Category Archives: General

Behind the Scenes, General, Screenshots

State of the Project Address v3.0

Even three point o-ier than before!

So, it’s been a long while since my last big post… Sorry about that.  Time to rectify away, though!

Since my last State of the Project post (way back in August of last year!?!) we’ve accomplished a whole lot!  Time for a list (in pseudo-chronological order)!

Vanity/Wardrobe

We rolled out our combined version of a Vanity/Wardrobe system.  While we haven’t hooked it up to the account system yet, we’ve got a solution for integrating it with the game in internal testing/review right now.  In the meantime, you can save/load your creations via a bit of text.  If you haven’t checked it out, you can find it here.

Housing

While housing (along with the associated streets and friend signposts) is set up and working, there’s some architectural and infrastructure stuff keeping it (and other instanced areas) from working in anything other than a test environment at the moment.  I’ve been chomping at the bit to get this rolled out, but we’ll just have to wait a bit while we work out some of the other kinks.

Pathfinding

CubiRacing

Our NPCs can move!  While we still have a few bugs to work out here and there, most of the NPCs are fully functional, though we don’t have foxes working yet.

Namerizing

Eleven Wardrobe Namerizer

Eleven Wardrobe Namerizer

We requested some help from our amazing community to provide new names/descriptions to the items in the wardrobe, since that data has been lost to us.  While we might have been able to simply dig around to find the lost info somewhere, we thought it might be a good opportunity to put our own (and some of your) personal touch on things.  It’s closed down at the moment, but keep your eyes out for other ways you can contribute in the future (we may even open this, or something similar, back up)!

Throwaway Server – Thrown Away!

That old Throwaway Server we were always talking about?  It’s no longer being actively used for development.  Instead, we’ve pushed the real thing up on GitHub along with a couple of other repositories.  Full disclosure though, there are still a couple of repositories we’re holding private for the moment that are necessary to run the game (if you want access to contribute, just send us a message from the info over on the Contact Us page.

Alpha Release

Eleven Logo

We finally managed to get things to a point where we could welcome people into both the forums (public) and the game (private).  We’re continually adding more people to our testing group as activity levels and system stability allow, and we’re making loads of progress in getting things ready for bigger audiences.  An unfortunate disclaimer though, we’ve still got a long road ahead of us along with some major changes that need to be made to our core system in order to get things ready for that next level which I’ll address a bit more later.

This also gave rise to our forums (you are signed up… right?), which has had a great turnout of former Glitchen and new players excited to get in on the action.

MMOGames Editors Choice Award for February 2015

We won!  Thanks to our amazing community, we won MMOGames first ever Editors Choice Award voting, and had an interview (with yours truly) run because of it.  Check it out here.

 

Current Happenings

Architectural Issues

You may have seen our most recent blog post regarding some of the issues we’re working on, but I’ll summarize either way.  Basically, some of the features we’re taking advantage of in order to get our system working well in a distributed environment also make it perform insanely slowly.  While this kind of performance doesn’t hinder a very small user base much, if we were to increase the load on the servers, things wouldn’t go very well right now.

Some experimentation has been done in order to try and improve things without rewriting our entire infrastructure to avoid use of the problem features, which has had at least a little success, but we’re still working towards better solutions and closely monitoring the respective progress by the node.js/io.js teams (did I mention we’ve been experimenting with both, and are excited about the merging of the two projects back together?).

QA2

The QA2 process has started, which means our team is combing through every single level in the game and trying to make sure every barnacle is pointing the right direction, every vendor has a nice and consistent look, and a million other tiny details that these perfectionists are keeping a close eye on.  We’ve already rolled out one of the Groddle regions, and are slowly working through the rest.  I’ll get one of the team members to write something up for the blog soon.

Wrap-up

We’ve been making a good bit of progress on bug fixes while we’ve been trying to sort out the big issues.  We’ve also got a setup for an integrated vanity/wardrobe that we should be able to roll out relatively soon to the alpha testers and are trying to add more testers whenever possible; we’re currently up to 53 users, though there’s typically only a handful on simultaneously.

