Divergence: Online
Structure Maintenance is LIVE Prepare To Pay Up Bitches!
From now on, structures (Harvesters, Factories, Hoppers, Defensive Turrets) will require maintenance in order to operate. Time to start spending those hard-earned (or got them off the body of someone you killed) credits and putting them to use!
The rules are simple;
All structures which require maintenance now required maintenance based on a base amount depending on what type of structure they are, and then additionally based on the final quality determined during crafting. The more energy efficient and better quality your components and items, the lower the regular maintenance costs will be for you!
Maintenance is displayed on a per-hour basis, and maintenance "ticks" once per minute based on that amount.
Additionally, structures also have different costs based on whether they are online, or offline. When offline, structures will generally require only 10% of that which they require when online and in-use.
Once a structures maintenance pool hits zero, it can no longer be picked back up unless its maintenance pool is increased to at least 1000 credits. Additionally, when a structure's maintenance pool is zero, it will begin to take damage every minute at the rate of 2% of it's maximum health per hour. This gives you just over two days to bring it back into the positive before you lose it for good.
Friends and clanmates can also pay maintenance on your structures so long as you have them added to a structure's admin list.
There are extra rules to take into consideration regarding hoppers and their maintenance;
Hoppers require maintenance based on their online and offline states, but they also increase in maintenance costs based on both the number of it's they are responsible for containing, and also the amount of ferrocrete contained within. All-in-all, it is vastly more cost-effective to build walls and floors with ferrocrete because the rate most hoppers operate at is around 1 (one) credit per item per hour.
For instructional imagery, please see our facebook page!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/415812755276522/
All The New Love Coming
First and foremost, you're already feeling the effects of our massive boost in FPS around areas with foliage, which is the side-effect of it not working currently; Trees have no collision. We're working on it every day and it'll be finished this week hopefully, in which case you'll get to keep all the benefits of ridiculously dense foliage in our game with an incredibly slight FPS hit - meaning if you were getting. 30fps before, you'll be getting Probably 60-120, no joke. Once it's finalized, you'll lose maybe 5fps off the top, which is still a huge huge boon. Additionally, it will result in all trees becoming dynamic instead of static, which opens them up for the upcoming feature of making them choppable and replantable.
Secondly, what started as a simple NPC upgrade (paving the way for creatures being returned to the game) turned out to necessitate a huge huge upgrade that's been taking all of our time since we finished with the planetary synchronization upgrade. Essentially, there were two ways of doing things, and after much soul-searching we've chosen to do it once and do it right, which means making all entities such as creatures beholden to serverside physics. If you've ever played an FPS game where people hack the shit out of it and it ruins your life, chances are the reason is because the dickheads who made it cut corners and just let the client handle everything and crossed their fingers. This is not how we do things. Simply throwing critters back in and only responsible to the client itself would open them up to the potential of being hacked, which we cannot allow. Right now, nobody hacks Divergence: Online, because we're totally nanners when it comes to hack-prevention. We have a perfect record, and we'd like to keep it that way. Therefore, we're doing NPCs in a way that augments the framework we already have for serverside collision, and finalizing that system as well. When it's done, turrets won't be shootable through objects, falling through the world will be virtually physically impossible, and the game will be even more iron-clad against hacking. Leading to my third point.
The third point is that we are intentionally keeping the game's playerbase small right now. We realized in the first week of the game that selling shitloads of copies is great, but i think you'll agree that letting in that many new players would only result in more negative reviews from cocksmokers who don't understand what Early Access means. As a game on Steam, we're beholden to a certain number of "exposure campaigns", which we can start at any time. The reason 80% of you people are here is because of the very first one, which lasted exactly a week. If we run another now, we can expect hundreds of new players, but, we plain just don't want to do that until more of these loose-ends are shored up. Primarily NPCs. What we have right now, plus the ability to hunt wildlife for sport, food, raw materials, or to be hunted by them, would drastically elongate players playtime and subsequently result in more positive reviews. We're stillonly 2% shy of a positive rating on Steam simply because i can't beg people hard enough for two fucking people to both leave one motherfucking positive review, so this is how we're going to do it. Once we have the above features sorted, we'll open up the flood gates and let the peoples in.
