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Some bridge - Yaga

 

Greetings Wurmians! 

That's right, I'm back with another edition of the valrei international. We've been rather busy this week with the launch of wurm unlimited 1.9 to catch it up to wurm online, but there's still plenty to talk about, so let's get to it

 

Wu live
This week saw the launch of 1.9.1.5 (and quickly 1.9.1.6, pesky bugs) and it's been huge. There's already been a few mods for the new content and seeing the servers buzzing with activity is awesome.


 I was playing on a server on Monday, and playing again today after the update made me realise just how big our visuals have come in the past six months, so a huge personal shout out to both Samool and Saroman, their continued work to see wurm look and feel better than ever has really impacted the game, and it's awesome to see. 

 

Far far away
Speaking of visual improvements, samool has been doing some amazing things with distant rendering. Gone will be the days of bland green land, and instead, we will have this! 

Spoiler

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Does anyone else like beavers? Cos dam! (seriously, who doesn't like beavers, otters or ferrets, they're the adorablest!) 

 

Coming soon
One thing I have been working towards and talked about in many places is the start of our very own wurm dev streams! From general discussion, answering questions and playing the game, to specific streams about upcoming features
 I'm excited to say we're getting near the point we can start with this and see where it goes.
If you have ideas for things you'd like to see, whether from how we play to segments we handle let us know below and we'll see about whether we can include it.
We have no firm date to the start of this yet, but our goal is to start in the next month or two with weekend streams 

 

That’s it from us this week, we’re doing some behind the scenes changes to how we handle things approaching the switch to AWS, once we are closer to those changes we’ll lay out our plans for future works . There’s a lot going into it and some pretty awesome things, so stay tuned for that!

 

Until then though, Keep on Wurming!

Retrograde & the wurm team
 

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❤️ Distance Rendering

Now we just need the UI to be more 4k friendly. I would die to play it in 4k with distance landscapes.

Edited by MrJonnyboy
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Ahh the distance looks great ? should go well with all the new graphics updates! Awesome work @Samool

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50 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

 

  Hide contents

 

 

 

 

 

Coming soon
One thing I have been working towards and talked about in many places is the start of our very own wurm dev streams! From general discussion, answering questions and playing the game, to specific streams about upcoming features
 I'm excited to say we're getting near the point we can start with this and see where it goes.

 

 

+10

 

sorry one day i may learn the finer art of just putting in the bit i want.  But the dev streamings is something i woould really love to watch

 

 

 

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4 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

Wait, beavers?

 

Yes, beavers. They sound like a grumpy squeaky toy for dogs when they talk and it's one of the cutest things ever.

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Those are some amazing visuals. Well done! Very much looking forward to seeing that implemented. Aye! Enough visual puns. :)

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2 hours ago, Retrograde said:

seriously, who doesn't like beavers, otters or ferrets, they're the adorablest!

me

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The new LOD changes are AHHHHH-MAZING and I can't express enough how grateful and excited I am that you guys are putting so much work into improving the game visually.

 

But this is probably the right time and place to also give feedback. So while I think the new LOD is wonderful, it also changes a lot of how vast and large the world feels. Although the old LOD was made so for optimization purposes, IRONICALLY it had a side benefit of giving the illusion of DISTANCE and VASTNESS because you couldn't see the trees in the far distance. This made the view look EPIC and MAGESTIC, making you feel like you lived in a huge world with so much to explore. 

 

The new tree LOD shrinks the world and reveals just how small it is. ?

 

So I took those screenshots and did some photoshop magic to see how I personally feel it should be balanced. In the process I realized that I don't mind the distant trees so much if they are on the ground level, but all the trees that were on the distant mountains bothered me a lot. So from my point of view, the perfect result would be if the LOD settings showed trees in the distance, but only under a certain height.

 

In the animated GIF screenshots below, you can see in the first one that the mountain in the foreground still shows trees (and that still seems logical to me) but the mountains in the far distance do not anymore. 

 

treedistance01.gif

 

treedistance02.gif

Edited by Malena
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Can't wait to get this in-game thanks for the great work guys.

 

 

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The views from the top of the mountain will be even better :)
Great work!

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5 hours ago, Retrograde said:

Does anyone else like beavers?

 

Coming soon

Im totally fine with that. :) 

Edited by Nordlys

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Really is amazing in difference between graphics Now and way back when, great job! 

Here's a bit of contrast;
 

Spoiler

This was with everything on max, wanted it to look it's best as it was my first homestead and I was proud.wurm005.pngwurm015.png

 

Edited by HexD
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Ayyy there's my name! How old is that screenshot @HexD?

