Folks,

I hope everybody had a great weekend! Our weekend was, well, a little less helpful than we would have liked it to be. Unfortunately, as our Alpha, Beta 1, and IT folks know, we had to cancel the testing we had scheduled for this weekend. Now, the good news is that we quickly found the problem and well, it’s an amusing one. Apparently, our Windows server decided, on its own, to update itself, and in doing so, broke itself in the process. So, while Skynet might be coming one day, this time the A.I. was really more like Accidental Stupidity. 🙂 We’ve put the genie back into the bottle (at least for now), so that problem is indeed solved. We are also making progress on the connection errors we were seeing and we’re hoping to do some Backer testing today or tomorrow!

More good news for our CUBERs as we just updated CUBE with the latest and greatest version of our building component of Camelot Unchained™. It has been quite a while since we updated CUBE (since we are kinda seriously focused on the main game first), but we have a lot of changes to talk about. First, our new procedurally assisted terrain system has made it onto CUBE! We’ll be phasing out the old CUBE zone eventually; it’s built on tech we no longer support. Moving forward we’ll be offering a zone select screen so you can choose which zone you want to build on, and the old zone will give you a warning every time you try to enter it.

Secondly, we made some major improvements to building, including, but not limited to,:

• We’ve added a bunch of new materials for you to play with in your buildings.
• We’ve significantly improved the performance of buildings in general.
• We’ve significantly improved the performance of the blueprint placement tool. This means that large blueprints should no longer cause terrible lag when moving them around. Stretching a single block to very large proportions will still cause lag during resizing, but once you’re done stretching it should move much more smoothly.
• Blueprints have been increased from 20x20x20 to 80x80x80 (64x larger).
• Large solid blocks of more complex shapes (like the wedge and the inverted wedge) should no longer case “space needle” artifacts.
• CUBE files (blueprints, config) now saved to your LocalAppData directory.

Thirdly, we’ve also made some major visual improvements to CUBE since the last push, including but not limited to:

• World and character art has improved significantly since our last CUBE release.
• The grizzled old warhorse of an architect has been replaced by his younger, handsomer, counterpart.
• We have a level of detail (LoD) system based on prioritization. Higher prioritized objects in the client will have a higher level of detail.
• New texture array system further improves the rendering system.
• Changed to a Gamma correct rendering pipeline so the colors on the client should look better.
• Changed to using a higher quality normals format.
• Re-exported all textures, converting to more appropriate compression formats for how each material is used. Report any missing textures to the bugs forum, please!

Next, we’ve also added new audio to CUBE so the world should feel a little more alive with music, background noise, footsteps and other sound effects.

Finally, we made a bunch of other changes, including but not limited to:

• We’ve changed over to Visual Studio 2015, which means that if you haven’t done it yet, you should install the Visual Studio 2015 32bit Redistributable. (select vc_redist.x86.exe from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145).
• Player movement speed has been increased to help get around the world faster.
• The clouds should no longer band/stripe.
• UI updated to parallel what is on Hatchery (at the time of this writing) so sharing UI mods between the two should be much easier. Most notable changes:
  • Local storage is now available for local saving of data.
  • Location of the UI folders on your hard drive has changed.
• Fixed the screenshot function to make shadows appear properly.
• Multiple chat server fixes should keep you chatting with other CUBErs with less interruptions.

So, a lot of changes since the last build right? It is now up and running for all you eager CUBErs; go forth, and build, build, and build some more!

And hot off the field of battle, tonight’s Impromptu Alpha & IT test has been going nicely so we are definitely closing in on the solutions to the problems from the weekend!

Other than all the above, everything is moving along nicely as we put in the hours till we go on break on December 24^th, 2015 until the new year dawns. We’re trying to get some things in before then, so keep your fingers, toes, and even tails crossed. It is going to be down to the wire, that’s for sure.

As always, thanks for the support!

-Mark