Week 18 - Preview Release

Hey all!

First of all: In the quite unlikely case you haven't realized it yet, the CoA Creator Public Preview is available for download here. Take a look and let us know what you think! The release notes are here. Sándor must have been in a good mood because he flipped the numbers from the social media challenge from last week, making it a total of 31 (new Charges) for you. All have been added to the public release.

Mark's article is also out. Besides, we're offering a contest to encourage everyone to try out (and thus, to test) the main features of the editor. Other than it's fun - and there are prizes! -, it would help us enormously to find any hidden issues. Be bold and participate! We don't bite.

Weekly Status

Game Client

1. We've finally released the Public Offline Preview.
   1. For the public release, added a couple new ordinaries, their heraldic line variations and the 31 new Charges. All comes with hints and heraldic info. Vanguards may want to download this version for the extra items and more feature! 
   2. UX: added a tiny tweak to Splash to provide feedback upon starting to load the game. 
   3. Added the fully working Heraldry Summary for the Coat of Arms Editor scene. It is being updated upon your choices and always highlights the altered paragraphs with some animation. 
2. Sándor was making art work and tweaked the Game Map's overview level.

^{Summary of shield attributes in action! Heraldry symbolism is highlighted on each element where applicable.}

 Platform & Game Server 

1. For Gábor, the main focus was put on Collectibles (to stay in tandem with an online version of the Creator) and updating the admins views. An internal update has been released about both. We're also putting some work into making the Platform to run more efficient (so it takes less money to maintain it - as you can guess, we're not high on resources).
2. Steve was fixing the last issues about updating the site to use the Platform. After some testing, we've scheduled to start preparing the live site to the transition on Tuesday - Wednesday, and unless we find a major issue, will likely update it on Thursday. This means that the site might be offline for a period, or multiple smaller periods during these events.

 Website

1. I've not been able to evade it this time. It's been mostly maintenance work: I've added the release to the public downloads (and a simplified EULA attached) and also tweaked the download page layout and the forums for the event. I've also updated user rights and gave more options to registered users and Vanguards for embedding (a restricted set of) html tags and/or images to their posts.

^{Showing Map Borders in Overview Mode - in progress}

 Next Step  

• During the next week, we're going to internally finalize the next milestones and put them on our public roadmap (that is right on the home page). Keep an eye out for it!
• For the next few weeks, my time will be distributed in about 25-75 between two main task groups:
  • I'll work on the Platform integration of the CoA creator, which would allow players to save their work as their House Standard (and use their House CoA on the site). I also want to add support for the inventory filter as some categories now fortunately have over a hundred elements. This will eventually culminate in a Vanguard, then a Public release of an Online Creator, then the coat of arms phase is considered over.
  • With Sándor, we'll be mainly working on the Game Map engine, it's scopes, variations, usability and animations.
• Once the site transition to the Platform is done, Instait's Dynamic Duo will finish the Collectibles for the online creator. Once it's done, their main focus will shift to implementing Game Worlds (both world maintenance, templates and tick evaluation logic - once the latter is complete, worlds can "start living" once again).

Hope you're pleased with the release.

See you next week! :)