sanctimonious: Adelie Aaralyn wishes to know what the next avatar will be. I can't confirm it for hundred percent sure, but I believe at this point we are considering squirrel as the next free avatar we add to Furcadia.

sanctimonious: Coros wishes to know who I am, and that's probably something I should've told you a bit earlier. I am one of the programmers involved in developing Furcadia and responsible of [programming of] the infamous beta that will one day happen.

sanctimonious: And to answer to Slay and a number of other furres who asked the same question, Furcadia Beta is a big update happening somewhere in the future. There are a lot of things that needs to be done for that, we are rewriting and redesigning pretty much everything for it. The Beta will be free just as our current version is free.

sanctimonious: supremacy wishes to know when our next update will come out. Our next update, which definately is not beta update, will be out somewhere around February, most likely.

sanctimonious: To a numerous people who wishes to know when the beta will be put in effect, I can't give you any reasonable date. Anything between eight to twelve months at LEAST is my best guess.

sanctimonious: Fri wishes to know will Furcadia always be in 2D. This is an unclosed issue, but it won't stay fully 2D forever. It might save most of the 2D-elements, but for many things such as the lighting effects and other special effects that have been planned for the beta will be somewhat 3d-mockups.

sanctimonious: Agett wishes to know some of the major changes in the beta. At least we will have 24-bit graphics and a considerably more sophisticated patch system. Animations without DS will be supported as we as real time lightning.

sanctimonious: Anita Pomroy wishes to know do I suspect that Furcadia will one day charge people for playing? I have heard Felorin answer this question countless times, and every time he has told that Furcadia will be free forever, though some parts of it might some day be available for members only. However, I believe the idea is not to suddenly close Meovanni from everyone who doesn't pay, but maybe add a new area that might require membership. >>

sanctimonious: That however is not going to happen anytime near. For the time being we will be just like we have been last seven years.

sanctimonious: Culracan wonders why 24-bit and what about alpha channel. I use term '24-bit' format because most of the people recognize it as "a whole lotta more colors than right now". We will support alpha channel, 8-bit one I believe.

sanctimonious: Chemical wishes to know if there are going to be any additions to the main map family in the future. I'm sorry, but I do not know. Check out Q&A with Felorin or Emerald Flame, they concentrate on the maps more than I do.

sanctimonious: Supremacy asks if the Dream editor in the Beta will be way different than now. I can only answer: I really hope so. I hope we manage to put together a really lot better and easier to use editor with a lot more features than the one we currently have.

sanctimonious: What is phoenix speak? It's a language planned for controlling RPG situations and keeping record of many things involved to them, like inventory, stats or even combat. Still on design stage, so it most likely will not be available anytime soon.

sanctimonious: Chocy wants to know why don't we publish some sort of free flying avatar or special water one. I haven't been involved on choosing which avatars we publish for free, but I have understood that the idea has been to publish them in the order of popularity. For the time being flying avatars have been chosen to only be special avatars, so they are easy to recognize and so on.

sanctimonious: DJ Sleepy wants to know what are the plans of future player patches, will they ever go gender specific? This is a difficult question, because while I agree that gender specific avatars would look cool, they also would greatly grow our download size and there are questions related to whether they would increase player harrasment as well. I think the compromise we'll have on the beta is that while our normal graphics will stay genderless, players can make gender-specific patches if they >

sanctimonious: choose so.

St. Cutefangs: SANCTIMONIOUS IS USING A TEXT BUFFER HACK!!!

sanctimonious: Tedra wishes to know if Furcadia will become a full-screen game. It's been planned that the Beta would support also full-screen modes for those who prefer to play that way, but we will not force it on anyone.

sanctimonious: Supremacy wishes to know if there will be more default items added to the next update. To my knowledge, no.

sanctimonious: Epliogue wants to know if there is ever going to be a Furbot update. I hope not. Would someone like to continue developing Furbot, if so they can contact after Q&A session.

