Friday 3 June 2016

DevBlog #22 – Weekly Update & Developer Activity

Why hello there, thank you for taking the time out to have a little read over this week’s DevBlog. Previously, we were talking about bringing the Woodlands House into Atom Universe and a couple of tasks the developers faced in doing so.


This week, we've made some more advancements in bringing this new private space to fruition. Avatars can now explore the environment freely and interact with certain pieces of furniture. However, now that this is possible: how does the avatar travel to and from the Woodlands House?




The development team have been working on two ways that can allow you travel to the Woodlands House, the Hub and the Arcade Plaza. Firstly, you can do it the old fashioned way: select your desired destination via the main menu. That’s OK if you’ve just started the game, but what if you’re already in-game?


Normally, in the Hub or the Arcade Plaza you could easily travel there by walking to the entrance, but it would be a bit different. The Woodland House is outside, it’s in the open, it’s peaceful and it’s away from the noise of the theme park. Having a doorway within the theme park itself, would break away from the immersion of the park and maybe even seem out of place.





Instead of forcing you back to the main menu and making you exist the game, the development team have now implemented the ability to fast travel between zones. Allowing to easily travel between Woodlands House, the Hub and the Arcade Plaza.




While we’re getting closer to releasing this to everyone on Early Access, the main focus has now turned to bug hunting, although there isn’t a time frame as to when this update will be ready. We’re getting pretty close…


Weekly Development Activity:


Art;


  • Playtesting and fixing new bugs
  • Making more assets for Atom Universe

Design;


  • Playtesting and squishing bugs (pretty much all week long)

Programming;


  • Finding bugs
  • Squishing bugs
  • Seeing if the bugs come back
  • Squishing more bugs

Community;


  • Playtesting (you guessed it) for bugs
  • Sending the development team bug reports

6 comments:

  1. Nice DevBlog this week Dave and thanks for posting it. I'm glad that we will be able to access the Woodland House soon and I like the look of the Navigation screens for public and private spaces. I can't wait for all to see it in the Early Access version. I see there has been a lot of bug fixing activity which I think is good as I have reported many critical ones like the sound missing and the new social features and reward system not working properly. I hope to see all those fixed along with the access to the Woodlands House and the new Navigator screens soon! As always, thanks for all the hard work being done by the Atom Republic/Atom Universe team. Keep up the great work! :)

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  2. HI can anyone please confirm if Atom Republic are doing an update as we cant get passed the main menu screen

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  4. We are working on the bugs related to traveling between public and private spaces, this is currently effecting access to AU. We are working as quickly as possible to open AU again.

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  5. Another exciting update - thanks to the AU team for all their ongoing work and bug squishing to bring the Woodland House to us. I was wondering how we would move from the Hub to our personal spaces so thanks for this information! On a side note, I haven't been able to access AU at all for a few days now (on PC) but I guess this is related to the development that's happening.

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    1. Hey Abi. We were discussing the issues people have been having today. A few of us were able to get on for the Block Party today. I had posted a work around to the PSN group chat which I invited you to, but I think you are only in there with your EU account and not your NA account which is maybe what you have been trying to use to access AU. Thursday, June 2 is when people started getting those "fatal errors" such that they couldn't enter the game at all. This was the case for me with my Steam account too. What we've figured out since then is that for PC users, we have been able to get on with other Steam accounts. I created one today just to join the Block Party and it worked albeit with some other bugs which I reported (missing accessories in "User Settings" screen, all dances/poses/emojis being unavailable, etc.). Others have been able to use alternate Steam accounts. On the PS4 side, some users have been able to use older PSN accounts while some had no issues at all. So maybe try one of those work around and see if you can join us for our Community Meetup tomorrow and we can discuss further. During the Block Party today, Tanguy said that the devs are working on a patch and the goal is to have that released on Monday/Tuesday. The current theory is that the issues are related to server scaling, but I provided some additional information in my bug reports that may point to other issues since all of us who are experiencing the issue can't even get past the opening screen to get to the Main Menu screens. I'll invite your NA PSN account to the PSN group chat so you can get some more real-time updates as we learn more from the experiences of other PS4 testers. Some of us in there like me are Steam users too, but that group chat is mostly for the PS4 Early Access users who come to our meet ups.

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