Fourthly, we've hired several new developers who will be helping us starting today.
Fiftly, in addition to new programmers, I've also begun the process of concepting all new clothing, armor, and some other goodies for you fine folks. You'll see it when it's ready :)
Therefore if you don't see daily client updates this week, now you know why; It's all heavy heavy server updates preparing for the things I mentioned above. Once it's done, you'll know about it.
Thanks for all your support :)
Complete Planetary Synchronization Upgrade Completed
The result is that, now instead of up to 3-5 minutes of synchronization, synchronization, in most cases, begins and completes virtually instantaneously.
Please do your best to test this out as much as you can and let us know your own results when we're online and back to work in the morning. If the system works as well as it does for us in our own testing, this should finally let us get back to the business of working on things that we actually want to work on, such as critters.
Thanks for all your support people :)
-Ethan and Ana
Feb. 8th Patch Notes
SERVER
Fixed issue with failure messages not being sent to the user when trying to put ammo into turrets.
When retrieving the list of structures that can be powered by a grid we're now properly including all machinery (e.g. turrets). This fixes the issue with turret available status not being displayed in the grid panel.
When powering structure, the checks are now in place for turret available status.
Fixed issue with power grids reporting that the AvailableLoad on them is alright despite being 0.
Fixed longstanding issue with camera collider not playing nice with many objects, such as terrain. Rejoice!
First steps of region-based graphical effects implemented. notice the change in the orange dusty Akkheran desert and the hazy regions of Lomenia.
CLIENT
Don't attempt to power structure from grid panel unless grid is online (optimization).
Corrected several issues with turrets, mainly the panel displaying grid and / or ammo wrong.
Fixed issue with generator operate machinery panel not updating after connecting the generator to the grid.
Feb. 5th Patch Notes
Exterior walls now retain the resistances they were imbued with but also have had their maximum obtainable conditions increased by up to 200%.
Damage should now be correctly displayed in the chat log.
Login scene now has an exit button so you can GTFO
smile emoticon
Many preparatory additions to prepare for proper melee weapon implementation.
First stage of major overhaul to how the game loads and processes physics, which when completed may result in many (densely wooded areas) getting and up to 80% boost in FPS. For the time being, you can walk right through trees. This is known and will hopefully only exist for another day or two, so dont try to take cover behind trees today
kiki emoticon
Also reconfigured the graphical style of the game because i think we can agree it looked dated as fuck. Fog will not be applied in two separate passes to try and emphasize the feeling of distance a little better. I really like it, but tell us what you think!
Feb. 4th Patch Notes
Added resistances to specific damage types to many items meant to be more resilient to small-arms damage.
Items (such as large exterior walls) that are meant to be resilient to small-arms-type weapons now have both Kinetic resistance and Small Arms resistance. Damage is first calculated against kinetic resistance, then any remaining damage is calculated against small-arms resistance, resulting in thick and sturdy walls being incredibly resilient to weapons that should not normally be able to damage them that much, while still allowing for weapons that deal damage such as explosives or “cutting torches” to still be able to bypass this extra resilience and do more damage to reinforced structures.
Items made out of logs from the scout tree are also extremely resilient to small-arms fire and require very few resources to craft. We hope this will result in more structures being made out of natural materials.
Metallic structures (such as walls) now require much more resources to compensate for their added resistances.
Added “Small Arms” as damage category and assigned all “bullets” and appropriate ballistic projectiles and ammo to said category.
Changed some post-effects to use a photographic tonemapping style as opposed to a filmic method.
Re-added rocks! These were mistakenly removed in a patcher earlier today.