sanctimonious: Hammond wishes to know if there will be different text fonts and colours in future updates. Yes, beta has been planned to contain better text and font support so we can use bold, italics and/or colors within our messages.

sanctimonious: Culracan wants to know if we'll be using GDI or DirectX with beta. DirectX is our choise at this moment.

sanctimonious: Cluracan

sanctimonious: Comic Castaway asks if there will be foreign character support. Yes, the beta has been planned to have unicode support, which adds virtually all character sets to one's use as long as the used font does support them too.

sanctimonious: Silverfire wonders if you will keep your digo items with Beta. Yes, you will. Beta is just an update, it will not take away any items you have bought.

sanctimonious: To many questions about the little thing at the end of my description, it is a fox, I'm afraid you can't have one, and it's there to advertise our up-coming features, such as various kind of desc tags. To get more info on them, please listen Felorin's Q&A session, he knows more details than I do.

sanctimonious: Chikako wonders if the beta update will have any new digo items. It most likely will, but so will updates before it.

sanctimonious: Cluracan wonders if the client-server protocol will change considerably with the beta. Yes, it will. A separate server dedicated for bots will be most likely offered, so bot owners do not have to learn the new protocol or considerably update their bots.

sanctimonious: Decadence wonders who is in charge of creating the new graphics, avatars and items for beta. Talzhemir is and our other graphician, Gar is assisting her.

sanctimonious: Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf wonders how the traffic issues are going to be resolved as more people populate Furcadia. As you probably have noticed every now and then an update does modify a map or two, trying to fix the worst traffic jams in a way or another. This will be continued, and every now and then we will do bigger changes, like some years ago when we added Vinca, Imaginarium, FurN and so on.

sanctimonious: Traffic jams have two sides though, you also meet a lot new people with them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

sanctimonious: Are there any plans for non-anthropomorphic avatars? Not at this point, no.

sanctimonious: Cosmic Castaway wonders how big will the download size be for Beta. We have no clue at this point, but our goal naturally is as small as possible.

sanctimonious: Kahlinia has heard rumors about upgraded digo items and new avatars. These rumors are true, next update will add some, and the one after it will add more. The general populance of Furcadia is listened carefully about the items we offer, but I don't think we will be adding a vote of which items we'll add in the future.

sanctimonious: Supremacy asks if there will be any new main maps in the next update. This is not certain yet. We will not be adding any new maps as far as I know, but we might be updating a few.

sanctimonious: Aand I think that quite about concludes this short Q&A session. Thank you for all coming and have a nice evening!

[#] Talzhemir says, "okie, let's begin.  Thank you all for showing up.  Have some cocoa from the silver kiwis.  Or coffee or soda..."

[#] LostZarian asks: will there ever be Bovine in Furc?
[#] This is the kind of question I get fairly often.  So often that I've got my own FAQ.
[#] Furcadia has so few Races because every new Race adds considerably to the size of the download. Every second longer it goes is a moment in which the download might fail. If that happens, the downloader is more than 50% likely to give up on Furcadia forever.
[#] The ones we have were chosen by going over FurryMUCK data. These six covers over 95% of FurryMUCK's population. If the Internet itself changes such that bandwidth is MUCH higher for even the slowest users, then we can consider adding others.
[#] My list is topped Skunks (stretchable for squirrels, etc.), (and, yes) COWS, Deer, Bugges, and Avians ("Byrddes").   In that order.
[#] Although I normally appreciate input, your suggestion for what to add next will probably fall on deaf ears until all five of the above are completed and added.

[#] jh'Scrud asks what music I'm listening to.
[#] I'm listening to an ancient harp called the Kannel, or Kantele.  Like many ancient European traditions, it's preserved in Finland (where Sanctimonious lives IRL).
[#] Lord of the Rings is inspired by the Finnish national poem-epic-collection, the Kalevela.  Honk if you're going to see LotR, the new one, soon!  :-)
[#] The kantele is so ancient it preserves the five-note scale of ancient Greece.  That probably doesn't mean much to you, so I'll play a .MP3 of it for you:
[#] (Sanctimonious plays piano, and has a kantele, by the way.)