That’s all for now, folks!  While progress may have slowed down a bit due to outside obligations and our fun architectural issue, be certain that we are very much committed to seeing this through, so we’ll get it working one way or another.

-Kaiyon

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General

MMOGames Editors Choice of February (Updated)

We won!

Thanks to all of your votes, we won, and should get some nice coverage from them due to it.

If you’re curious to see how well our amazing community did in the voting, take a look here: http://www.mmogames.com/topmmos/mmogames-editors-choice-february-2015/

-edit- The interview I did with the editor is available now here:  http://www.mmogames.com/gamearticles/glitch-revival-project-interview-project-lead-eleven/

-Kaiyon

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General

Vote for Eleven!

While we certainly owe you a real progress update (and there HAS been progress!) we are honored that MMOGames has put Eleven up for Editor’s Choice for February! I’m pleased that the editor has taken notice of us, especially since we are not yet in an open testing phase. If you’re so inclined, take a moment to click the link below and vote for us. The voting is at the bottom of the page, and no registration of any kind is necessary.

MMOGames Editor’s Choice – February 2015

If you haven’t signed up for the forum yet, please do so here; signing up now will reserve your name for the game!

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General

Testing… Testing…1, 2, 3, Testing…

Is this thing on?

Ah, good, it is.

Well, as I’m sure you all know (you do, right?) we’ve let a small group of 13 people into the game to start playing around and testing.  This has been a great success, with many improvements being made to help improve the stability and experience while some other work is ongoing in order to bring over some more features.  Thanks in no small part to these improvements, we’re bringing in another small (but bigger!) group to help with the process.

How’s 18 sound, making a total of 31 alpha testers?  We’ve already picked those new people and let them know.  If you weren’t part of the group this time, just hang tight while we tighten things up more.

And now for some feedback from our testers (They provided a lot of material for this part, but in the interest of not facing TLDR issues, I picked out a few comments.  They can yell at me later.):

“I feel at home and the nostalgia is overwhelming!”

“Incredible!! I didn’t expect it to be identical to Glitch which it is.”

“(S)ome days there are no new bugs(yay) and other days there are quite a few, and often they cause reloads but it’s all part of the process.”

“It’s good to be there, to almost feel the heart of the Giants. Just like if I went through a portal that brought me in Ur a few glitch-years after the events that put an end on Ur. Back in a broken but fixable world, because we have the technology, we can repair it. A bit of a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, if you have the imagination.”

“Things that arent working yet, npc, and emblems, and such. I can’t do basic quests without simple ingredients like butterfly milk and grain.” (Regarding what’s annoying)

“Default Glitchen æsthetics. Bare, bald, grey, and not being naked. Generic! Although we could be wireframed. Generic might be good then, the pants are superfluous.” (Regarding what’s annoying)

-Kaiyon

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General

‘Two Years Past’ or ‘Welcome Home’

It’s been exactly 2 years to the day since we thought we all lost the world of Ur forever.  It most certainly was a sad day for me, and I’m sure I can say the same for the rest of the team (those that played at least).  Little did we know at the time that just under a year later, we’d be given the opportunity to bring it back…and that exactly a year later, we would be able to walk around in Ur, even though it was only on a single street.  It’s been a year of hard, but fun work, and while we’ve got a long ways to go, significant progress has been made.

Welcome Home

Eleven Logo

As those that have been keeping up with the blog may know, we started work on our ‘true’ server, the one that’s going to be for keeps, a while back.  Since we’ve had a chance to figure out how most of the main game functions work, the true test there was going to be getting the overall system architecture set up in such a way that we’d have the stability and organization we need in order to bring the world back together as we left it 2 years ago, and allow a full load of players.  Well, while only a very minimal set of gameplay functions have been implemented in the ‘proper’ way on this new version of the server, we feel we’re ready to open up, albeit to a very small group to start.

