Rokh
September 2018 update - Future of the project
We are reading our forums, and understand the frustration and confusion over the current status and future of ROKH. So, we are going to take a risk, and be brutally transparent about the financial history and status of the project. We are taking this step both to clear away confusion and to demonstrate our belief in our audience and ROKH. We hope that you’ll continue to support this project and help us to keep it live.
Read more at: https://steamcommunity.com/app/462440/discussions/8/1735465524716911942/
ROKH Development Status - NEW BUILD AVAILABLE!
After intensive testing by QA and certain community members, we are happy to release today the latest version of ROKH, corresponding to the Milestone 3 of the fixing plan. As a result, all servers have been wiped, updated and restarted. This new version is now available to everyone and features the new crafting tree UI/Menu. We hope you’ll have fun with it and we are eager to read your feedback.
We are still working on what will be the future of ROKH. As mentioned previously, we have some leads to find funding and continue the development of new features for the game. The co-publishing option is our preference and we are actively talking to a few now. Next week’s GDC will be a key moment for us.
We also wanted to use this opportunity to address points that were raised by some of you on Discord following our announcement of the new project we are working on. As you can imagine, the performance of ROKH being limited, we went looking for new partners to continue developing Darewise. We were approached by business partners to work on a new intellectual property. We obviously wanted to merge this opportunity with ROKH but unfortunately, this was not possible. As you know, Darewise has been the publisher of ROKH but now we have the opportunity to be the developer of Project C and we can not pass on this opportunity to go back to our roots. This project is in very very early stage.
This does not change anything for ROKH. Project C is a very different and separate project. Teams are not shared and we still make ROKH a priority. We care about ROKH’s players and about our initial funding partners. We will continue to do whatever we can to bring this game to its best shape.
Thank you all for your amazing support and patience. See you all on Mars!
Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and join our Discord to stay tuned for the latest news!
ROKH Development Status - New Milestone Achieved
The milestone 2 of the Rokh fixing roadmap has been successfully completed with Red Kite Games a few days ago. All the following tasks and bugs are now done:
- Fix interactables can be interacted with when pause menu is open.
- Enforce character limit on character names.
- Create Auto-test framework.
- Fix non-unity build compilation.
- Fix the search feature.
- Fix the player cap limited to 3 when creating a local server.
- Fix the low FPS rate encountered after several hours of gameplay.
- Getting Steam builds uploaded automatically.
- Setup unit and soak tests.
- Fix game crashes when interacting with a container.
- Strip intro movie from server builds.
- Fix salvage item with crowbar on another player’s habitat crashes server.
- Streamline server browser window process.
- Create Auto-test for recipe crafting to identify potential crashes.
- Remove QUIT option from menu.
- Fix local Server on same PC doesn’t appear in browser once created.
- Change death screen “New Character” button to “Relaunch”.
- Fix allow creating a character on server from the frontend.
- Fix no message displayed for players when the server is closed.
- Fix redirected to main menu after reconnecting to same server twice.
- Fix player unable to reconnect to server after being defeated.
- Fix client stuck loading from character creation if server drops.
The build, that some of you have been testing, is pretty robust now. Even with some crashes (client or server side), you can enjoy your journey on Mars in a pretty smooth way and without any hard reset of your data.
But we are still looking for the best way to make our come-back with ROKH and while we continue exploring our marketing options, we have started the Milestone 3 of our roadmap.
This Milestone 3 consists in the addition in-game of the second most requested feature from last month survey: a crafting tree. It will allow all players to discover what are the very various possibilities ROKH’s crafting system offers. Stay tuned for the first screenshots...
We would have loved to be focused on Vehicle crafting, your first choice, but our current very limited resources on the project make it impossible. We are seeking for a partner (publisher or financial sponsor) to join the project and bring us the support we need to keep on developing the game, with all the features we listed in our survey and more. By the way, thank you all very much for your participation, answers, and suggestions. It's highly appreciated and helpful in many ways.
Thank you all for your amazing support and patience. We wish you the best wishes for this new year. See you all on Mars!
Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and join our Discord to stay tuned for the latest news!
ROKH Development Status - New test build
Christmas is already on us and we are approaching the end of our Milestone 2 of the Rokh fixing roadmap. This month we have corrected more than 50 new major bugs identified through development or thanks to our external QA team.
The build is way more stable and most of the encountered bugs are non-critical. For sure we are still experiencing framerate drops here and there but nothing that should prevent you guys from having great fun.
Because yes, it’s now time to broaden our group of testers and we are happily pushing the latest build to the Develop Branch. The current build (819) on this branch will no longer be available nor supported. If you’d like to get access to it, simple drop us an email at hello@rokhthegame.com. If you had previously requested access to the 819 build you will automatically get access to this new build without requesting access again, just make sure you are opted in to the ‘Develop' branch. In order to report bugs, we have a simple feedback form which will allow our team to receive the bug reports more efficiently. It can be found here: Bug Report Form
What are the next steps?
We are still planning to have our QA team testing the game further to ensure that no additional bugs having been introducing during the fixing. Based on their reports and mostly also to your report, we will decide when to push this update publicly.
Also, we are actively looking into the next update for the game. We have limited resources still and we are looking for a partner to help us with funding the game, but here are a list of features we’d like to bring next to ROKH:
<*>Vehicle crafting: Two new craftable, customizable vehicles provide mobility and new gameplay. As players begin to attain mastery over their survival, some will want to explore distant locations in pursuit of rare and precious minerals and technology caches, or relocate to better positions in case things go south.
<*>More tile shapes: Build elaborate bases with a variety of tile shapes and sizes. Build spindly towers, wide low circular arrays, and create numerous other styles through various cool base components.
<*>Customization habitat options: Custom panels allow players to get wacky, or creative, or obsessive. Do they want to make a LEGO scene, or a medieval base on Mars? Custom paneling really opens the doors to the fans of the game.
<*>Crafting tree and streamlining: Provide the players with a comprehensive crafting tree to display all the items available in-game and the path to craft them. Continue to streamline the crafting process to decrease time spent UI screens.
<*>Resources distribution scheme: Create deep yet understandable resource rules, rewarding exploration and experience. Players can learn through experience where certain types of minerals and resources may be found, as various factors define and
limit resource placement.
Please let’s us know what would be your preferred choice in this survey
Your voice counts and we will prioritize our plan accordingly.
Thank you all for your amazing support and patience. We wish you a great holidays season. See you all on Mars...in 2018!
Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and join our Discord to stay tuned for the latest news!
ROKH Development Status
Together with Red Kite Games, we have been digging deep into the project over the past 4 weeks. Our primary focus on the network side has been building and running local servers to track down issues – building up our knowledge of the codebase and understanding the server architecture.
We have produced the build of both client and server (in various build configurations) that can connect to each other and can attach a debugger to reproduce errors and identify our own.
We have also dug into some of the main issues – including:
- The game crashes at resume when spending a larger amount of time in the server lobby.
- Game engine crashed after spending several minutes in the screen.
- The game crashed while exploring the map.
- The game freezes when using “Alt + Tab” keys to switch to another program.
We also retrieved some of the latest logs from GPortal and we have identified new potential problem areas within the game which we started to look into in further detail.
Finally part of the team spent some time to improve the development status of the build. For instance, initially, the time to build the project was about the 90 min. It has now been reduced to 45 min and still generates a logs file of 250Mb full of ‘warnings” for us to correct. This will help us greatly to increase our build generation and testing process.
We will have a first test build available for our NDA group of testers at the end of next week. While you guys will test and report bugs, we will finish to draft our roadmap of correction and tests for the month of December.
Thank you all for your amazing support and patience. We still believe heavily on ROKH and on its potential to becoming the tremendous game we envision. Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and join our Discord to stay tuned for the latest news!
ROKH Development Status
We wanted to share with you today what has happened over the past few weeks on the project. As mentioned in our last project update, 2 teams were investigating the source code of ROKH to establish a fixing roadmap. It turned out that the project we had access to was incomplete. We had to enter in a legal dispute with our former development partner to get the latest version of the project source code as well as all available material of the project (engine, assets, documentation).