[#] Diana Celebrie asks how you get nominated for a Beekin Teacher.
[#] Almost all Beekin stuff is done by Emerald Flame.  With advice from the Beekin Associates, who are sort of like a "cabinet" to her, she chooses the Beekin Heads.  Beekin Teachers are chosen by Emerald Flame and the Heads together, I think.

[#] CadillacWerewolf asks why he's sometimes booted for hours at a time, even though he's done a tracert and tried both ports?  and, how do you email the affected router or hub?
[#] If you don't understand that question, you can refer to this:    www.bga.com/~pixel/lag    which is me explaining that Furcadia isn't lagging, the Internet is.
[#] Being "booted" is specifically something done by Guardians.  To find out more, you need to ask by emailing    guardians@furcadia.com
[#] As for how to email the affected router/hub... it's standard for each to have an email account called      admin@<whatever.com.or.net.or.org.etc.>
[#] The service I listed in that web page also lists the specific one that you're supposed to email if there's a problem.

[#] Carrie O'Kaye asks if the "beta" version of Furcadia wil use shades as shadows?
[#] Probably not.  Time to educate new artists is excruciatingly tight.  I protect something called the "apparent simplicity" of Furcadia.  Explaining how to do shadows of that kind is pretty far beyond the scope of the game, I'm afraid.
[#] Often, cooler and even better things are left by the wayside, in favor of the "lowest common denominator."  If a 12-year-old can't guess it, it's probably not a good idea.

[#] Radioactive Chicken asks if I've ever had anybody banned because I didn't like them.
[#] Hehehe...
[#] No.  I've never had anybody banned on my account.  If I'm harassed, I file an official report.  Anybody who ever harassed me and got banned, got banned because they were also harassing a lot of others, and then violated our harassment policy.

[#] Existence asks if somebody 16 could be a Guardian even though the rule is, theyhave to be an adult.
[#] (Guardians are Beekins, and therefore part of Emerald Flame's bailiwick.)
[#] Guardians are frequently called in to deal with adult language and adult situations.  We can't have underage Guardians because it's against the law to deliberately/knowingly/explicitly expose minors to adult material.
[#] The word "explicit" should be carefully explained in this context.  It means "deliberately".  If something is done in Furcadia and it has other purposes, but it gets abused, we aren't held responsible the way we would be, if we made something that had no other purpose.

[#] Radioactive Chicken asks what I'd like for Christmas.
[#] For Christmas I'd like lots of the kind of grit you sift through with a gold pan.  A month ago, I barely squeezed in a plane trip to Georgia.  Got to meet jh'Scrud all too briefly, and we went to Cleveland, to a touristy mine thing.
[#] I find playing with sand and water is very relaxing; I recommend it.

[#] Carrie O'Kaye asks who's the delightful furre represented in Items 323 & 326.
[#] It's George W. Bush dressed as Carrie O'Kaye.  No, no, no.  It's Carrie O'Kaye!  What a coincidence!

[#] Tom Cornhill asks why it costs $5 to leave me a note.
[#] It costs that because I want to make you really really really THINK before you tell me, "you just GOT to listen to me!"
[#] (I hate having Whispers turned off, I really do, but, well, 1500 furres, and 1 me; I can't type any faster.)

[#] Radioactive Chicken asks what my IQ is.
[#]   o.O
[#] According to a test I took when I was 10, 170.  According to a Mensa test, it's 160.  I doubt it; I think it's more like 150.  Felorin is smarter than I am.

[#] Kiiyue asks if Furcadia is my full-time job.
[#] Most of my time is spent working on Furcadia-related things.  I also do freelance consultation to other online games, but I can't tell you which because I'm under "nondisclosure agreement" and "confidentiality agreement" with them.  I also occasionally do freelance artwork.