It may sound like a tiny number, but we’ll be welcoming 13 people in to start.  How are we going to choose those 13 people?  This first group will be a mix of people we’ve identified as good testers and 5 people brought in based on their levels of interaction with our group via social media (Facebook, Twitter and here on the blog).  Different rules will likely apply to future groups coming in, such as contests and/or first-come-first-serve registration, but those 5 people will be identified and notified shortly.  For now, one of the most important things to remember for testers is: Alpha is really not about playing the game at all, but often rather tedious testing and enduring crashes and bugs and… stuff…

How are we going to let people in to the game?  Well, that’s where the web app piece comes in to play.  Our shiny new forums are launching today as well!  Everyone will be welcome to register and chat on the forums for now, and those chosen to participate in the Alpha will be given access to the game through the same login along with a special Alpha only forum.  The forum url will be announced in approximately an hour via Facebook and Twitter. (Update: look here! http://humbaba.elevengiants.com )

While we’re glad to start bringing people in, please remember that this is a work in progress, and we’re likely to experience some growing pains as we move forward, and since this is a volunteer project, please bear with us while we work these things out.  As always, your best source for updates, whether they be related to issues we’re having, rules for bringing in the next batch of alpha testers, or announcements for new functionality being rolled out will be right here on the blog, on Facebook and on Twitter.  Further information for how you can help out as an Alpha tester once you’re in will be found in the Alpha forums.

Again, welcome home,

-Kaiyon

P.S.: Please look forward to follow up posts from some of the key team members that have helped make this happen.

P.P.S.: Special thanks go out to Aroha, Joey, JustinD, LadyCeres, Scheijan, Turnip and Varaeth for their contributions to this last push towards Alpha, and of course to the rest of the team for all of their hard work on the rest of the project.

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General

A Year of Fun

Well, okay, I may have missed the exact date, but in my defense, my family was fighting a severe case of the plague (that may be a slight exaggeration, but it sure felt like it).

Just a few days over a year ago (November 21, 2013), our little team started to form.  At that point, there was no “Eleven” and there was no project, just a group of people picking around in the assets released by Tiny Speck to try and make sense of what was there, and just as importantly, what wasn’t. While this discussion started up on a private Facebook group (amongst other places), it quickly transitioned over to this amazing product called Slack when Ali (LittlePoundCake) joined the discussion and opened the doors for a few of us to help manage a group of people similarly interested in figuring this whole thing out.  From there, we quickly decided we wanted our main goal to be filling in the missing pieces and bringing the amazing world of Ur back to life.

It’s been an incredible experience so far, and while I know we’ve put a ton of work into it, we’ve a long road ahead to fully reach that goal, and then we’ve got the future to consider!  I could reminisce for several paragraphs, but I’ll leave that out right now (you can always look back at the blog archives).

I know it’s been pretty quiet on our social media front over the past month or so, but please don’t take that as a sign off stagnation.  In fact, it’s just the opposite; we’re working very hard to bring some big things to you all, our loyal followers and displaced residents of Ur.  While I’d love to spill the beans now, please bear with us just a bit longer; announcements will be made soon (don’t you love that term?)…

-Kaiyon

14 Comments
General

We need your help!

Yes, it’s this time of the year again. I know many of you have been playing with Joey’s awesome new Vanity and Wardrobe page. As you will have noticed, we are still missing quite a few things on that page; while we got all of the assets and the categories (like shirt or hat) from TinySpeck, we’re missing all names, descriptions and tags of all the wardrobe items.

This is where you come in: we built a little website so you, the community, can help us in getting all the funny names and whimsical descriptions back.

The Eleven Wardrobe Namerizer

Do you remember some names from all the time you used to spend in the Wardrobe to dress up your Glitchen? Perfect! Do you even have screenshots which show original names or descriptions? Even better.

For the creative among you: you think you have the one and only Glitchy description for the “Polka Dot Bikini Bottom”? Or a great idea what the “Steeltoe Boots” should actually be named? Go ahead and add it.

Have you ever wanted to look less strange sitting in the grass and munching on carrots?

Have you ever wanted to look less strange sitting in the grass and munching on carrots?

