Updates

Explore Housing in Hometown

September 26, 2016

In August of 2015, during Release 20, we responded to many requests from community members to be able to view a home in-game before they purchase it (either from the Add-On Store, Stretch Goal Store, or through a pledge upgrade) by building Hometown for the first time. Using the Island template, Starr “Darkstarr” Long built the town of Hometown on an island just off the southeast corner of Novia, near the starting town of Soltown.

Over many releases, Hometown morphed several times; changing biomes and becoming a community effort. Starting shortly after persistence in Release 32, we decided to take this back over as a developer effort versus a volunteer community effort. This was not an easy decision, but there was some negative perception around having players have access to the houses and decorations for “free”. So, rather than create unnecessary drama, we have just decided to take this back on as a dev effort.

Darkstarr has been feverishly placing the first sets of lots and houses on Live, and various team members will be claiming and decorating them as their own over the next several releases. Hometown is located off the southeastern coast of Novia, near Soltown (see map).

The dock area where you arrive includes links to all the other templates currently available so you can view those to see how they are all laid out. There is a large perimeter wall built with the White Stone Castle Walls that encircles the main flat area on the main island. All the houses in that enclosed area are available in the Add-On Store (ala carte or in in Bundles) or in-game (crafted or bought from NPC merchants). Everything outside of that perimeter wall is expired content.

The center of town near the main entrance is where you can find all of the various row houses. Directly behind them is Viking Avenue, which features all the Viking Bundle Homes. To the right is Kobold Quarter, which features the Kobold Bundle homes. And beyond that is what will become the Obsidian Section; featuring the Obsidian Bundle homes. To the left is the Elven area. The rest of the interior area is devoted to the various other home types and is roughly grouped by style (Adobe, Rustic, Shingle Roof, etc.).

Join us in Hometown to select your next house design to call home!

Update of the Avatar #195 – 2016.09.23: The Passing of Lacey, More Estgard Polish, Hometown Returns, Spotlight: Bastion’s Point

September 23, 2016

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

The Passing of Lacey

By now, many of you may have heard that one of our community members Lacey has passed after fighting a long, brave battle against breast cancer. Lacey was an incredible contributor to our community and was well known for her amazing decorating. We all benefited from her tremendous skills which she shared with us in projects like Hometown and the setup for the Devs vs. Players PVP match for the Spring Telethon.

You can see in this screenshot from the PVP match that Daxxe Diggler shared just how many people she impacted:

Community Spotlight: Relaxing in Bastion’s Point – Player Owned Town

September 21, 2016

The first Player Owned Town spotlight kicks off with Bastion’s Point! We will be touring towns and talking with guilds and other groups, all of which are open to be spotlighted on coming tours brought to you by Berek, your community wood elf druid. Near Soltown, I saw a great many things in Bastion’s Point that drove me to write this spotlight. Here is what I witnessed:

The other day I walked along the East Perennial Trail between Soltown and Solace Bridge. I was still dazed about the terrible things I saw at the Bridge and I needed a place to rest. To my good fortune, I came across a hamlet called Bastion’s Point just along the east coast. “Ah, I will rest here and perhaps get something to eat,” I said to myself.

As I entered Bastion’s Point, I felt a cool breeze of salt air which felt refreshing in the heat of the noon sun. I ventured further into town and found what initially looked like an inviting visitors center, until I saw the guillotine and the sign saying “executions every day brought to you by your friends at ‘A Bandit Camp'”.

Turning down the road, I encountered an open air social center with finely crafted chairs, a piano, and some strange plants. It was here I met Governor Trevour, who led Bastion’s Point. He greeted me with a friendly handshake and offered me a pint of ale from Mac’s Black and Tannery.

Bastion’s Point Social Center includes reading and relaxation areas, musical nooks, dance areas and town provided Amplifiers for listening to Avatar’s Radio and Radio Free Britannia!

I asked Governor Trevour…

Why was Bastion’s Point founded?

We wanted to bring together our friends we met playing other games like UO, once again to enjoy the experience of their company and the fun of adventuring together. What better way to do so than by creating a player owned town that serves not only as our hub of activity but also serves as a welcoming demonstration of our vision for our joint gaming experience. And no better place to come together once again than a world created by Richard Garriott and his great team of fellow visionaries.

Richard Garriott and Team Speaking at Austin Game Conference

September 19, 2016

Richard “Lord British” Garriott, Creative Director at Portalarium, will be speaking at Austin Games Conference this week at the Austin Convention Center! In his first talk, Explore & Create, he shares how his experiences adventuring across, underneath, and over our planet helped him create other planets.

EXPLORE & CREATE: HOW EXPLORATION & RESEARCH CAN FEED THE CRAFT OF VIRTUAL WORLD CREATION

RICHARD GARRIOTT, ROOM 19A

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016, 2:15 PM-3:15 PM

Richard Garriott has spent the last 40 years using his passion for exploration and research about our world to help him craft the virtual worlds he creates. In this talk he shares how his experiences adventuring across, underneath, and over our planet helped him create other planets. He will also share how a commitment to detailed research helped him create a level of believability in the worlds he created by creating layers of detail that reinforced the reality.

