Read the Update here: https://cityoftitans.com/content/explore-titan-city-now
And, Lest we forget... A quick word from Warcabbit.
"Everyone working for this has been a star, not least of which Voidforge for his patcher work and Void and Iathor in Mac conversion and Lin Chiao Feng for his work behind the scenes, and we can't say enough about the hard and good work of Warlocc and JWBullfrog in public relations, 1WithAPencil and AmbiDreamer and so many more in comp who created and described Titan City. Ashenfall and Doctor Tyche, and all the map creators and designers who helped bring it to life, and for the stellar work of PenitentRebel for creating the videos that help us show it to the world. But, face it, this update has two stars. Two world class people are responsible for this. Red Warlock and AmIEvil, this one's dedicated to you. You've put so much of yourselves in, and we're getting so much out. You gave us the world. Thank you. Now, go out there and play in it."
As always, we welcome your comments below.
Wait until you see the... nope, that would ruin the surprise.
As a M2 Mac user, guess I'll have to wait.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Mac is coming - we have our Mac team working on it right now and they are very enthusiastic to get it out. Each of our updates we've had to do some additional work to get the project working on Mac, but we'll get there. Thank you for your patience.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Not ACTUALLY complaining ... just grumbling at the reality of the situation.
Also, since I don't discord, hope there's no objection (or at least not much of one) if this thread gets used for a pretty wide variety of feedback (once I can patch up and see the city).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Awesome.
Hi. I'm Hope.
Personal opinion, I think the starting map is 2-3x too big. I think it would have been better to keep the map smaller and spend more time polishing and working on bugs than a map so big there are bugs everywhere, no way one person working on the map is going to be able to get this size of map polished.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Its a balancing act, and I am inclined to agree with you.
Honestly? I would be more than fine with the developers putting in invisible walls around areas that are above place holder but not *finalised* finalised quality (ie for all intents and purposes its "Here is something that looks fine at a distance... needs work to bring it up to the "close inspection" that players will do" )
Hell, you can do this trick for area's that you plan to introduce at a later date... not *ideal* or perfect (instead of a full on "wall", maybe death fog? to help obscure it as an example)...
Yes, it's a balancing act, but given their situation as a small indie team with no budget....a smaller, more polished experience might have been better to release with than a huge map in need of a lot of work still.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Just when I thought the devs had all given up and were just playing rebooted CoX like everyone else....
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
We had talked a while ago about sharing a walled off section of Alexandria for people. The reality was, the errors that people are seeing now would probably be there whether we had just Alexandria or the whole city. That's because there are two types of errors people are seeing.
First, no one but me has really had a chance to go through street by street and look at things like identifying and fixing floating trees and small errors like that, until a couple weeks ago when our non-tech volunteers were able to get into the game. We wouldn't want to waste our high-tech volunteers time with cleaning up floating trees etc. So, that left me as the only person making those kinds of fixes. And I've stared at so much of this city for so long that I could have a tree floating right in front of me and not see it. That's why it's great to have those other sets of eyes, and actually very helpful that we have players who are posting specific locations where we can go back and make fixes now. We could have stopped players from entering for another couple months and done an intensive look at small errors like that, but I think people are really happy to enter the city, even with those small errors. We are starting an error collection list and all of those easy-to-fix errors I'm going to be able to get in and make a bunch of cleanup fixes in our upcoming updates.
Second, we have some fine tuning and polishing that will happen with our tech team that I don't even fully understand. When some players are looking at the quality of what they are seeing, they are pointing out some fixes that our tech team say will come with final polishing. Again, we could delay players entering the game to get those types of things to be more polished, but I think people have been really eager to see real progress and so far, I think people are happy to see a city that they find exciting, with a lot of polish work that they can see still needs to be done.
It is definitely a balancing act.
I, for one, am glad that we did not just introduce a more polished Alexandria (that probably still would need to be delayed to be fully polished), but introduced a bigger vision of what we are releasing right now with polishing work still to be done. I heard early on that people thought Alexandria looked boring and not very inspiring as a city that super heroes would fight in. Now that players can see Alexandria contrasted with Downtown, Victory Beach (the amusement park), the Airport, and all of these very diverse neighborhoods, people can appreciate Alexandria as an interesting spot in its own way, and not the entire 'look and feel' of the game.
So I feel like people will get what we are trying to do more by seeing this large vision, even if they see there's a lot of work still to do.
But that's just my opinion...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Teleporting and flying around in the city was interesting. Even saw a certain little bridge easter egg. Although, I avoided the forest like the plague, as it causes massive frame drops on my computer. All in all, spent more time flying around the city than I thought
[center] [i] [color=blue] Unarmed combat best combat. Every media [/color] [/i] [/center]
That was Lake Verdandi on the map from Dragon Con. Fans of a certain anime series may pronounce it Belldandy. Along with the rivers Urd and Skuld, I call these the Norn Water Features. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
There is still a lot of efficiency work to be done that will be complete near the end of when we are ready to finalize the environment. That should improve those frame rate drops. But glad you got to enjoy what you saw in the city!
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
So now that the city is working in the launcher, what is the next step?
