Town Meeting Transcript & Video Options

[Cironir]

Below is a transcript of our September 2016 Town Meeting!

Note that the text log only contains the announcement section of the meeting. The Question and Answer section can be listened to in the video recording of the meeting.

Full video/audio recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHkHY32CeNg
Q&A section only: https://youtu.be/HHkHY32CeNg?t=55m47s


Town Meeting September 2016


Hello everyone and welcome to the 2016 Furcadia Town Meeting!

You might be wondering what a Town Meeting is since it's been so long since we had one. A Town Meeting is a chance for us to tell you all the latest news and you to ask any questions you might have! Refreshments will be served following the meeting!

First, we'd like to thank all of you for your support through the work of releasing The Second Dreaming update! We do have the best community around.

We'd also like to thank all the Beekin Volunteers, both the ones who worked so hard on the update and those who kept the community going so they could. You guys are awesome!

I personally want to thank all of our Team Dragon Members both present and past who have put so much work into this, much of it volunteer work! Our staff is amazing and have worked way past what could be expected out of any other team. We do it for our love of the community and belief in Furcadia.

All of our Team members have been amazing and hardworking but I wanted to say a special thank you to one that has really gone above and beyond. She has been with us from the very first and always puts in extra hours and helps anyplace she can. Thank you so much Majas for being spectacular!

Okay, enough thanks for now I want to get serious for a minute. We know change can be hard and while our community is very excited about the new 32-bit things, there are parts of the update that take a bit of getting used to.

We've used ini files for almost 20 years! Logging in like the rest of the world seems strange and takes some getting use to. The web based character create feels a bit fiddly, but it gives you so many new possibilities in costumes and full avatar selection, and it allows us to make the new web and mobile clients that are coming soon.

That is a Furcadia "soon" >.>

Seriously though, sorry everything has taken so long. We really have been working very hard through many hardships and unexpected issues since January of 2013. I like this little analogy of the expectations of making software. http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/50/

Speaking of that update, I'm sure you have all looked over this very excellent page https://cms.furcadia.com/update31a that tells all the cool stuff we have added this update!

There's 32-bit colors, translucency, new enhanced Fox Editor, upgraded Dream Editor, lovely FurEd and Character Create, over 6000 high definition default art pieces, lighting, gendered and winged anthros, avatar upgrades, and so so much more! That isn't even mentioning all the behind the scenes design, management, code and other work that went into this.

We've really loved seeing what you all have been doing already with the new tools and here's a few examples!

Now with all these new systems, a few bugs are expected and while we squashed a lot of them in months of testing we knew some might make it through to release. You all have found a few post-release bugs and that was expected! I'm super proud of Treeki, Kashi and Ninja for how fast they got in there and fixed things!

Everything from first day crashes, to downloading issues, to account transition problems were all ironed out in short order. Ciro and the community Team have worked hard to help many people with edge cases through our in game help and support ticket systems: http://support.furcadia.com

Ciro, can you announce the winners for the Bug Hunting contest we had?

Prior to the update's release, we'd announced the Test & Win Raffle! Everyone who reported a bug or submitted a screenshot of their dream being uploaded received one ticket for the drawing.

We've pre-drawn the winners so that it's a bit speedier. The method used was simple: We added all names of eligible participants to a text file (multiple eligible bug reports yielded multiple entries), picked random numbers, and matched them with the line numbers in the text file (so if the number was 123, the name in line 123 won a given prize).

We started with the top prizes as there is a two-prize limit per participants, and we wanted everyone to have an equal chance at the most sought after prizes!