Visit the AGC Website for Richard’s latest schedule.

The Portalarium Team

Starr Long (Executive Producer), Finn Staber (Designer/Programmer), and Fletcher Kinnear (Character Artist) from our team will also be speaking at the event:

DEVELOPING NAKED IN FRONT OF THE AUDIENCE

STARR LONG, ROOM 14

SEPTEMBER 22, 2016, 2:15 PM-3:15 PM

More and more game developers are pushing community engagement earlier and earlier in the process of game development. Traditional game development consists of the developer working behind closed doors on their vision. Periodically, and in very controlled circumstances, the customers can see the work in progress but that is mostly elaborate trailers, often not even showing actual game play. Most importantly the customers cannot give feedback while the game is still being developed. Now earlier engagement is also extending more and more beyond the virtual (forums, gameplay, irc) and into the real with cosplay, conventions, meetups, physical rewards, and other tangibles that make the community connections even stronger. This is going beyond just letting customers see the game at all stages and begin playing it as soon as it is possible to provide feedback. This is moving more and more towards blurring the line between the developers and the players into one community. Starr Long, a twenty-five year veteran of the game industry, provides deep insight along with examples, from Ultima Online up to his current project, Shroud of the Avatar.

AR/VR WIZARDS

FINN STABER (ON A PANEL WITH OTHERS), BALLROOM G

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016, 4:45 PM-5:45 PM

Advancements in technology now allow for a new level of immersive interactive experiences. The term “mixed-reality” is used in many ways for both AR and VR to describe the convincing presence that can be created. This panel of expert developers discusses techniques for creating immersive user experiences, and some of the important lessons learned over the past few years as “early adopters” of the latest AR/VR technology

WACOM BOOTH 308

FLETCHER KINNEAR, EXPO HALL

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016, 1:30 PM-5:00 PM

Wacom staff and guest artists will be on hand to demonstrate the latest in Wacom tablets and techniques on how to use them. Shroud’s very own Fletcher Kinnear will be manning the booth Wednesday afternoon sharing his tips and tricks.

Update of the Avatar #194 – 2016.09.16: Estgard Polish, Lord British Attending SotA Con, Halloween Content, Austin Game Conference, R33 Postmortem Recap, and More!

September 16, 2016

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Estgard Polish

Estgard is on the island of Norgard and is part of the Path of Courage. It is a cloned scene using one of our PRT / POT templates based off of the Forest 01 base template (aka PaxLair). In Release 33, we did an initial rebuild (aka “un-cloning”) of that scene where we added a plot specific perimeter wall and a handful of other visual changes to have it more closely match the Viking like style of the island of Norgard. In Release 34, we are polishing that rebuild to bring it up to our visual standards. When we start focusing on the Courage Path in a future release, it will also get an NPC polish pass. In Update 192, SorcerousSteve gave you a preview of these changes and this week he is giving you another update on the upcoming improvements. WARNING: Plot spoilers below.

Note that when we un-clone these scenes we do NOT change lot placements. We only make cosmetic changes of building styles, terrain, and foliage.

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Esteben “SorcerousSteve” Zaldivar]

REVISITING ESTGARD

Hey guys, SorcerousSteve here to give you an update on Estgard! A few weeks ago we got to see a preview on the upcoming Estgard, we’ll continue that this week with a look inside the city walls. Estgard is a densely overgrown town located in Southeast Norgard along the Naryad Channel, it is a densely overgrown area constantly ravished by Kobold attacks.

The ongoing war between humans and Kobolds in this area has put people on the edge, so much that they believe that yellow will ward off the Kobolds and protect them.

Introducing the New Testing Incentives Program

September 13, 2016

[From a Forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]
Program updated September 20, 2017

Greetings Avatars,

Thank you everyone for the amazing work you all do reporting issues in the game. It is only through your bug reports that we can find and fix issues with the game.

The volume of reported issues from the Live Server has remained steady, but now that we have reached persistence, it is understandably challenging to convince players to divide their time between the “real” world of Novia and the fleeting world of the QA Server. We still have a critical need for testing on the QA Server right before a monthly Release goes live.

That is why we are launching the Testing Incentives Program.

We want to reward testing efforts on the QA server because we understand that time spent there is time lost on advancing your character on live. At the same time we do not want to repeat the mistakes of past incentive programs, so instead of rewarding quantity we have created a lottery.

For each release we will randomly reward 4 of each of the following rewards (one prize per player):

5 Gold Crowns
Ant Farm
Antennae
Bug Cloak
Set of Bug Paintings

In order to qualify you must meet the following requirements:

Install the QA version of the game
Login and play on QA for at least 4 hours per release
Report at least 1 bug in the QA section of the forums

Note that players will only be submitted for the lottery once per QA cycle. Continued bug reporting will not count toward additional submissions into the lottery.