[#] Jovin is curious about FanFic, FurcBased.  The Furcadia source material is roleplaying game material.  I did extensive research into the legal side of this.  According to Dragon's Eye policy, RPing your own stories about them, and publishing them, is fine, so long as you don't represent yourself as Dragon's Eye or Furcadia.
[#] If you put something like "The Prime Jujinka is the property of Dragon's Eye and this story should not be construed as a legal challenge to ownership," that's plenty to clear you with us.
[#] I view FanFic as a modern "scent of food / sound of money" problem.  (You know- the story where the Chinese judge is confronted with a beggar and a restaurant-owner claiming the beggar owes him money for smelling fish?)
[#] I recommend asking furres about whether or not you can use their alts in your tales.  That's just politeness.
[#] That's definitely not true.  Parody-writers get successfully sued some of the time, and there's no predicting.
[#] With Furcadia, I don't want a "chilling effect"; I'd rather err on the side of leniency.  So, all things I make for Furcadia, that you can routinely study, are issued as "copyleft".
[#] You can use it-- but you are obligated to extend the same generosity to everybody.  So if you copy my green pillow and add eyes to it, we won't sue.  But you shouldn't get upset when someone screen-caps it and gives it feet. :-)

[#] Jovin Lim asks about "these powerful characters like Talzhemir and Felorin".
[#] "Talzhemir" and "Felorin" are our RL aliases, not IC characters.  Well, they're in that nebulous middleground that I've dubbed Persona Roleplay.
[#] There's no Talzhemir or Felorin in the world of the Dragonlands.  Felorin likes when his alt shows up in stories.  I tend to prefer that "Talzhemir" be kept separate from anything using "Dragonlands" background.
[#] The "theme" for "Talzhemir" is that of a genie.  And there's not really genies officially in the world of the Dragon, Vinca, and Primes.
[#] So, I wouldn't stop you but I also (probably) wouldn't help you.

[#] Jovin Lim asks if he should send me his book once it's done.
[#] A commercially sold publication shouldn't use "Talzhemir"; that's a legal challenge to ownership of the copyright.  If it's FanFic, you're welcome to do so.
[#] I don't usually have time to read FanFics.  That's why we have writing contests- so that there's this precious little window when we get a chance to see stuff by furres.
[#] (FanFic: fiction by and about a fan of some Concept. it's FurreCon shorthand :-))
[#] Talzhemir asks:  aren't you going to ask about the little flaming sword?

[#] Arinos says:  I still wanna know waht the Galdoon is.
[#] what
[#] Well... sometimes something comes along and it doesn't have a name.  And it deserves a name.
[#] Furcadia is older than the release and use of HTML.  We predate "The World-wide Web" using "URLs" and "http://"...
[#] A "Galdoon" is a device that makes announcements, holds rosters, holds local IC Continuity entries like a kind of encyclopedia, and takes care of auto-Ejects.

[#] Tom Cornhill asks:  who/what inspires you?
[#] Folklore, mythology, and legend, of course.  Some fantasy authors.  My first exposure in a novel to what I call "furres" was the beavers in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
[#] C.S. Lewis had been writing about them since he was 10; he called them "Dressed Animals".  His talking animal world was named Boxen.
[#] "Furre" is my word and is, yes, owned by Dragon's Eye.  For a list of major "properties", you can View Source of this page:  http://www.realtime.net/~pixel/
[#] The concept of bipedal animals is ancient.  Very ancient.  The oldest known sculptures are mammoth-ivory effigies of lion-people, from paleolithic caves in Germany.

[#] jh'Scrud asks:  and not Frank Baum?
[#] Yes, Frank L. Baum is an inspiration.  He was the author of a most excellent manual of chicken breeds and care.  But he's better known as the author of the Wizard of Oz.  You can see the map of Oz in the aerial view of Acropolis.
[#] Using "furre" would, yes, be a copyright violation, in a professional publication.  On a web page or fan fiction, however, it's acceptable as "fair use".

