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.
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?
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.
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:
(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.
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” tabunderneath 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.
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.
Short little video for you guys today demonstrating some cooperation, rather than solo gameplay. Varaeth and I wanted to show you a few new two-person things that have begun to work since we’ve been working on the game. We showed you back in March that collaborative mining was working, but quoin sharding was not. Trading, transcendental radiation and even partying also work again. The party space is full of unconfigured spawners and teleport markers.
(Pardon the overall lack of polish in this video…we started to film it, then I had to reset the server for other reasons, which of course meant we both forgot to grab a quoin to get those badges out of the way. The reason it takes Varaeth so long to join me when we dive into the pool is because he was getting his badges and had a little lag on his end…
TL;DR: staging can be harder than you think when you’re still building a gameserver!)
It’s been many months since we’ve been able to show off some basic gameplay, but we’d like to change that. We have a few videos planned for you all, so get ready! What I’d like to demonstrate to you today is how many higher-level things are happening in the background at the moment.
You’ll notice some weirdness which we will of course be attending to. Those poor street spirits will be dressed up properly very soon. If you missed Aroha’s tweet, we put a temporary room in the game for the locations we don’t have yet; this cut out a good number of errors so we can focus on the ones we need to fix. There’s some visual “noise” that’s from the god-client, like all those tooltips and things highlighting as I walked past them. (Or did that happen before? I forget!)
Anyway, without further ado:
A note on the achievements happening back to back: Glitch counted everything. I have been astounded looking through this code to see how much counting occurs. When we set up our player data for testing, by default we made them level 26 with some currants and iMG…the game just has a bit of difficulty parsing that with the fact that we didn’t earn them. Picking up a currant forces it to count, and it goes “yay, you have so much money!” and fires off all the relevant achievements. Don’t worry, we’ll be starting from scratch when the time comes just like everyone else!
It’s been a good 5 months since I last gave a nice overall summary of our progress on things, so here we go.
Game Related:
You know that throwaway server we’ve been talking about? Well, we’re just about ready to throw it away! Well, not really throw it away; it’ll still be a playground to figure things out for a while, but we’re actually ready to start working on the actual thing! Aroha has put a lot of work into the high level design while we’ve been picking away at the throwaway server, so keep tuned for further details soon. (I’ll pester him into making another one of his Dev Log posts.)
Of less importance, but more fun, is the fact that we got a lot more features working. Just some of the highlights include the home streets and interiors along with towers (expect a video from me soonish!), hi5 signs, GPS features on the main map, triggers (physics and such), and I’m sure I’m missing a bunch!
The QA team under LadyCeres is still tweaking the locations of different items with input from their fake forums while also cataloging the way street spirits should look around the world of Ur. To put that second part into perspective, each street spirit is made up of several customizable parts, which leads to an absurd number of possible combinations, but only a smaller subset actually make any sense, since some of the different styles simply don’t physically match up. You an expect a blog post about how the world of Ur is coming together soon!
We have a new logo made by none other than Kukubee himself! He was awesome enough to make us our very own logo with similar styling to the Glitch one, but with it’s own unique feel to it.
Work has even started on the Android version of the Eleven app based on the Glitch HQ app that TinySpeck had. Gafanhotz has been hard at work making it look really slick while the server infrastructure is still being developed to help drive the app.
Website Related:
The forums are getting very close to internal testing, which means they’re also close to a public release! Varaeth has been hard at work getting the whole website infrastructure set up to allow us to incorporate the forums with the game, vanity, wardrobe, etc… I can hardly wait to be able to start interacting with everyone in a more direct manner. Expect an update soon when internal testing starts.
I’m sure you’ve all already seen Joey’s video showing off the new combined wardrobe and vanity. If not, what are you waiting around for, get over there and take a look! Gone are the days of having to go back and forth between two tools to update your overall appearance; it’s all in one now, baby! We’re still considering some extra features, such as customizing the color of some of the different pieces of clothing, so let us know what you think. This is even something we could consider rolling out to public testing soon. Stay tuned for more details!
We’ve got an early concept for our skills page as well, thanks to RedBirdo. Once we get the forums rolled out, we can begin integrating these important game-related features with the rest of the website.
Bottlenecks:
I’ll go over some of the bottlenecks from my last big post along with an update on where we are (some of which may have been mentioned above already), along with some new things.
Logo – Done! Thanks Kukubee!
Vanity and Wardrobe – Mostly done! Turnip started off the efforts to determine how it worked in the background for TinySpeck, and Joey helped finish it off by creating an amazing new interface. We’ve got a little more behind the scenes work to handle in order to get the spritesheets generated (and put in the right spot for the game to pick up), but the main work has been finished!
God Pages – We’ve stalled a bit here, but have a small set of pages to start from. Soon, we’ll need to pick this back up as a higher priority, and really start to consider the scope we want to include in our version of the system. We’ll try to blog some details of this effort at some point.
Authentication – Just about done! Varaeth is just working out some of the last details before we can start the forums testing.
Pathfinding – Still waiting. There have been bigger fish to fry, so it keeps getting pushed aside. If anyone has some experience in this area and would like to join our little team to take a stab at it, let us know!
Other Notes:
“Can we come it and play yet?” – Unfortunately not yet, but we’re getting closer with every step we take. The rollout of the forums and wardrobe/vanity and the fact that we’re gearing up to start working on the ‘real’ game server should be good signs, so keep your eyes fixed here.
“Shut up and take my money!!!” – Patience, friends. We still don’t have a great demand for income, since servers are really our only expense right now, and we’ve got that pretty well covered. We’re also evaluating options on how to take donations once we start needing them, as well as considering options for Eleven merch. As always, stay tuned here for more details.
Final Notes:
Again, I’d like to thank all of our amazing friends. Tiny Speck, Kukubee, Jade, Danny, Brandon Brown, Xavier and many more that I’m sure I’m forgetting.
Things are slowly coming together, and I’m still insanely proud to be able to lead such a great team of people. It’s amazing how well people can work together when they have a common goal!
Here is a preview of our NEW concept for the Wardrobe and Vanity. The layout and functionality is entirely thanks to Joey!
For those that are curious, this interface is written using HTML and Javascript, but it’s calling upon the original Avatar Displayer SWF file found in the wardrobe. We’re all very excited about the Wardrobe and Vanity being more unified than it was previously – you can see how easily you can switch back and forth to customize your character’s entire appearance on the fly without needing to wait for each module to load independently. Enjoy!