 

@wipeout

Edited by Rudie
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Im glad that you're doing things and all, but when are you going to adress the elephant in the room? No amount of draw distance or shiny textures is gonna bring new players to your almost dead dwindling population. And if you are doing something about this, when u gonna let us know? I want to know if the game's gonna be dead in 3years or if ur finally gonna start advertising.

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1 minute ago, Gladiator said:

Im glad that you're doing things and all, but when are you going to adress the elephant in the room? No amount of draw distance or shiny textures is gonna bring new players to your almost dead dwindling population. And if you are doing something about this, when u gonna let us know? I want to know if the game's gonna be dead in 3years or if ur finally gonna start advertising.

 

Hard to advertise a game if any footage, screenshots, promo videos look like crap - right? So the prettier Wurm is, the more attractive it will look in ads, bringing in more players and making it worth the money to invest in those ads. (which ain't cheap btw)

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I am really excited for the official dev streams! Still catching up on the VoDs of the practice runs, but they look good so far.

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As someone who grew up in rural Scotland, can I just say, Otters, Ferrets and Beavers might be a nice addition, purely for looks and feels, but I'm unsure about their utility, I mean, what will they be used for, what would be their drawbacks?

Ferrets are generally used for hunting rabbits, Wurm has only the annual Easter Bunny ....

Otters are prodigious fish eaters, but other than being kinda cute they don't actually 'do' anything.

Beavers, well, we don't have Beavers in Scotland, at least not as an indigenous species, and they are not exactly known for much other than dam building on rivers and streams, which, yes, we don't have (yet) in Wurm.

 

I'll be interested to see where, if anywhere, this goes, I have a vague feeling I'm reading too much into a single sentence, but, it's Wurm, strange things have happened before ...

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2 hours ago, Gladiator said:

Im glad that you're doing things and all, but when are you going to adress the elephant in the room? No amount of draw distance or shiny textures is gonna bring new players to your almost dead dwindling population. And if you are doing something about this, when u gonna let us know? I want to know if the game's gonna be dead in 3years or if ur finally gonna start advertising.

They had a small advert on mmorpg few days back , but it felt dated to me and short .

https://www.mmorpg.com/wurm-online/news/wurm-online-updated-with-6-months-worth-of-changes-and-a-memorial-to-a-fallen-dev-1000052118

 

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10 hours ago, Retrograde said:

Far far away
Speaking of visual improvements, samool has been doing some amazing things with distant rendering.

Excellent looking work on this coming feature! Currently the distant views from the high mountain top elevations looks so barren so to me this will be a much welcome change.

 

2 hours ago, Zenity said:

As someone who grew up in rural Scotland, can I just say, Otters, Ferrets and Beavers might be a nice addition, purely for looks and feels, but I'm unsure about their utility, I mean, what will they be used for, what would be their drawbacks?

I am pretty much doubting that these critters will be added to Wurm other than used as inclusive pun of exclamation. If they were though these are commonly hunted to then skin and sell their furs, so I imagine the same results would be their use in Wurm too. Not that I am in much sympathy with those who do this in the outer world though. Poor cutie creatures exterminated carelessly for profits. Oh, beavers can be pests sometimes with their dams blocking needed flowing waterways.

 

=Ayes=

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@Malena

I think the main issue is how the terrain underneath the distant trees is still bland, so it feels like they stick out of the terrain a bit too much - we'll adding some shadows there, though probably not for the initial release.

 

Height dependent tree display is possible, but how'd you tell how high they should stop appearing? There is some naturally high elevated terrain which you wouldn't call a mountain, so the cutoff point might have to be different for each server.

It looks good on your screenshots because you replace them with something like the rock texture - while the trees only appear in areas where there actually are trees, so just on the grassy distant "tiles", which already can look out of place for the distant mountains.

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6 hours ago, Malena said:

Hard to advertise a game if any footage, screenshots, promo videos look like crap - right? So the prettier Wurm is, the more attractive it will look in ads, bringing in more players and making it worth the money to invest in those ads. (which ain't cheap btw)

 

I agree, but how many years have we all said this now?  Saroman and Samool have done incredible wonders for the game, but that can only go so far.  They can make this the most immersive, graphically pleasing in naughty ways game that runs better than windows paint, but it doesn't matter if new players don't stay because of the game itself.  It would be great to read in the news how new player retention as well as to a lesser focus vet player retention is being worked on - along with art/client devs doing their thing (since we do all know an art dev isn't the same as a server dev)

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