Crowfall Dev Tracker

Hey, Crowfolks!

For five years, it has been my incredible honor and a privilege to serve this community. Sharing a passion for Crowfall was always a joy, even on the hard days, because I knew that every conversation came from a desire to see the game succeed.

Today, I am announcing my departure from ArtCraft. I have decided to take some time off to focus on my personal life for a while.

I still believe in Crowfall as much today as I did when I saw the first Kickstarter video. Knowing Todd and Gordon as well as I do, I am convinced that they will follow through on their commitment to make the best game possible, and I’ll be waiting and watching from the sidelines with all of you for the big day when Crowfall is released to great acclaim.

There are no words to express my gratitude to all of the content creators, forum warriors and guild leaders who have made my job seem less job-like and more like hanging out with good friends. Please cont...

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Hey folks,

We wanted to drop a quick update for you on the status of the TEST and LIVE environments over the next few weeks.  

As of last week, the War of the Gods update is now running on our LIVE environment. This is a great milestone for Crowfall, and we want to thank you all for helping us to get here. 

Now that 5.110 is on LIVE, we’ll be shutting down the TEST environment to clear the way for our next update. LIVE will be up indefinitely in the meantime.

We don’t want to run a Dregs test on LIVE until we have fixed a handful of issues, most notably fixing the scoring bugs, lowering the spawn rates of caravan animals, adjusting the siege schedule and tweaking the details of the campaign Victory cards.  We also have the first of the three chapters of the new player experience almost ready, so that should be coming to TEST in the next version as well.  Estimated time of arrival for the next version on TEST is one to two weeks.

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In light of our announcement today that Crowfall has officially entered the alpha testing phase, we are ready to bring the War of the Gods (5.110) update to our LIVE testing environment! 

On Friday, May 29, the LIVE server will be taken offline at approximately 8:00 am CDT |  15:00 pm CEST in order to perform maintenance and to deploy the update. Initially, the LIVE environment will offer three of our five world bands: Eternal Kingdoms (the player-owned realms), God’s Reach (the starter area), and the Infected (3-faction-based campaign wars).  

We are still in the process of testing and balancing the fourth world, the Dregs (guild -vs- guild campaigns) on TEST and will continue to do so, on TEST, for now. Those who wish to test this mode – and have a higher tolerance for playtest issues – are invited to download the TEST game client and log into TEST. 

It’s important to remember that Crowfall is not a finished game. Whether you’re playtesting on LI...

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Hey folks,

Quick note -- we're not making a huge deal out of this, but with this latest patch we are officially ticking the version from pre-alpha to alpha.   The game has been in development (and in 24x7 testing) for a few years, now, and frankly we probably should have called it 'alpha' some time ago.  We'll do an announcement this morning, but we are electing not to do an official press release, because we feel like the distinction between 'pre-alpha' and 'alpha' doesn't mean much to the audience at large...  Internal designations vary so much between teams and projects that frankly, it doesn't mean much until you start to invite in the public en masse.  That's beta and that's when it gets real. 

Beta is what we are all focused on right now.  We have some solid momentum going now on fps improvements (huge strides in the most recent build, as you can all attest!) ...

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Alpha has arrived for Crowfall!

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Hey folks,

We put a new version up on Test last night -- this has a number of performance improvements, and a few known issues that we should probably highlight.

the Good

- First, we found a few improvements in the rendering pipeline.  This should give a frame rate boost on all machines.

- Grass cards have been improved to look better (no razor edges along the bottom) AND to perform better.  You can see the difference by turning your settings back to "Basic" ... but frankly, the overall performance improvement to this system means that you might as well run in Medium or higher.

- We added a new culling system to help performance as well.  "Culling" is a way of removing items and effects from the scene to improve framerate -- and, in theory, you shouldn't notice anything but increased performance if we are removing the right things.  (again, that's in theory).

- We fixed the framerate stutte...

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How the Classes of Crowfall correlate to your favorite RPG classes

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Tune in on Thursday, May 7, for the latest Crowfall news and find out what's coming next. 

11 am CDT | 6 pm CEST - https://www.twitch.tv/crowfallgame

 

Explaining the difference between LIVE and TEST. (This is in response to confusion we've seen around the interwebz)

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As we get closer to bringing backers in for their first taste of The Dregs, we wanted to remind you that the primary objective right now is to test the performance and technical aspects of the current build.

We know that there are issues with balance that many of you care about: how many import tokens you'll have, which powers are buggy, which classes and disciplines are OP or "too weak".  You can help us further by limiting your feedback to the objective, with as much helpful detail as possible.  As they say, "just the facts, Ma'am. Just the facts." 

