next event -- an invasion test.

Things are going well so far in our testing. But we have found a few things that cause us to pause and make adjustments. That is not unexpected, and we are still expecting to have the invasion event this month.

Among the things we are looking at are the following:

1. We've decided to go ahead and do an engine upgrade to UE 4.25 from 4.24, as this will allow us to finalize some improvements to FX, which will make the game a bit faster (and also look a bit better) when the big battle is occurring.

2. We're narrowing in on the right number of players in a battle using our Simulated Player combat testing tool. But we are not quite done yet.

3. Network performance has been outstanding in testing mode, but we are trying to get a slightly faster hi-intensity server from our server supplier, Vultr. They keep telling us they don't have one available, but that is a problem for us...they need to do better.

4. We just pushed 70 revised animations (polished by our professional lead animator -- he is awesome).

5. Once we complete the upgrade to UE 4.25, we will finalize the new FX, and hopefully be on our way to the event.


All of this, as long as nothing goes wrong.

[Consultant]

Wow, that was harder than we expected!

Usually it takes us about two days to upgrade the code on a single jump (for example from 4.22 to 4.23) in Unreal Engine code. But this jump from 4.24 to 4.25.1 has been six days of incredibly complex code adjustment. And we still need to track down some changes related to the blueprints (that is done last).

We also need to figure out what happened to a few things -- for example, health bars are now taller for some reason. and then we need to assist our artists to download and use the new engine version. that always takes a bit of time. They are artists, not coders and engine changes sometimes frustrate them.

But the game works. We tested our combat simulation tool and it runs. Since that tool uses virtually everything in the game, we know we have passed through the bulk of the effort and gotten to the other side. But 4.25 is a significant change from 4.24 -- we may havve manually changed on the order of the thousand files to get the adjustments made.

But we are back in business on the changes listed in the announcement above. We are working toward an event, late this month (we hope).

Stay tuned!

[Voidblazer]

Keep up the good work, team! I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

[Consultant]

I would just like to say that I saw some stuff this morning in the lastest internal videos that I was really excited about. We have our testing capability for the upcoming event working in 4.25.1 (well, there was one crash at the end, but it is working). Now we see a set of changes, upgrades and adjustments we need to make, and then we can record a video about what is happening.

We think all of you will be pleased with this next video. I'm not going to tease any more than that.

After the video, we will get feedback, probably adjust one or two more things based on your feedback, and then set up the invasion event.

[Consultant]

We've struggled through a few issues since I last updated this. First, let me say that our event planned for June is now going to be in July. That's the bad news. But the good news is that we have upgraded to 4.25.1, and (with considerable effort) gotten a hi-intensity server up and running.

Those two efforts put us off of schedule for the event, but as of this morning, we think we have the ability to support big battles that look good in the game. So now we are about to shift to the setup for the actual event, and then get it scheduled.

This is actually quite a breakthrough. We may have the best big-battle capability of any that we have seen in a modern engine like UE 4. At least as we see the issues around big PVE battles.

[Voidblazer]

My birthday's July 14th. Sooo, just saying... Patiently waiting for the next event, and I'm ready to step back into Apotheosis City again!

[Consultant]

Thank you, we are working on it.