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
I think I will work with the PR staff and others on a PR update about that soon, but to my mind, these are the next priorities:
1. Fix issues that we are seeing reported that we can clean up pretty quickly.
2. Mac Access to the City (this might or might not be quick... mac fixes can be simple or tricky depending on how quirky the tech issues... Void & iathor are working on this)
3. Spawned villains and NPCs (AmiEvil has developed the system for this and I've already been working in the Avatar Builder on lots and lots of our factions, NPCs and villains to have a large variety of groups to spawn)
4. Combat / Power sets - AmiEvil can share more about this. I know he has lots of work done already and has big plans for the future here.
5. Travel Powers - Another area that AmiEvil is working on a lot. First here is he's already working on a greatly improved Parkour system.
6. Tracked moving cars, blimps, airplanes, roller coasters, etc. (This seems pretty easy to get this wired throughout the city, but there might be some detailed work we need to do to get the alignment of the movement correct).
7. Missions / Interiors / Instanced areas
I think those are the next priorities.
Other items that are on the docket that I don't know much about the timing yet (maybe I can get more of an idea for the update):
- Mini Map
- Exploration Badges
- Chat/MMO
- Expanded costumes and weapons
Also, long term stuff that is in the works, but for later:
- Bases for players
- Finalized polish and efficiency for the environment (When we are done with certain areas of the environment this goes in - it's the last thing we need to do for the North part of the city)
- The South District (I already have our lore and maps team working on mapping out all of the other areas of the city so when we get all the top priorities above in good shape, I can return to building the South City and have maps ready when I'm ready to go back to environment building)
That's what I can think of off the top of my head...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
This could just be me reading a little too into this response, but it sounds as though these next several steps are basically a slow and steady crawl to full release. Everything thats going to turn City of Titans into an MMO are going to be released in phases over time with presumably a lot of play-testing of the vital essentials like world population, combat, travel powers, enemies, and missions. The major bonus being work on the Southern Districts of the city finally being allowed to continue once everything in the Northern part has been mostly, if not completely, squashed.
"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."
So how do we access the city? I have the avatar builder? Is that enough?
Evolution is key. And mutants are key.
Hmm... first, this is just one dev putting out my thinking for how things are going to move forward, not a definitive outline for anything. Just my thoughts.
Also, yes, we are an all volunteer team and I don't expect us to move forward at super speed with completing all this. We are getting some more attention right now and and more people asking to volunteer and contribute. It's possible that the pace of delivery could pick up, but I think we are still going to be rolling out some of these achievements above over a period of months in the coming year, some of the achievements pushed back in a matter of years. Maybe things could go faster if we get more help - want to volunteer?
Finally, I'm not sure about this idea that the Northern area might be 'completely squashed' by the time we get to launch. If you look at every one of those priorities above, each of them will in their own way add to the experience of the Northern city. Having more exciting powers and spawned foes to fight, having NPCs and missions and exploration badges that add story to the city, having travel powers to experience the city differently, having moving cars/blimps, roller coasters etc to give the city more visual flair, having a mini map to find all the things you want to find in the north, having a base to call your own somewhere in the north part of town, having the ability to jump in with friends and chat while you play together - every addition is going to make the northern part of the city much more interesting.
But again, these are just my thoughts as one volunteer developer for the game.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Yes, that's all you need. After you finish creating your character there will be options for selecting powers, and when you select both your primary and secondary powers, you can enter the game.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
The trick there is that new volunteers need to be onboarded and brought up to speed on How Things Get Done™ so as to produce useful work results. That requires oversight, which consumes attention span for training and tryout from a veteran and reducing how much work that veteran can complete within a particular span of time. So there's a ramp up process involved in getting new volunteers up to snuff and slotted in as a Qualified member of the team, regardless of which department they are volunteering for.
My point being that there is going to be a lag delay between volunteers being brought in and those volunteers making a difference in the pace/quantity of work output, because the contributions from the volunteers isn't going to be "instant" the moment they're brought in.
Which is just another way of saying there are no Quick Fixes for the update tempo.
Long term, sure ... more volunteers can help with that. But short term, the cake is already baked.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Yeah, I definitely wasn't trying to get at or imply that things would get done at super-speed, especially not with the collection of screenshots already taken and uploaded into the Game Bugs channel on the Discord the first day this latest update went live. I already know some degree of work is going to be needed to sift through all those and separate known bugs with the game world from actual unknown bugs. I was mainly just driving at, in comparison to years gone by and at the state we're in now, we could see more testing and eventual rollout of the systems that will be present in the final game rather sort of waiting around for the next big, behind-the-scenes achievement to be made and shared with us here.
I'll be frank, having followed this project from as far back as 2015 to now, I've memorized mostly information pertaining to lore, mechanics, and other player-interactive systems that have been shared thus far. Its usually why I'm, sometimes, the first to respond to player/new server member questions the minute they drop into the Discord. If I were to volunteer, my contributions wouldn't be geared towards the more technical side of things like rigging, costumes, working with the skeletons of the male/female character models, or even the concept art and reference sheets. I know back when Artstrong was doing his livestreams, he was having a time work from references that lacked any detail, colors, or notes.
Yeah, I understand that much that not everything in the North End of the city is going to be 'completely squashed'. Hence, why I said 'mostly' in order to account for that while there may or can still be some looming issues that plague the Northern area or features that are yet to be implemented, its also not something one would probably deem as "game-breaking" exactly. If that makes sense.
"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."