Eulora October update

I. As far as the current situation is concerned, we have since the last update fully prototyped gathering and craftingⁱ. It currently works on the test servers in the sense you can gather an item called A1ⁱⁱ, and then proceed to a craft station where you can mix two of these into something called a B1.ⁱⁱⁱ

We are currently working at getting an autoupdater to work, which would allow at the very least behind the scene transfer of new art assets from the server to the client, so people don't have to update the whole thing every time we add a new tree. There has been some discussion internally on whether we want or don't want to offer "proper" auto-updating, which is to say including the actual code. There are strong arguments against such a thing, notwithstanding that it is common practice. It's still unclear how this stick will fall.

We are also intending for a further alpha version release sometime this month.

II. As far as planning is concerned, I would like to share that it is our intent to continue with the alpha versioning until the vast majority of game code has been fully prototyped, so "everything works" so to speak, even if it works in the wireframe sort of way you've been able to admire in the alpha releases to date. So far we have completed this for the most part, there's a map to run on and a sky to run under, there's working chat, there's all sorts of stuff working fine. Still missing - the battle prototyping, which isn't very far behind, and a few odds and ends here and there (which, as odds and ends tend to work, will still be soaking up development time long after the game has gone gold).

It is our intention to have the beta versions secure at least some communications from the client to the server and back using a pgp end-to-end model. It's not entirely clear how we'll resolve this in practice, but a candidate implementation is to have the client code generate its key pair on the first run and register it with the server as part of the account creation. At any rate, due to the Bitcoin-based economy, security considerations are a much larger concern for Eulora than for your average fiat-based competitor.

Random number generation on the server is another point of major concern. I'm not currently going to divulge any specifics but I do want to make the point that yes, we're aware you can't simply call rand() when people's Bitcoin loots are concerned.

Ideally we should be able to move to beta at some point early next year.

III. As far as artwork is concerned, we've just received delivery on the heraldics part, (contracted July 16, 2013), and consequently the respective SSW is given full force.^iv While I'm not releasing it at this time for public viewing, it will feature in the Eulora heraldry once that's implemented so you get to see it then. It does look pretty good.

This'd be all for now. Hopefully see you all soon in game!

1. Some theoretical discussion of that field can be found here. Even more general discussion of the game design had been previously released, here. [↩]
2. They actually look it, too, the icon for an A1 is a red text "A1". [↩]
3. The exact interaction between skills, attributes and gather/craft results, as well as the exact interaction between the acts of crafting and gathering and skills through experience are still being worked on, but these are moreover issues of balancing rather than actual development. [↩]

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   Under the terms of the S.MG Initial Public Offering Agreement is
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                   Special Stock Warrant #3
   
   Today the 17th of October, 2013 at 1:30 PM GMT, stipulating that on
   or after January 16th, 2014 5015BD3D0AE659C8B8632F31CF2950F23C844002
   shall be issued 192`307 new S.MG shares upon payment of 25 BTC to
   S.MG.
   
   S.MG will not process or administer any assignments of this Warrant
   by or among third parties. The administration of any such contracts
   remains the sole responsibility of the respective parties involved.
   S.MG will honor partial conversion into shares of this Warrant,
   under the reservation that conversions of less than 1 million shares
   will be charged a 1 BTC processing fee.
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   [↩]