Thank you everyone for the incredible work so far and we look forward to more of it in the future!

Richard Garriott Hi-jinks: AMA! Dragon Con Wedding and Storytelling

September 12, 2016

Reddit AMA: Richard had one of his busiest schedules at Dragon Con ever this year, with 9 different events to preside over. Despite that, he still found time to do a Reddit AMA Sunday night where he answered questions about everything from how he got the name Lord British through what languages can he speak to how he celebrates Halloween.

Check out the entire AMA on Reddit.

Speck’s Wedding: Not one to stay idle, after the New Britannia Round Table on Saturday, Richard presided at the wedding of a community member, Speck, who was given away by her childhood friend, Shooter Jennings. It was a true Dragon Con wedding with the groom dressed as Deadpool and a Jedi cutting the cake with a lightsaber. MJ Guthrie at MassivelyOP even covered the wedding!

Storytelling Interview: Richard had just landed in Austin from Dragon Con when he was interviewed by Unseen Dragon about storytelling.

Many from the community also attended Dragon Con to meet with Richard Garriott, Tracy Hickman, and to celebrate their presence in the game with each other. Enter the forums to see more photos of their adventures, and to post your own if you attended Dragon Con as well!

Update of the Avatar #193 – 2016.09.09: Tropical Island POT, Economy Balancing, Testing Incentives Program, Sales Policy Update, and More!

September 9, 2016

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Tropical Island POT Polish

When we launched the Tropical Island Player Owned Town Template in Release 30 back in May, we were moving quickly to get it launched and in the hands of our POT owners. It was based on the Island 01 template and was a simple swap of tree type mostly without really any other major changes. Owners who chose this template were understandably underwhelmed by this variation so we decided that we needed to take another pass at this Island.

Hutch has been working this Release to improve the island and has made a host of improvements. He started by choosing a few different base terrain textures, ones that lend themselves better to a tropical environment. He then chose some additional terrain grasses and ran a process to apply them to the map in order to cover areas that were bare of grass before. He also added some more tree varieties to the map to improve variety and height differences and spread these more thoroughly throughout the map. The biggest changes, however, are an overall increase in foliage density throughout the island to create a more tropical jungle look and the addition of flat beach areas suitable for house placement.

Hangout of the Avatar ~ Release 33 Postmortem

September 8, 2016

Join us Friday, September 9th at 3:00 PM Central (20:00 UTC) for our monthly Hangout of the Avatar! The team will be chatting about Release 33 and looking ahead to Release 34.

As always, we will be giving out rare Lord British artifacts of immense power and glory, and answering your latest questions. For a chance to win an artifact, be in Discord chat during the livestream. There will be multiple chances to win throughout the broadcast!

UPDATE! Livestream has concluded. You can now watch the archived recording on YouTube here:

You will also be able to watch directly on YouTube: www.youtube.com/portalarium! The final recording will be archived on YouTube after the event as well.

If you wish to win prizes, be in Discord or IRC chat during the livestream! Post your questions in the comments below. Only one post submission allowed, and keep questions to 3 or less. This will allow us to get to as many players as possible.

Questions and feedback related to this release’s specific topics will be given priority and really verbose questions may be skipped, as they can be a challenge to shorten and summarize live on the air. In brief… please keep your questions… brief.

Tweet with us @ShroudofAvatar during the Hangout!

Update of the Avatar #192 – 2016.09.02: Free Lot Deed Raffle, R33 Postmortem, Estgard Polish, Fireplaces, Elven Bundles, Lord British at Dragon Con

September 2, 2016

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Free Lot Deed Raffle Tickets in Release 34 Raffle

As mentioned in the Release 33 instructions we have begun the distribution of in-game Lot Deeds via Raffles. The raffles will be monthly and for this first month’s raffle we will be handing out 75 Place Anywhere Deeds and 600 Player Owned Town Deeds. Raffle Tickets can be purchased from Home Decoration merchants in various locations throughout the game.

For those backers who do not yet own property we are going to automatically enter you into both Raffles in Release
34! Anyone who has game access to Shroud of the Avatar, but does NOT yet own property at the beginning of Release 34 (September 29, 2016), will automatically be given a gift of 1 Raffle Ticket of each type to the First Raffle. To claim your tickets simply login to the game, go to the nearest bank and claim your rewards. The drawings will be held on October 27, 2016 and winners will be announced shortly thereafter. Deeds will be delivered in Release 35.

Backers are not eligible for this gift if they meet the following criteria on September 29, 2016:

Own an Ancestor Pledge or above
Own a Viking 2-Story Row Bundle or above
Own a Kobold 2-Story Row Bundle or above
Own any quantity of Add On Store Deeds
Own any deeds won through previous drawings, contests, etc.