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CubeForce MediaLegend of Dekkane

 

 
 
Release is near! - by Dev Team
11.21.10
 
 
hings have been hectic at the studio as the November 25th release date looms near. Since our second beta wave, we have taken huge strides forward in terms of stability, compatibility and overall quality. We have significantly added to our workforce here in the studio, almost doubling our staff to help ensure Aerrevan is released on time and to the level of quality this market expects.

ur content designers have been hard at work filling in the last few points on the map and ensuring a quality play experience throughout. We have added a ton of new quests, items and dungeons in the last month, ensuring Aerrevan has enough PvE content to keep our users satisfied. We have more than doubled our spawn count since the second beta wave, and improvements to enemy AI have significantly improved the feel of combat. Players will find our AI to be far from incompetent!

he programming team has made great strides in fixing memory allocation errors, improving client stability and improving the flow and feel of the game. Further tweaks and advancements in our client-server networking have added massively to the dependability and stability of our networking solution. We have also replaced our entire environment renderer with a 3rd party software known as Graphite created by Quad Software. Graphite has improved environment rendering speed, terrain LOD quality, and has brought Aerrevans outdoor rendering engine up to spec. Soon to come is dynamic shadows massive lighting improvements as well as normal mapping support throughout the engine. Though we will not have normal mapping in place for release, we plan to add it as an option shortly after launch.

verall our progress has been steady and Aerrevan has definitely improved. Our stringent in-house testing, 3rd party partnerships and added programming force can all be attributed to our recent strides forward. From everyone here at CubeForce Media, we look forward to seeing you ingame soon!
 
 
Phase Two - by Dev Team
08.31.10
 
 
ince our last log, we launched our first wave of beta and are now preparing for the second beta wave. The beta launch was a little rockier than we had hoped, but thanks to our dedicated testers and many sleepless nights, we have managed to squash literally hundreds of bugs since beta started. A few weeks into beta, we made a decision to rewrite our networking protocol and integrate a middleware solution to improve the stability, security and quality of our networking. We transitioned to the new networking system about a month ago, and it was a significant improvement over the old one. We have also completely redesigned the ingame interface, the results of which can be seen in the screenshots section of our website. We have also seen a number of additions to the Aerrevan staff since our last devlog in both programming and content creation. You may see some of them on the forums with the developer tag. Our main focus since beta started is to do everything we can to make the game more stable, all while adding content and the last few features. We are looking forward to our second wave of beta and the opportunity to introduce Aerrevan to more testers. We would like to thank our beta testers and community for their ongoing support in our efforts to bring Aerrevan to the MMO market.
 
 
Beta On The Way - by Dev Team
04.23.10
 
 
ow, it has been way too long since our last devlog, perhaps an indication of how busy we have been over here at the studio! With beta creeping closer each day were working harder than ever to make sure beta is enjoyable. The worldbuilding team is hard at work adding detail to the scenery and making sure Lurris is good and populated. Our community has been growing at an exponential rate since we started accepting beta applications, both from press coverage as well as the first phase of our advertising campaign. The team would like to welcome all of our new forum members and thank you all for joining, were looking forward to beta just as much as all of you are!

he programming team has been steadily growing our list of completed features, especially in regards to gameplay. Recent (major) additions include things such as pathfinding, guilds, chat channels, our full skill system, and much more. It is starting to feel much more like a full game! We have also expanded our staff to include 18 people, with more on the way. We want to make sure we launch on time with all the features we have promised.

ur beta list is growing rapidly and already includes well over 1300 players with hundreds joining each day. We are super excited to show everyone what we have accomplished and hope you all enjoy the upcoming test. See you ingame soon!
 