However, even if you (like me) don’t remember anything, don’t have any screenshots and aren’t the creative type – we still need your help! Vote for the suggestions others have made. Help us tag everything, so we can create more comfortable ways for you to search and navigate the wardrobe pages.

You will find instructions and a few guidelines on the startpage of the Namerizer. If you have any questions or feedback please post them in the comments section here.

Happy Namerizing!

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Behind the Scenes, General

Have you seen this quoin? Peons request #2

WantedPosterFinal

Back in February Sirentist explained the tagging process being undertaken by the QA team and asked you all for help locating snaps containing quoins. Sirentist asked for Glitchen to root through their folders of snaps from the game, tissues at hand, and to upload anything that would be useful to our Peons forum. Now we want to explain how we used that information and why we are asking you again to search through your snaps and videos for us.

We had many incredibly useful snaps as a result of this initial request and we have incorporated this information into the streets we have been tagging. Thank you to all those who contributed to this initial request for snaps, and especially to the wonderfully productive Zoi and MissCoco who appear to have been documenting Ur in the middle of the night given some of their quoin-complete street snaps! Their photography skills augment the street snap archives we have been using provided by Cleops, Ecats and the Glitch Tribute Blog.

Over the last few months Sumi and I have been revisiting all the streets in order to fill in a giant spreadsheet which formally documents the snaps that contain the quoin images for a particular street. (Yes, I know we should have done this on the first pass through tagging, but excitement at saying ‘Tag, you’re it!’ got the better of us and we neglected to keep our documentation up to date). You can see the details of the task by looking at the page for Aranna, which shows that for Khubbani Siggara, the snap documenting 9 of the 10 quoins can be found in Cleops’ dropbox:

TaggingNotesFinal

(Maybe you can see why we overlooked this administrative task in the initial excitement of recreating the streets ready to be walked through again!)

We have dedicated ourselves to filling in this spreadsheet for the whole of Ur for several reasons. Firstly the next stage of the QA process involves us going through each street in turn, fine tuning the position and parameters of each item on the street. This will mean that rocks will no longer float a few inches above the ground, sloths will hang from trees in a manner consistent with the laws of physics (and biology). We will also need to set the type of each quoin – energy, mood, currants, iMG, time, favour – along with how quickly it regenerates and the payout provided. The information on the quoin type can only come accurately from snaps – otherwise it will have to be guessed (maybe we could flip a quoin for it).

Secondly it became clear that as people responded to this initial request for snaps, that we needed to be much clearer about what we still needed for each street. For example it emerged that people found it useful to know how many quoins are predicted for a street as well as how many are missing; this allows you to grin like the Rube has just offered to trade a tomato for a Grand Ol’ Grinder, when you find a snap with all the quoins on it.

We have just finished this giant task of documentation and the Peons forum is now complete for all regions of Ur. This hall of shame contains entries for all streets which contain more quoins than those identified by the snaps we have currently in our grubby little mitts. Here is the page for Aranna and the third entry is that for Khubbani Siggara previously mentioned.

ElevenPeonsFinal

As you can see we’re still missing a lot of quoins, particularly the location of those pesky Qurazy Quoins (or QQs). We are also very interested in snaps which include the high value quoins at that moment when they popped and revealed the treasure therein.

However, although snaps continue to be indispensable for quoin placement, they rarely tell us much about the value of the pictured quoins or their spawn frequencies. Another tool that has proven helpful to the QA process are a number of video clips uploaded to the net by former Glitchen. Looking through these videos has helped us re-learn how certain quests or the odd basement street used to work. We are also using these videos to provide an indication of how we should consider configuring quoin spawn rates and values during the next phase of QA.

So we are now asking you to take part in one final push to help produce an ultimate repository of snaps and videos which mean we can repopulate the streets with quoins that are as near to the Uriginal (sorry couldn’t resist that one!) as possible. Please can you dig a little deeper into your memories and archives to see if you can find any more snaps or videos which can help us in our quest to recreate the streets of Ur as accurately as possible.

