[James]

You may notice that we took down the original Karrea world, and replaced it with a newer version. But don’t worry – nothing was deleted – the original world is simply offline at the moment. The lighthouse is not gone.

[James]

Just like a proud parent showing off their baby!

[James]

Hey everyone, let me give some official answers and background here:

1. Our next step from a marketing perspective is to get the game onto Steam Early Access. This will allow people to discover the game via Steam, pay via Steam, download a native standalone app, and validates the game a little. Once this is done, we’ll be in a better position to promote the game wider.

2. Everyone who buys the game on Steam will also be able to play in the browser.

3. Everyone who buys the game on oortonline.com will also get keys to play on Steam.

4. The perks will only be available on oortonline.com.

5. You can upgrade your purchase – email us and we’ll help you do it. Lots of people have already done this.

6. When we hit the next milestone – we’ll send out another player survey to gather feedback on the direction of the game. However, we read all the forums, and talk with players on twitch, youtube and twitter – so there are lots of opportunities to give feedback. The advantage of the surveys is that _everyone_ is given an equal opportunity even if they’re not hanging on the forums or twitter daily.

7. PvP is quite a polarising feature. Some people want it badly, others aren’t interested. We’re going to make sure both groups are equally satisfied. There will be dangerous PvP worlds and safe non-PvP / pure PvE worlds. Players can then pick the experience they want. PvP will be opt in.

8. We didn’t ignore the feedback and we use it daily and weekly when focusing the team and making priority decision. It’s crazy valuable.

9. We will do an amazing job of the highest priorities (exploring, for example). Look how varied the world generation currently is – now just think how we’ll deal with dungeon generation. It’ll be special.

10. We did start the combat before the survey results were returned. (Thanks, Mr Bismarck).

11. We also crafted the core combat mechanics so that they will be shared between PvE and PvP. We wanted to share the mechanics with the players as quickly as possible and it was much quicker to enable some simple beacon PvP than to create mobs with AI, models, animation, etc. So the PvP was just a short cut.

12. We’re listening to the community and we hope to get better at communicating so that everyone is confident that we’re “on track”. At this early stage of development we’re spending quite a bit of time create systems to enable features, once these are in place you’ll hopefully see more rapid feature releases.

Hope this answers your questions and concerns – shout if there is anything else.

[James]

You mean it’s complete until the next version arrives… with all the new awesome features that you’ll want to include!! (Especially the coloured lights mined from the other worlds.)

[James]

Yeah – a few people have asked for an average player height so their eyes are halfway between the 2nd block off the ground (1.5m).

[James]

> Rubber-banding seems improved on my sometimes-laggy internet connection, but that could just be because of a good day in vacuumland.

We’re constantly working on this. It’s particularly tough when the game isn’t running quickly (say 15fps-) and the ping time is high (say 200ms+).

However, we’ll keep improving it and making the game smarter to deal with it in the worse cases. Hopefully it’ll soon be an issue of the past…

[James]

1. The current graphical animation is a place holder – we def. want to replace it.

2. It’s great to get some ideas about a cool / special / and original way to achieve this. More please.

3. There are some technical challenges. Any solution that instantly removes the blocks (even as part of a shrinking animation) will make the space behind the block visible. This requires the game to quickly re-generate the chunk mesh from the voxel world (without the block in) or you’ll see through the world. This often happens in voxel games because the world has not been fully updated before visual results start getting shown. So in an ideal world, we’d find a visually great solution, without needing the chunk to be instantly re-meshed – as this process can take many frames to achieve.

Any other ideas?

[James]

We’ll normally give access within a few minutes or an hour. At the moment there is a manual step – so we say 24 hours – just to be on the safe side.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by James.

[James]

This is brilliant…!

[James]

Let me also add that there are many games that use a combination of a compiled language (often C++) and a scripting language (say Lua, or UnrealScript).

The compiled parts often do the heavy lifting (physics, animation, simulation, rendering, world generation, etc.)

The scripted parts often do the more design and entity focused tasks (crafting, weapons, gameplay, etc.)

Even when we release the standalone apps we will still use a combination of C++ and JavaScript. This combination allows us to get the most out of a computer and allow our team to work productively + flexibly.

The game will also make full use of your i7 cores and your GTX780 pipelines. With all the graphics settings turned up to max, you’ll think your machine is about to take off. 😉

[James]

Lots of people are asking for mod and server support – we’re exploring exactly what this means – but we’re *definitely* keen to deliver something comprehensive. We’re talking with some of the bigger MC modders to understand their exact requirements and learnings before sharing anything public. But I can confirm, it’s on the radar, being explored, and we’ll share news when we have something solid.

[James]

We’re alive and kicking. Think we still need to get into a good rhythm of news, game updates, twitch steams, and youtube videos. They’ll been an update this week with some visual and graphics improvements. Quite a bit of development can often be behind the scenes (improvements to the systems, servers, the world builder, etc.) It’s not always obvious.

(Also a few members of the team have been away on holiday for the past and current week.)

I think the busyness of the servers reflects the amount of content. Once we get the crafting and first creatures / combat in they’ll be more “game” to get your teeth into.

Keep the faith. Team is working really hard. Updates soon.

[James]

Bonkers! (Awesome bonkers – that is.)

[James]

(We have an update coming that you might like to play with. Let’s just say different coloured crystals on different worlds. Gotta collect them all.)

[James]

It’s awesome – blown away.

[Author]

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