[#] Carrie O'Kaye asks, "Will there be a Dragonland as part of the main maps?"
[#] There already are.  Theriopolis and Goldwyn, in Imaginarium, are set in the Dragonlands.  However, what happens there doesn't "become canon".  (Canon means "by the book").  The permanent Dreams are more like  "shadows" of the official Continuity and don't affect it.

[#] Tom Cornhill asks, "Can you take any action if someone steals your patch work, if it is your own original work?"
[#] This is a copyright violation.  As you can gather from my words earlier, copyright is a very complex thing.  Dragon's Eye's staff can't make rulings on what is real-world law.
[#] If you had a complaint, you would first have to take official real-world legal action.  Find a lawyer.  File a suit.
[#] From there, a judge might rule that the artwork was indeed stolen, and not to be used.
[#] Dragon's Eye would then cooperate with the authorities, helping track the one who uploaded it as best we could, so that they could be subpoenaed.
[#] It hasn't happened yet.
[#] Several portraits were removed, however, when it was proven to staff that they were stolen works.

[#] Inhandra wonders how Talz feels about hte sudden popularity in people registering names to sell them for Digo items.
[#] Hmmm.  That's a controversy that hasn't been decided internally.  The official general attitude for years was, "If you create the name, it's yours.  You cannot give it away.  You can let someone else use it, but it is always yours."
[#] The "legal precedent" for this is a vague imitation of British law.  In England you can't "lose" copyright.  Paul McCartney wrote "Silly Lovesongs" and he can license it to EMI but EMI can't come to own it later.  I recommended that because I think that is the model that is going to ultimately be the most workable.
[#] So, somebody could sell the name-- but if the creator claimed it was "stolen", we would have no choice but to give it back again, resetting password, with no re-transfer of the Digo items.
[#] Mostly, all I can say is, "It's not a good idea to buy a name with Digo items."

[#] Radioactive Chicken asks how Talzhemir is pronounced.
[#] The ZH is the same as the S in "vision".  It's TAL - zhe - meer.

[#] CadillacWerewolf asks, "isn't theriopolis supposed to be a sort of market place? and if so, how come there aren't any bots there?"
[#] Theriopolis (which means City of the Beasts) is a Dragonlands setting.  It's based on medieval real-world Venice, hence all those canals.
[#] In the User Agreement, there's a limit to bots being able to say up to 1 thing per minute, and a rule that they must go in Allegria Island.
[#] More than that, and it's officially "spamming".
[#] A more detailed description of the "IC" Theriopolis can be found here:  http://www.furcadia.com/roleplay/therio.html
[#] Information about the "IC" Goldwyn is here:  http://www.furcadia.com/roleplay/goldwyn.html

[#] Tom Cornhill asks:  What would you do if someone went into competition with you building a game like Furc but better?
[#] "Better" is a subjective word.  Which Dream is the "best" one?  Most furres judge it on whether or not *their* *friends* are there.
[#] Furcadia's technology is extremely primitive, but it's not just the technology that makes it Furcadia, it's also the communities that inhabit the Dreams.
[#] Communities aren't so able to move because in moving, people might lose their authority and status.  For example, you could build k'Furcadia Vale clone on Habbo Hotel, but the furres who are recognized as lords and ladies of k'Furcadia Vale aren't going to want to go there necessarily.
[#] So I wouldn't worry about Furcadia's survival, and I'd wonder what they were doing to show their players have a good time.

[#] Rainbow Challenge asks: so you will be completely happy if someone builds a chinese version of furc?
[#] If they don't call it Furcadia, don't call their players Furres, don't have Jujinka appearing at the Spring Festival sprinkling sparklies on everybody, and don't call their writer and art director Talzhemir, I guess it's okay...
[#] We're working on an update at any given time.  I think we are two updates away from Beta.  Beta will change our graphics to have 256 colors per item, not 256 colors for the whole Dream.
[#] It will also support Unicode for fonts, so that other language character sets work!  Cyrillic, Kanji, etc.