As you can imagine, it was not a pleasant time and it put us very much behind in our schedule to get back to you, the community, with a first testable new version.
It’s been 2 weeks now since we received everything. This has allowed one of the teams involved in this new phase of the development, Red Kite Games, to thoroughly analyse the project. Red Kite Games, former Rockstar Games developers, was able to collect some info on the game. They will be starting the first milestone by refactoring the project to have it in a more stable state for development and fixing, as well as starting to fix some network issues. They are working on the code from the build 909, which is an internal build including the new UI/crafting path. We expect the Red Kite team to work on this milestone until the end of November and we will do our best to share with any progress and testable builds.
Then a second milestone will start to dig deeper into the gameplay bugs and optimization. After that, and depending on how the development went, we will work with them to define the next milestone (that might include some nice surprises for you guys).
Thank you all for your amazing support and patience. We still believe heavily on ROKH and on its potential to become the tremendous game we envision. Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and join our Discord to stay tuned for the latest news!
Official Servers Status
Just a quick message regarding the official servers. For those of you playing on the public 816 build, you may have noticed another drop in the number of official servers recently.
Despite a number of restarts and checks on hardware status by GPortal, a number of servers which are showing as online on our dashboard are not displaying in game, are timing out connections, or are remaining greyed out. This leads us to believe that these servers are suffering from corrupt databases. Unfortunately the only way to rectify this is to reset and wipe the affected servers.
As at 2015 BST on 17th October the servers displaying in game and playable are: 004 EU, 006 EU and 014 NA.
All other servers will be reset shortly. We appreciate this will result in lost work for some players but with the current bugs and server stability issues, occasional server wipes may be necessary while we wait on updates and fixes from the new dev teams.
Thanks for your understanding,
Beaker86
Official servers & Fixing process update
Since our last news, we have seen and been made aware of some questions and comments we would like to address here. Thanks for your support and have a good read.
Where is my server?
You may have noticed that several official servers have been taken offline recently. We have taken this decision with our partner G-Portal for 2 main reasons:
1) to lower the cost of operation of ROKH while the active player base remains low. We are consistent with our limited resources attribution for the game and want to keep focusing them on fixing.
2) to avoid burning more hardware from G-Portal. Indeed, G-Portal is an incredible partner for us who has been supporting us greatly with hardware and software. But the game not being optimized well causes some hardware crashes and we agree to try to limit that to a minimum.
That’s why we have taken some servers down (or more exactly not reactivated them following many hardware failures). But we will keep the current servers up for you to enjoy the official servers provided by G-Portal.
What is the project status?
As mentioned in our latest update, 2 teams have taken over the project to fix it. We were working to get a clear roadmap of development to be shared with you in September but it turns out that getting onboard and working on someone else’s code and design takes more time than expected. Especially when this game is as complex as ROKH, with a lot of interlocked systems and network layers. We have audited the code and architecture to make sure to work on the optimization side of things as well.
Therefore, we are still working on the roadmap and milestone plan. We are moving as fast as possible to provide you with a first test environment update. We will bring you a further update on our development process in 2 weeks and in the meantime, we’ll be introducing the new dev teams over the next weeks, make sure to stay tuned!
See you soon on Mars.
ROKH Development Status - Q&A pass 1 & Fixing
Sorry it's taken us a while to bring you a situation update but we needed to make sure various things were in place.
We wanted to share with you today fresh news from the front. Our QA first pass was completed last week. With over 200 hours of intense and professional testing, we have now a better vision of the work to achieve to provide you all with a better and more stable experience.
The QA team has identified and documented more than 100 new critical and major bugs. 50% are linked to connectivity and stability, and 50% are more functional and linked to gameplay features implementation. All the bugs and logs you have been sharing with us have been checked and double checked. Some are now documented, some are still too hard to replicate to be documented properly. With the next pass of QA, we will continue to investigate.
So what is next?
Now can start a major fixing campaign.