02/03/2016
SERVER
Accounts with a Gold token are set as Premium and marked as Subscribed.
Added the Bronze, Silver, Gold perks and they'll be applied to the account when the corresponding tokens are used.
Refactored the server login handler and user profiles to more efficient.
CLIENT
Fixed the issue with item placement not displaying certain items correctly (e.g. horizontal hardwood log walls).
02/02/2016
Fixed the issue with the skill points cap.
The number of skill points left now displays correctly.
Feb 1st Patch Notes
Fixed the position of the Options Panel.
Implemented stationary NPCs (e.g. for vendors), to increase FPS around them.
Improved NPC movement so it doesn’t result in a dramatic FPS drop anymore (also raptors now play walk / run animations and move at a faster speed).
Before requesting to send items from machinery inventory to player inventory, checking locally whether the player has enough space to accept the item.
Checking ammo compatibility for turrets locally before sending to server.
Completely replaced existing water and ocean system with a new system that will allow us to utilize some really cool features in the future. The new system needs a lot of tweaking for both the shoreline and general appearance but it enables us to use both additive and subtractive volumes, which are state-of-the-art features right now. The new system will allow us to do cool stuff like add in new ponds and lakes higher in elevation than the water level, and anywhere we like, as well as (and this is totally cool), allow for subtractive volumes, which mean you can have things meant to be underwater, but not filled with water, such as submarines, lower decks of boats, and even underwater caves. Right now you’re thinking “holy shit” and guess what, you’re right.
Thanks for staying off our jocks about stupid piddly little bug fixes and giving us the space we needed to add this stuff. Now those things are in, we can go back and polish up Turrets and work more on our NPCs to prepare for hunting in the game.
Jan 29th Patch Notes : Defense Turrets Baby!
Preventing an error when sending new objects to players that seems to cause that to break until the server gets restarted.
Fixed an issue to where only structures with maintenance could be powered.
Refactored the way harvesters, generators, and factories work so that all machineries (including turrets) have the same base code
Fixed an issue with not being able to properly place and pick up turrets and powerable structures.
Fixed an issue with errors preventing players from dying properly if killed by an NPC or turret (non-player).
Progress with raptors (but they still chase too slowly).
Displaying error message when attempting to set harvester to online without having a resource selected.
Added our first turret for testing before we full-enable it tomorrow and add in it’s bigger brothers and sisters, the DMBDT-30 Drenn-Matthews Ballistic Defensive Turret 30mm. The schematic is pretty simple right now and will eventually require the subcrafting of the barrels and such seperately, and it has no ammo specified, so don’t even try griefing your neighbors with it tonight. We just want to test the schematic to make certain it’s craftable, and when we’re satisfied with the results, you’ll be able to dump the appropriate new ammo into it (30mm Caseless), bring it online and bring hell to those douchebags wreaking hell on your lawn while you’re away.
Store Page and Accelerated Development
In a nutshell, while the game will continue to be accessible and playable via steam with new updates, content and patches every day, the game will not be visible on the store until certain criteria we've made Valve aware of are addressed to borh our and their mutual satisfaction. For reasons of professionality and our desire to maintain a positive relationship with our friends at Valve, we won't say more; Only that we'll be taking the time, while awaiting a direct response, to continue to crush code and new content for our players on a daily basis.
You guys (and gals) are the heart and soul of Divergence: Online and we couldn't be more glad to just be here with a real shot at making the MMO that the future deserves.
January 28th Patch Notes
Fixed issue with ferrocrete constructions not showing up in certain situations (e.g. when picking up a hopper with ferrocrete and putting it back down).
Players can choose to display their name to other players by pressing Left Alt.
Major refactoring of the code for structures that increases performance, reducing both network traffic and database storage. Structure classes have been separated into structures that can be powered (e.g. street lights), structures with maintenance (harvesters, generators, factories etc), and structures with hoppers (that will most likely require both power and maintenance).