[#] Apple~Kitty asks:  Meow meow computer meow bad problems meow.  Meow meow another way to do portrait uploading besides the web?
[#] I'm sorry but, no, the only way to do portraits is that web page system.  It's cut me off from approvals, too; I no longer do the immediate-mode text command to check them.  :-(

[#] Inhandra asks:  Any other tidbits you can tell us that will be included in the next update?
[#] I'm an advocate of Dream-owners, and I'd like to make Dreams an ability to be more "special".  I asked Felorin if we could have Lrace.  It's short for "local race".
[#] Local race would be    lrace.fsh   a file that lets you add one race to your Dream, via the Patch.  I've written up documentation on
[#] Dragonspeak that would interact with Lraces, and I've suggested interface changes, like a button that would transform you into Lrace if the Dream owner hadn't restricted it somehow.
[#] I spend a bit of time writing looooooong papers documenting possible things to add.
[#] Dragonspeak that lets Dream owners treat different genders differently is something we've discussed and, so far, haven't been willing to do, yet.  We're waiting for Furcadia to be large enough that
[#] its overall "native" community standards are robust enough to not be damaged by it.  So far, we're not big enough yet for that.

[#] Carrie O'Kaye asks:  When will Reunion finish Dreamer?
[#] I honestly don't know.  I talk to Reu about once every month, and that may be more than anybody else on staff because so much energy is being put into an update to the Client.
[#] I'd like to mention-- Dragon's Eye ahs a "secret weapon", a furre by the name of Kunnis.  He's already found and FIXED a zillion bugs in the client.
[#] Our first plan was to have Sanctimonious do the next Client.  He does have a lot of say in how it gets done, but for the past months, his time has been devoted to web page workings (such as the web-based portraits system).
[#] Reunion iz here!  :-D
[#] I believe Farrier is going to head up the Bugges, if he isn't doing that already?
[#] Niko, who used to head the Bugges, has made a floor-creation program.  He made a color-switcher before, that tweaked .GIF/.PCX items so you could make red pillows into green ones, etc.
[#] We'd like for the Beta to include two color parameters, so you can specify colors on an individual item.  And that's why I made everything all red red red.

[#] Two asks: Is there a way to submit ideas for DS that should be added, that will actually be read and considered?  Aside from having to participate in the forum.
[#] No, and there's a very good reason for it.  Decisions aren't made by a single person, although one furre usually is the "president" of an area, like Emerald Flame runs the Beekins, for instance.  For any given suggestion, there may be between 1 and 8 different people
[#] to whom that info ought to go.  Nobody here has time to go over a suggestion email box, and forward a suggestion to a couple other staffers.
[#] Our default is, we all keep an eye on the Forums.
[#] I think that's been the most successful way to do it-- Felorin asked for suggestions for new DS and got lots of *brilliant* ideas, many of which made it in.
[#] Some ideas got "chewed on", spawning debates between Farrier, Felorin, Ghost Tiger, and others.  What got "spat out" the other end was usually the best of several optimums.
[#] My suggestions for DS have been spreading out into a whole new thing that may turn out to not be a DS system at all, but something new.  It's currently dubbed Phoenix Speak.  There's a lot to do before we get to that; it's back-burner-ed right now.
[#] Emerald Flame and Gar and Felorin are also brainstorming intermittantly on something called Fuzzball, a scripting language (possibly).  Fuzzball and Phoenix Speak differ in that Fuzzball is immediate mode commands, and Phoenix Speak revolves around an "engine" to run questionnaires with "modal" questions.

[#] Ja Lacaob asks:  Could you give an idea how phoenix speak would work?
[#] Suppose you wanted to run an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game using Furcadia.  A Phoenix Speak scripting command would look like this:
[#] (6:2) Let there be a Statistic called (Dexterity).
[#] (9:14) change the (Dexterity) Statistic by (#).
[#] (25:6) The (Dexterity) Statistic can be viewed by the character-owner or by any furre of Rank (#) or higher.

[#] Reunion asks:  Could you possibly use curly brackets?
[#] *lol*  (inside joke:  that was a long discussion on the Forums)
[#] I leave that stuff to Felorin.