 
Alpha is live - by Dev Team
01.27.10
 
 
t has been a long, treacherous road, but at the beginning of this month we finally released the first version of Aerrevan available outside of the development team, and what a launch it was! Amidst a sea of crashes and bugs as far as the eye could see, alpha has been a great experience for us as a development team and for the community. We have tackled and fixed more bugs over the past couple weeks than ever before, and I want to thank the testers for helping us discover a bunch of obscure bugs related from everything to hardware configurations to running up a mountain at the edge of a tile in a very specific area to magically teleport to another part of the map! The alpha group has performed one stresstest, and I am happy to report that the server held up wonderfully and network traffic was well within acceptable levels.

t the studio we have been focusing almost all of our resources on fixing bugs and improving the area around Pafras, the starting town. We have also been working on the game interface in an attempt to make it feel less like a tech demo and achieve a bit more flow. A ton of behind the scenes work has also been put into creating both a shop interface and skill trainers to give players some form of advancement system. With any luck we can roll those changes out in our next few patches.

n the coming weeks before alpha is closed down, we hope to further improve game stability and interactivity. We have already begun work to make NPCs a little more intelligent and give players a true leveling system. I would like to once again thank the game testers for helping us identify and fix a bunch of potentially ugly bugs, without you we wouldnt have found them!
 
 
Almost there! - by Dev Team
12.22.09
 
 
ith the alpha test days away, things are very busy at the studio! Since the last development worklog, we have made great strides in preparing the actual game client and server. These next few days will be full of late nights and long hours as we try and cram in as much content as possible amidst the holiday season. Needless to say, we won\'t have very much spare time over the next few days.

lmost all of our efforts have been focused on game mechanics and gameplay features. The biggest tasks we have tackled over the past month have been combat and the server database. Both are now at a usable state. With the coming alpha test we hope to determine if these primary systems will hold up. For alpha, we have chosen to have open PvP for the sake of maximum testing potential. Every day we find critical bugs from our internal tests, and we hope that alpha will uncover all the flaws with our current code.

s of today, we are not adding new features to the client, only improving the ones that already exist and ensuring they are as bug-free as possible. Hopefully the client and server hold up on the 28th when testers begin streaming in! We hope you are all as excited about the alpha as we are!
 
 
Alpha on the Horizon - by Dev Team
10.29.09
 
 
ince our last development log, Aerrevan development has made some great strides forward. Namely, we have announced our Alpha test and have been working hard to get as much packed in to the game by our Alpha milestone as possible. We dont want to disappoint our alpha testers!

n the programming front, we are now starting to focus our efforts on improving core systems needed to bring the Alpha test to life, rather than the development tools themselves. Up to this point, we have mostly been focusing on getting the tools 100% solid so the worldbuilding team can do their job. The switch in focus to the actual game is a nice change. Expect to see some screenshots with actual spawns and some preliminary interface work soon!

ur worldbuilding efforts have been concentrated on Farhill, the main human portion of the game world. A decision was made to only have the human race available in the upcoming alpha test. This is to allow the worldbuilding team to focus their efforts in to making one area of the game as polished as possible in the short timeframe we have. You can see by our recently released screenshots that our work in Farhill is going quite well. We have already constructed the town of Goledarb and a large portion of the base terraforming / world design is already done. Now to add all the little details and really bring this area to life!

o wrap this developer log up, we would like to thank everyone who has shown their support for the game in the forums and on external game media sites. Your support is greatly appreciated.
 
 
Steady Progress - by Dev Team
09.17.09
 
 
n the first half of September, the team has been hard at work further improving the technology as well as creating new art and ingame locations. Also, the server team has been hard at work to bring us ever closer to our alpha milestone. In fact, I am pleased to announce that we have hired on a new programmer specifically for developing the server database structure.

he engine programming team has been spending their time on three tasks. Firstly, they have been finishing up the Speedtree 5 implimentation, and will be completely finished very soon. Secondly, they have been improving the engines support for shaders as well as adding to our current shader repository. This will help to improve the ingame visuals with special effects. These effects can be seen already in the screenshots section on the red glowing orb in the shrine model as well as the blue orbs on the tower in Salmaesh (currently the first screenshot loaded by the viewer). Todays exclusive development screenshot is a preview of our work-in-progress ice shader applied ontop of a rock. Lastly, they have been making major progress on the client GUI to prepare it for alpha testing. We are currently in the process of an entire GUI revamp in an effort to improve the visual quality of our game.

n the worldbuilding front, there has been extensive work done in both the desert and mountain regions. The centrepiece of recent worldbuilding work is Salmaesh, an orcish town located in the south of Lurris. A preview of Salmaesh can be seen in the screenshots section.

n closing, we are very pleased with the progress the first half of september has brought and we hope to have much more to show everyone in the near future. We hope you will enjoy playing Aerrevan as much as we have enjoyed making it.
 
