Week 16 - Milestone

Selam!

This is going to be probably the shortest, yet one of the most cheerful reports to date. Despite the feeling that we were the guinea pigs of some extensive scientific experiments about Murphy's Law, the coat-of-arms preview for Vanguards is out!

^{Compared to our past some weeks, these guys are on an easy vacation! ;)}

Weekly Status

Game Client

1. Released the Offline Preview and during this process:
   1. Fixed known bugs on the creator
   2. Finalized the various fallback, dependency and substitution rules for heraldic parts to prevent invalid choices and to streamline the coat-of-arms creating process for players (ie. if you're placing a part on your coat-of-arms that has dependencies, dependent parts are also automatically added to your CoA. If you change an attribute that had dependent items associated, those are automatically updated or are falling back to a state that is valid for the new choice.)
   3. Made some choices context sensitive (ie. the list of available heraldic lines depends on the ordinary you chose, to avoid confusion. Same applies for shades/variations of edges and materials: you can't put a wooden shade on a metal edge,  etc.)
   4. Added (fully localizable) tooltips and heraldic hints to most items.
   5. Finalized the preview CoA & Splash layouts. Updated scene management for the latter.
2. Sándor was mostly working on the Game Map's detailed level by adding more elements to the terrain variations.

^{Our new splash screen.}

 Platform & Game Server 

1. For both Steve and Gábor, the main focus was put on Collectibles (to stay in tandem with an imminent online version of the Creator) and the transition from the site's current database to the Platform. Both are looking nicer now but both are still work in progress. I've seen the new admin views hosted and running in the Cloud!

^{Some of the new terrain variations}

 Website

1. Added the release to the Vanguard downloads. If you're a Vanguard, head towards the Vanguard Area (inside Meeting Hall) to grab yours! Hope you enjoy it :)

^{A screenshot from the Vanguard Preview}

 Next Step  

• On client side, my time will go 50-50 to two task groups:
  • I'll continue to add hints and is going to fix the few known issues we are aware of, and any new bug our vanguards may uncover. I'll also help Mark to come up with a new article about the coat-of-arms system.
  • I'll start to put Sándor's new assets to the Game Map Engine, and will follow the lead that I left behind for the CoA creator on game map related features.
• On server side & the web, Steve and Gábor will try to sort the site integration and unify these systems, and then attempt to finish the Collectibles so the CoA Creator can be updated to use the online features.

Attention! For every like and share we get for this report on Twitter or Facebook 'til the next one comes out, Sándor promised to draw a brand new coat-of-arms Charge.