We want to hear your thoughts about balance so that we can address them, but we don't want to hold up the test until "your class is just right".  If you find yourself worried that you or your team will be at a disadvantage when playing, remind yourself that this first phase is a playTEST, not a PLAYtest.  

To be clear:   "Fairness" isn't our priority right now.  This phase is abo...

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Hey folks,

Another quick check in on 5.110 "War of the Gods" development; we've been running Siege tests internally and we're knocking down bugs at a pretty rapid pace; as of this moment there are about a dozen issues remaining that we'd like to resolve before we put a Dregs campaign in front of you.   In the meantime, we appreciate all the help you guys have given us on finding and reproducing bugs with powers, crafting, interface and everything else.  We have a testing team that works around the clock (literally) to find and document issues but they can't provide the kind of coverage that comes from having a few thousands players in the game and playing.   In preparation for Dregs testing, please make sure you have your Guild properly set up on ... Read more

Join us on Thursday, April 2, at 11 am CDT | 6 pm CEST for the ACE Q&A live stream. 

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UPDATE - Thursday, 3-26-20, 6 pm CDT - Please be aware the War of the Gods Update on TEST will be unavailable the rest of the night. Tomorrow, we will notify our community as soon as we have an update on when it will be available. Thank you!


The big day is here! Crowfall backers are cordially invited to log into TEST and get their first look at the eagerly-anticipated War of the Gods update! Please remember, this update is on TEST because it needs to be TESTED so check the release notes to ensure you are aware of what to expect and...have fun playing!

PHASE 1 

We’re taking a phased approach to releasing the update on TEST in order to collect feedback on specific updated features. In this first phase of testing War of the Gods, we will focus on updated combat and gameplay, leveling progression in the God’s Reach world, and Frostweaver gameplay and mechanics.

God’s Reach offers new Crows a s...

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Who’s awesome? You are, you victorious Crow, you are! And that’s why we’re creating this Victory Salute appreciation award just for you. 

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Yeah, I know.  It's frustrating.  It's frustrating for us, too.

Here's the deal: we have a build, and it hung at the 99.99% bar.  There is one issue that has proven to be incredibly elusive, and it's causing a massive lag on the server.  Overall, the game feels pretty good.  We're still working through power-related bugs -- all the underlying system changes we made this milestone have caused a crop of them, but frankly that's expected and we're working them through at a good clip -- but I'd be OK with putting those in front of you.  Overall, I think combat is in a much better shape than 5.100, even with these new issues.

But the server performance issue is a killer.  Any kind of reasonable player load (and I have reason to suspect we'll hit that) causes this problem to emerge, and it makes the game unplayable.  Which would be even more frustrating.

As to "when", the truth is, we don't know.  We have top men working on it....

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Hey folks,

Unfortunately, as the title says, today is not the day that 5.110 goes to Test.  

We hoped it would be. We wanted it to be. We pushed really hard to make it the day. 

This was a crazy week. On Tuesday, Gordon and I decided to institute a mandatory work-from-home policy for the entire team. That meant a quick scramble to get everyone equipped with machines and webcams and microphones and, in some cases, even desks at home. We started sending people home in waves.  By Friday, the entire team was up and running in sixty different locations, with access to slack and email and source code and bug tracking and server monitoring and everything else. This morning we were even able to do company stand-ups like normal, only via webcam. so, really, not like normal at all.

In spite of that, we made a valiant run to get you a build, because we know you guys are chomping at the bit ...

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Leveling the playing field with Racial Disciplines

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P.S. I know how much some of you were looking forward to that Interactive Roads article, but no matter how hard I tried, I could simply not compete with the fine work @Staff and ...

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We will not be publishing a Dev Diary this Wednesday (tomorrow) since we've got the live stream happening on Thursday (11 am CST). 

(Preemptively locking this thread so I don't get a bunch of "dergs" and "Thursday at noon" responses. Some of ya'll have beat that poor dead horse so far into the ground that it's nothing but dust and microscopic bone fragments now.) 

There will be another Crowfall Twitch Stream-a-Thon March 20-23. We want to help spread the word about guilds who are open to bringing in new members. You can help us accomplish this by creating a guild recruiting video for the streamers to share during the event.  

Your video should be at least 30 seconds but not more than 60 seconds in length. In accordance with our Fair Use Policy, your Crowfall-...

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The Thralls are coming! Get bossy with the head guy to collect resources you'll need for Major Disciplines.

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