The contract between our subsidiary Colony Production Limited (CPL) and Nvizzio has been terminated.
We’ve decided to find new teams with an expertise in product such as ROKH and with a pedigree in fixing games. In the industry, we call them “Game doctors”. Appropriate to the situation, isn’t it? :) We will introduce them properly to you guys in an upcoming announcement.
Therefore, we will have 2 differents teams each working on a specific aspect: gameplay or online. Each team is currently reviewing and planning their roadmap based on the QA report. Once we have that, we will be able to give you guys more visibility on when you will see changes in the game. We are aware that it’s not pleasant to be kept in the dark but that’s unfortunately inevitable during some steps in the process of game development where things are moving.
The external QA team will be reviewing each internal build for regression testing and make sure that no new bugs have been introduced and document them if it happens. When QA will greenlight a build for live, we will deploy it first on a live test server, then push it live for you all. The process to grant all of you access to the live test server is currently being define. We will share it with you in due time, with the first test build deployment.
Thank you all for your great support. See you all soon back on Mars.
ROKH Dev Team
PS: Don't forget that our Discord channel is still open: https://discord.gg/rokh
Community Spotlight
With the team deep in QA and bug testing we thought it would be a good idea to share some of what has gone on in the community over the past couple of weeks.
Discord
As previously announced, the Discord server (https://discord.gg/rokh) has selected channels reopened. Since the server was reopened we have also made some changes to the channel set up.
The channels currently available for use are:
- #game-and-help-chat - a place to discuss anything related to ROKH (combines the old #game-chat and #help channels into a single channel)
- #general-chat - a place for off-topic chat (within our community guidelines)
- #looking-for-players - schedule sessions with other colonists
- #bot-commands-only - a place to use the bot commands to prevent flooding other channels
- #screenshots-videos - share your screenshots and videos of ROKH (combines the old #screenshots and #youtube-clips channels, the latter of which was originally restricted to Content Creators)
Content Creators can also still use the following channels:
- #livestreams - advertise your upcoming livestreams
- #content-creators - keep in contact with other content creators
As mentioned above we have some bot commands which can be used within the server. Please try and restrict use of these to the #bot-commands-only channel. These are as follows:
- !rank - find out your rank and level based on Discord server activity
- !links - display links to game guides, patch notes and known issues
- !social - display links to social channels for ROKH
- !wiki - display a link to the ROKH wiki
- !rules - display the ROKH community guidelines
Community Creations
We have also seen some great screnshots still coming through on Steam and Discord.
Jamais203 submitted this shot of their base complete with full panoramic window on Discord.
Martin (Thilog) and rozon, also on Discord, have been hard at work on their base and have even got their first transmitter frame ready!
Belun spent some time making this impressive pyramid
Finally, after discovering that if you connect the pump 'backwards' compared to the input/output indicators rusty was able to successfully pressurise his habitat, but not before a couple of unfortunate 'incidents'
The last community creation I want to share is this video on YouTube by prozon where he breaks down the process he uses to reach cobalt tools in version 816:
https://youtu.be/Xo_wtzwpPmk
And Finally...
Before I head off I wanted to share a couple of PSAs with you all.
Following some requests we have made version 819 (new crafting update) available again to users. This version is 'unsupported' meaning that there are no official servers and you are unable to rent a server for this build, however you can run a local game or a Linux dedicated server if you have the hardware to do so.
If you are interested in playing this version of the game please contact hello@rokhthegame.com and access will be arranged.
For running a local server I have put together a short guide using tips I have been given by members of the community which seem to work fairly reliable, big thanks to Rutger for his help and advice making it. The guide can be found here:http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1101402165
We are also still looking for players with any experience or interest in writing wikis, especially on the Gamepedia platform, to update and flesh out the wiki. If you are interested, please contact either myself or DoctorPelusa on the Discord server.
Hopefully this will be the first of many of these community spotlights. If you have any videos, screenshots or guides which you would like us to share please keep submitting them here on Steam, in the Discord server, by PM on Facebook or by email to hello@rokhthegame.com
Signing off for now,
Beaker86 (Community Moderator)