Please bear in mind the following points as you excitedly search for the lost quoins of Ur that are listed on the Peons forum:

  • We would welcome any quoin-containing videos that are not part of the video archives we have already identified. So if you spent some of your time in the game filming your travels around Ur, we would greatly appreciate it if you could link to your video or archive in the video section of Peons along with a brief description. Just use the ‘PostReply’ button at the bottom of the  Peons page to do this.
  • Using the power of Google™ we have already searched all the published snaps which were taken before Glitch closed down – the snaps that appear when someone clicks the “All Snaps by (Username)” link. Whilst this has been very hard work, it has been heart-warming for us to come across so many familiar faces and be reminded of the many creative events that took place before the end of the world. So you don’t need to upload any of these snaps for us.
  • Now, we are requesting any snaps that you didn’t publish, as well as screenshots taken using a method other than the in-game snapshot feature. For example you might have taken street snaps of your favourite locations and then saved them on your hard-drive. If this snap contains quoins which might be relevant for our search, then please let us have them by posting on the Peons forum.
  • We are particularly keen to receive full street snaps as these make placing the quoins accurately much easier because they are free from parallax effects. However partial snaps are still useful, especially if they contain the elusive QQs.
  • If you have snaps that document any of the high value quoins then please upload those for us to use – otherwise they risk being lost for ever!
  • You would also make a QA peon very happy if you could check that the snap you plan to upload doesn’t duplicate a snap that someone else has already posted for that street.
  • The title of the post for each street indicates the number of missing quoins and/or QQ. So for example ‘missing 1 quoin (of 4)’ means that we are searching for a standard quoin, whereas ‘missing QQ’ means we are searching for the Qurazy Quoin. Obviously ‘missing QQ + 1 quoin (of 4)’ means we are searching for the QQ and a standard quoin.
  • The entries for each region will be listed with the most recently changed post at the top. This is not ideal but is what you get when using a forum which costs no currants to run. However you can re-order the posts in the familiar alphabetical order by using the drop-box menus (sort by ‘Subject’ ‘Ascending’) underneath the list of streets.
  • Finally, please, please upload images to the Peons forum by following the instructions outlined by Sirentist. So avoid using the tempting “Img” tab on the reply window or the “Add image to post” as these use a 3rd-party to store the image … and sometime soon thereafter the link becomes dead. Instead please use the less obvious “Upload attachment” tab underneath the reply window because this provides a permanent link to the image. Go read Sirentist’s post as it is way funnier than this bullet point.
  • Note that there is a 5MB limit on the size of images that can be uploaded to Peons. If your street snap is bigger than this – and this might be true for areas such as Jal – then the file can be converted to a smaller size by following these instructions.

Rest assured, all posts will be looked at and responded to by the QA team as we use them to restore the streets to that glorious era before the end of the world took place (excluding the forehorsemen of course). The title of each post will reflect the number of quoins still being searched for – once we’ve found everything we are looking for, the post will be changed to say ‘|done|’ and donations made to the QA person’s favourite giant as thanks for the snaps and videos which made this possible.

Soon Ur will be back in all its former glory thanks to the efforts of people like you!

P.S. You might be wondering why there are so many bad puns throughout this blog. Whilst it might be a reflection of the kind of person who becomes obsessive about quoin location on a remote street in the Ancestral Lands, it is also a homage to the wonderful rhymes you’ll find on a few of the early posts on the Peons forum (see Toma Traverse for instance). Unfortunately it soon became clear that the completion of Peons would be severely delayed if we maintained the rhyming couplets and so that practice was soon abandoned.

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General

Running the Routes

I know the resource routes were a bit of a polarizing game feature.  Most people either loved or hated it.  Well, here’s a quick video showing a short one in action!

A couple quick notes:

  • We only have the one street template to work with at the moment which I tried to piece together from a full street snap of one of the old ones.  We’re working with TS to see if we can get access to the original templates.
  • Butler motion is still a little buggy.  Most of them are standing still next to the house, but one of them (the one on my street) is stuck in front of my tower.

-Kaiyon

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