New updated blueprint and goals.
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While we are saving the really big stuff for the debut and press at SOE Live, we also want to keep making the game bigger and better along the way (not just hold everything for the show). So here's what's coming in the near term:
Week of June 25:
Roaming Vectors: What does this do? It lets the tools act with more precision. Line edges are cleaner, shaped blocks are extremely sharp (and also work at the 1-voxel size, letting you create all sorts of shapes with them!) and more.
Smooth-scaling voxel brush sizes: You are no longer constrained to specific voxel brush sizes. Starting at one-voxel size, you can now smoothly scale way up and down again by using the mouse wheel.
Props and Materials : We had a collection of sci-fi props available in the pipeline, so we polished them up and offer them to you now, and we also have a slew of new trapdoors as well. Additionally, there are some new slate-like building materials to use with your Dark Elf workshop efforts!
Week of July 2:
See Players Build: You can now see other players use their tools within the game. You can see their selections, pasteboards, tool rotations, etc. This lets people demonstrate to each other really easily and also allows easier cooperative building and discussion. This is an opt out program, meaning that if you don't want other people to see what you're doing, you can choose to turn it off, and if you're traveling around the world and don't want to see that activity, you don't have to do so. But it's cool. Leave it on.
Building Bugs (and quality of life improvements): We've identified a short list of "bugs that must die" that we can kick out quickly. (Some bugs are thornier and not getting solved quickly.) We do these kinds of triages occasionally as we develop to "catch up the loose ends". Upcoming fixes are things like fixing the rotation and translate arrows, fixing grapple so you can grapple from underwater, fix the cursor version of shaped blocks to make rotations/translations more obvious, and more. (NOTE: Bug fixes are ongoing and constant, but we're taking a moment to do special focus this week and clean up a bunch of things.)
MyStore: The first bare bones of MyStore will show up, initially just allowing you to see the status of objects, de-list items from the Player Studio, and edit prices. More will come the next week.
Week of July 9:
Configurable key bindings: Yes, it's WAY overdue. But at last, you can set your own keybindings.
MyStore: Phase 2. Now we add the FOLLOW functionality, as well as historical data (how many units have sold at first, more later.)
Recommendations: There are a LOT of Player Studio items. Now we'll start offering recommendations to players based on activity within the Showcase, thus making it more probable that players will find the things they're interested in.
Week of July 16:
Rotatable Templates: You are no longer constrained to 90 degree rotations on templates! Now you can rotate them freely, just as you do with props. NOTE: There will be artifacts when you rotate at non-90-degree angles, but we're impressed enough with how accurate the rotations are to offer this functionality up.
More props and materials. TBD, but some things added are spotlights. Yes.light that gets cast in a cone in front of the light source!
Week of July 23:
Guilds. Finally! At last! Rejoice!
Negative Templates: Take your template. Paste it into other voxels. Watch it carve its shape out of those voxels, leaving a negative of your template!
Week of July 30:
Delete that doesn't Warp! : Use your delete brush on a voxel. Watch its neighbors NOT CHANGE AT ALL. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Water as a Material: Place a voxel. Select "water" as a material. Paint the voxel and watch it start to animate as water!
Week of Aug 6:
VoiP : We go native with VoiP, including claim-based open chat so that you can allow players (that you select) to talk openly and freely within your claim boundaries.
Props: Lots and lots of household detail props (drinking glasses, kegs, pots/pans, food and more).
(NOTE: This is a soft week because we're doing crazy prep for the show.)
Week of Aug 14:
SOE Live! And yes, we are unveiling some major new systems at the show. You can probably infer some of the surprises based on what we had on the Blueprint previously, but we definitely have some stunners on the list to unveil at the show.
There are two keynote presentations this year: One for Landmark and one for EverQuest Next. Yes, we're showing a bunch of new stuff for EQN also! Be there!