[#] Inhandra asks: How are your batwings coming along?
[#] Batwings are the next for-pay Digo type item.  We already have a version of all non-"special" avatars with batwings.  I have to position them.
[#] Here's the kind of stuff I might do in a typical day.  The positioning of long winged furres has to be done by entry of numbers in Sanctimonious's editor.
[#] It has a quirk that items don't go below the bottom of their placement diamond.
[#] By putting in a number value, however, the long wings can be made to work so that furres don't hover over their chairs.
[#] :looks for a picture of 'em...
[#] We'd like to get them into the next Update.  All 'when' or 'how soon' questions tend to get answered 'we don't know'.  Honestly, though-- we usually can't say.

(She would eventually post no links to any pictures.)

[#] Two asks:  Will there ever be an update that will allow a change of perspective? (i.e., the ability to shift 360 degrees around a character from four or more camera angles.)
[#] Creating all the art in that format, writing an engine, etc. would cost Dragon's Eye about 1 million dollars, and 2 years of time minimum.
[#] What really seals the fate of 3D is that currently, the typical furre doesn't have access to a 3D editor, and couldn't make Patches.  And Patches are Furcadia's life's-blood.

[#] Two says:  You could probably use an already created engine.
[#] No engine yet created could handle the intricacies of a typical Furcadia screen.  Estimate the polygons of what you're looking at, and you're looking at twice as many elements as what most games allow you to see at once.
[#] I don't think Dragon's Eye is up to doing a whole other game; that probably will be done by some other energetic team, for whom it is a labor of love.
[#] As a typical 12-year-old can't be taught to use a 3D editor in about 10 minutes, Furcadia is highly unlikely to ever become 3D.
[#] If you're interested in a 3D game that's free, you might take a peek at www.eternal-lands.com
[#] They're not affiliated with Furcadia, but the creators of that game were once  Furcadia players.

[#] Dessodre asks:  Talzhemir, doesn't knowing so much hurt your brain?
[#] I guess I know a chunk of it and have to ask others alot of questions.  Mostly, my work tires me because design is an "art" and that means making lots of decisions.
[#] If you think debating me is exhausting, think of how I must be debating myself all the time. O.Oo.O:-):-P;-)
[#] ...Lolindir?  are you awright?  Somebody, fetch water!

[#] Ja Lacaob asks how I managed to grow a real tail??
[#] Cloning???

[#] I think I better wrap this up.  Lord of the Rings tomorrow at 10:30 for me...!  Thank you all so much for coming.  (thanks, Honcho and jh'Scrud and Arinos for being my "bouncers".  It was pretty calm?)

[#] Two asks:  Will there ever be an update that will allow a change of perspective? (i.e., the ability to shift 360 degrees around a character from four or more camera angles.)
[#] Creating all the art in that format, writing an engine, etc. would cost Dragon's Eye about 1 million dollars, and 2 years of time minimum.

[#] We're working on an update at any given time.  I think we are two updates away from Beta.  Beta will change our graphics to have 256 colors per item, not 256 colors for the whole Dream.

Cluracan: Where is everyone, Reu?
Reunion: I don't know.

Okay, well, 8-bit + tons of dithering info doesn't really cut it as "8-bit."  There's so much dithering info in there that you only manage to shave 5KB off a 25KB image, where you should have ~ 8KB as the final image size.

Also, you think Furcadia dithers its images?

So, right now, we do "shadows" as dithers
(checkerboards of pixels) with background color
in between.

Any half-brain can come up with a file format.  The problem is the pixel format.

There is no 8-bit format that supports an alpha channel.

They never said anything about 8-bit format. They said "256 colors per shape" which offers a lot of variations.

it's a lot easier to grasp an idea of (color) remapping item or character graphics with palette based images than with any other kind.

I argue that while technically pixel format might make it seem so, alpha channel is not part of a color per se.

... and because it's a lot easier to grasp an idea of (color) remapping item or character graphics with palette based images than with any other kind.