Vitare Blog

Hello everyone, sorry for the lack of updates we have been working hard on the client, behind the scenes, and several things do take a while, so however small it seems – it can be very efficient towards client development. Also remember, our personal lives come first, Vitare comes second.

The Vitare engine has been updated with several new features. These features are key to the Vitare engine, and provide services that are used in other services and elsewhere in the game. We’ve added the tiling engine into the game – you can add walls, floors and objects, theoretically.

Rendering is also coming along well, frustum culling as it’s known prevents objects that aren’t on your screen being rendered. This makes the game run faster.

Sorry for the lack of updates from me, but little things can take a while. And remember, Vitare comes second in my priorities.

- Matthew.

Please note: This is a re-post as the original was removed due to an error.

Hey everyone. Sadly I can not offer as much in the light of updates due to the short period of time since such a large update, however i will try and explain what’s been happening.

Firstly lighting has been started, lighting is a hugely important feature in any game as it allows interesting scene designs and layouts to be possible and creates a realistic image of light entering a room and interacting with the objects in the room.

Secondly i have started the styling feature, that allows any object to have its looks changed, it allows different textures and surface types to be applied to objects and really creates a whole range of possible textures for a single object. This feature is also optional in the custom content system, custom items can have their own style maps that lays out where each texture can go.

Finally i would like to give a huge thanks to the community for supporting us this far, and remember to keep on sending us your input, they are a huge help during the development process, and early on is where they are likely to be implemented!

Until next time,

Matt.

Hello everyone, I’ve been up until the crack of dawn (as I write this it’s 12:53am GMT) improving Vitare Blueprints for you all.

Inspired by another website, I have re-designed the main page and it is a lot more easier to navigate. Please let us know what you think of the update, and be sure to register a Blueprints account and contribute your ideas!

The new Blueprints homepage now features new links, colours and information. You can also stay up to date with this blog on there with the RSS feature. We will be updating the homepage, so comment letting us know what Blueprint is missing.

Note: The new sidebars links on the homepage (Contribute) are not all valid. They will be added over the weekend.

I’d also like to thank you for your replies so far to the currency voting, be sure to keep giving us your ideas!

Thanks,
Daniel

As you know, Vitare will have a fully-working economy, and a currency! We originally planned to call the currency Vitare Dollars (V$), but I am thinking of calling a vote for the currency, if this goes ahead we need a list of what we could call it so we can create a poll! So this is what we need you to do:

Leave a comment and let us know what you think the currency in Vitare should be called, if we like it we will add it to the poll and keep you updated with this subject.

Thanks for all the help!
Daniel

Hello everyone, today I am writing this blog to share our ideas for the Vitare Real Estate. The Real Estate will be one of the main things in the Vitare Economy. As with other games, you can purchase a piece of land or trade the house deed. In Vitare, it is similar but with a few differences.

In Vitare you can purchase a piece of land for V$ (Vitare Dollars) which you can earn in-game by working at a job lot or you can purchase it via our available payment methods. Depending on where the land is, the price will vary. Any land that is vacant belongs to Vitare, we are considering adding a rent feature. Where you can pay a certain amount of V$ per week, there could be an auto-pay feature where if you have the funds and you are not online, it automatically takes it and rents the land for another week. If you fail to pay or don’t have this selected and forget to pay, you will be forced to move out and your home will be placed into your avatar’s inventory along with any furniture.

This is where you come in! We want you to let us know what you think of a rental system, where it’d be easier for new players or people who want to get a lot fast.

In the future, we will go over this more once we gather feedback.

Thanks,
Daniel

Hello everyone welcome to weekly update number 1 from me, Matt!

Firstly just a brief description of what these updates will contain; in these updates i will write about what’s going on behind the scenes in the Vitare development and maybe even a few screenshots! These updates will also help me get some feedback on what you think about the client so far and the features that i have implemented, so without further ado, lets get into this weeks update!

A lot has been done on the client over the past few weeks, however we have decided to once again go back to our original XNA powered client, and scrap our web-based client, this is because of two reasons: both speed and simplicity. Although the web client was extremely fast, it did not handle well once many thousands of objects were on screen, a simple requirement for a game engine. However do not panic! as we are still using the original game engine so development has not been affected.

Another new feature of the client is our world system which allows us to split the Vitare world through multiple servers that has a massive speed benefit as well as providing the fastest game experience, the transitions between world servers is seamless, and you will not even notice that you have been moved server.

Custom content has also been started, which is a huge feature in Vitare and we want the best possible way to manage and provide custom content, currently AND in-game item can be either edited or fully recreated, so for example you could design your own fridge in a modelling program such as Google sketch-up, 3ds max or Maya and import it directly into Vitare.

That’s it for this weeks update, next week i will be delivering even more juicy news about the client and server!

Many regards,

Matt – Lead developer.