 
Engine Improvements - by Dev Team
08.31.09
 
 
elcome to the Aerrevan developer worklogs. The team will update these logs periodically to keep the community informed as to the internal workings here at the studio. Along with every worklog will be at least one exclusive development screenshot of a work-in-progress area or other unreleased content. Today, we have an in-engine view of an elven tree fortress with a fern selected. This fern is stand-in art and is being converted to a speedtree powered equivalent.

ver the past month, we have made a lot of progress on the core engine. The engine programming team has been focusing primarily on two things. Firstly, they have been improving the current art pipeline by integrating Collada support with the engine. This helps to speed up the model creation process and allow us to more easily contract out art asset creation. Secondly, they have been doing a full integration of Speedtree 5.0. According to IDV, we are the first game to make a full integration of SpeedTree 5.0. Speedtree 5.0 is still in the late beta stages, so integration took a little longer than we had hoped, but it is now almost fully integrated. One smaller focus has been creating a new water shader, this shader is almost completed and ready to be shown off in a screenshot in the near future, stay tuned!

ur server programming team has been making great progress on further reducing the server overhead and improving general stability. Huge changes have been made to the database structure over the last while and they are finally starting to pay off. The old database system was not very intuitive and was prone to failures and corruption, the new system is on-par with commercial MMO standards and is far more stable. Hopefully we will be able to really put this database system to the test with a closed alpha test sooner rather than later.

he Aerrevan lore repository has been steadily growing and this past month marked some great additions to not only our lore repository, but also to our game media. This month we hired a new phenomenal concept artist whos work can be seen all over this site. His work far surpasses any of the previous concepts and as such we have made heavy use of them in our website design. Many more concept pieces are on the way and we will be sure to update the site periodically to show them.

o close off this development log, I would like to say thank you to the fans and to everyone who has shown us their support up to this point. We are very excited to finally be at a stage where we can start to show this game off to the general public, and we look forward to meeting you all in our community.
 
 
Engine ImprovementsDev Team
08.31.09
 
 
elcome to the Aerrevan developer worklogs. The team will update these logs periodically to keep the community informed as to the internal workings here at the studio. Along with every worklog will be at least one exclusive development screenshot of a work-in-progress area or other unreleased content. Today, we have an in-engine view of an elven tree fortress with a fern selected. This fern is stand-in art and is being converted to a speedtree powered equivalent.

ver the past month, we have made a lot of progress on the core engine. The engine programming team has been focusing primarily on two things. Firstly, they have been improving the current art pipeline by integrating Collada support with the engine. This helps to speed up the model creation process and allow us to more easily contract out art asset creation. Secondly, they have been doing a full integration of Speedtree 5.0. According to IDV, we are the first game to make a full integration of SpeedTree 5.0. Speedtree 5.0 is still in the late beta stages, so integration took a little longer than we had hoped, but it is now almost fully integrated. One smaller focus has been creating a new water shader, this shader is almost completed and ready to be shown off in a screenshot in the near future, stay tuned!

ur server programming team has been making great progress on further reducing the server overhead and improving general stability. Huge changes have been made to the database structure over the last while and they are finally starting to pay off. The old database system was not very intuitive and was prone to failures and corruption, the new system is on-par with commercial MMO standards and is far more stable. Hopefully we will be able to really put this database system to the test with a closed alpha test sooner rather than later.

he Aerrevan lore repository has been steadily growing and this past month marked some great additions to not only our lore repository, but also to our game media. This month we hired a new phenomenal concept artist whos work can be seen all over this site. His work far surpasses any of the previous concepts and as such we have made heavy use of them in our website design. Many more concept pieces are on the way and we will be sure to update the site periodically to show them.

o close off this development log, I would like to say thank you to the fans and to everyone who has shown us their support up to this point. We are very excited to finally be at a stage where we can start to show this game off to the general public, and we look forward to meeting you all in our community.
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