And the winners are:

One Eternal Direhound Package each goes to the following players: Intellectual Music, Ragna, Asgard, Rick, Dragonfire
One ArchAngelcat Package each goes to ... Alluvial, Sylu, Hiff, Adrienne, Trily
One Gloaming Conjurer Package each goes to ... Tokota, Hawkeye, Jade
One Golden Alchemy Package each goes to ... Clockworks, Althia, and Manni
The Golden Dragon Package goes to ... Tigatron
The Dreamer Domain Package goes to ... Heaven's Cat
The Renowned Avatar Package goes to... Sylu


Treeki has gotten together a little bug fix "optional" update that we will release this next week. It fixes troubles downloading Dreams, the issue with password ini files and will greatly increase CPU performance in large, visually complex dreams Dreams. You can read the full change list and test it out here http://forums.furcadia.com/index.php?showtopic=84517

Since the update Kashi has added a system that automatically logs you into the webpages if you click on the "edit my furre" button in the client. He will have Delete Character and Change Email Address features ready soon along with a huge bunch of web fixes. Watch the blog for more news on these! http://cms.furcadia.com/community/seconddreaming/news

Furcadia's next big task is hugely important. So our tiny team could focus on the updates, we have put off a needed server move and upgrade for 4 years! In that time two of our servers have had terminal hardware failures and we had to hurriedly migrate everything on them to other servers.

Kashi is pricing out new servers and getting everything ready to be moved, which is a big task. All our old services have to be redone to work on the new machines. We are looking at moving Dream servers on to Amazon S3 to greatly increase the speed of Dream Uploads and Downloads! The move will help all around performance and connectivity too!

It is a costly move for us though and we will be holding some special sales and events to help raise the money for it. This is day to day running of the game, not a Second Dreaming goal so Digo Market needs to pay for it! Your purchases at Digo Market are what pays for servers, staff and costs to keep the game up and running! http://digomarket.com/?cmd=list&topic=5

Speaking of Digo Market, we thought you'd all like a peek at the next avatar! We are happy to announce the Purrkin! Degu is working on this adorable Minkin version of the Purrwing! We also have an anthro antelope with gendered versions coming up and should have a Hyena before the year ends. There's also rumors of an adorable and much requested Giraffe!

(Speaking of Degu, he and Tenjin have both agreed to be Associates! They have been a HUGE help with TSD and art in general and have been Team Dragon members for some time. Degu will be an AIC of Pixels along with Majas and Ten will become and floating Dev Associate. Congrats and thanks!)

Back to avatars, we are also adding genders to a few of the older avatars. All the anthros like the Wyrrme or Racoon and a couple of the sexually dimorphic Ferians like the Leonen or Harten are included.

Now to talk about the rest of The Second Dreaming! We'd been thinking of calling TSD Part 2, Update 31b but our mini update is taking that name so we are going to Update 32 for it!

We've now given you all the tools to get your Dreams ready for the big change (all except walls and skins, they're next!) so now we can focus on getting out the Web and Mobile clients as well as a C# version of the windows client that will allow for graphical hardware acceleration. This will also let us put out a Mac client!

The biggest visual difference in the next update will be a new interface! I know, more change, but it is needed for us to look modern and attract new players to play in all your lovely Dreams! We will work to make sure the new interface will allow you customization options like you are used to!

There will also be custom butlers, new dye colors, double size art and much more! We are excited to finish out The Second Dreaming though we have a lot to celebrate already!

On December 16th of this year, Furcadia will have our 20th Anniversary!

As the world record holder of the longest running MMO, we are the first to reach this milestone and in true Furcadia style, there will be much celebrating! Please do get your Dreams ready and plan your own celebrations too! Some of your Groups have been around almost as long as the game!

Speaking of records, Furcadia was named as one of the eight most influential games that changed how we play games, by one of the world's leading hardware manufacturers, ASUS. It is a great honor for us to be listed with the seven other video games that changed history together with Furcadia! The full article is located at: https://rog.asus.com/24242016/gaming/8-game...ed-how-we-play/

Again watch the news for more information on the festivities. http://cms.furcadia.com/community/seconddreaming/news

Oh! Almost forgot, we will be having a Dream Contest for Wolf Howl this year! No real theme other than make sure you use the new lighting and ambience! You can even enter old WH contest Dreams if you've fixed them all up modern! Happy Dreaming!

We shall be taking your questions now!

Hear the questions and answers at: https://youtu.be/HHkHY32CeNg?t=55m47s