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Hi there, I just spotted a quick note from the Developers of Atriarch..

October 3, 2005

update coming soon ... We have been really busy, so we are just jumping on quickly to let you know we are here and will take some time out soon to update. There were a lot of posts on the boards asking about last week's update. I am going to have Arc give me a nice description for everyone as soon as he is finished with his current milestone. I think that should be some time this week, but no promises. I'll be visiting the boards this week as well addressing some questions. See you again soon!

See you then.

Hi there, this weeks update includes some interesting infomation about Foundations and Plugins, I'll let World Fusion the developers behind Atriarch explain further;

enhancements to player-building foundations ... In a previous update, we discussed how Atriarch player buildings require a structural foundation to be placed on flat ground before building can commence. We have now implemented the ability to support multiple types of foundations. Whereas previously there was only one generic, all-purpose foundation, the engine can now distinguish between different ones for different purposes. This is really exciting, because it lays the groundwork for functional player structures that are individualized and personal.

Atriarch's plugin architecture ... The Atriarch team is extremely excited about a slight shift in the direction we have taken with the engine. Our player program, "the shell", has been designed with a plugin architecture. Basically that means the guts of the game are loaded into the shell as plugins. The best part about this is that we have decided that we will release the shell as free software/open source. This effectively allows players to add their own plugins seamlessly. While we will continue to carefully guard the recipe for our secret alien sauce on the backend, the player program will be available to everyone once we release... maybe sooner if we think it would be beneficial.

Don't worry if you find some things hard to understand as I happend on a thread at the Atriarch Watcher Forums Where Serafina Answered with the following:-

There have been a lot of questions about the plugin architecture and what the hell we mean by it. Therefore, on Monday, I will get a more comprehensive explanation from Arc posted. A quick clarification is that the plugins will not affect the server or another person's experience of the game. A player will not be able to upload their own content like you can in Second Life. Player-designed buildings will have to be designed with the building blocks provided by the game. We still want to focus on "player content" but still manitain the cohesiveness of the alien culture and world. I think that would be difficult if we allowed player content to be uploaded. (I should make a note that I have seen Second Life played, but only while standing over someone's shoulder, not on my own.)

Instead think more like the way plugins work with Mozilla Firefox. It is somewhat similar... not that it is like the browser, but rather that it is like the way plugins work. Most likely, this feature will initially be more interesting to programmers. However, since the program will be open sourced, I am guessing that there will be a lot of interesting plugins made for the game.

I hope that helps clarify a bit for right now.

Serafina

Until next time :) have fun.

Check out the latest update from the Office game site.

a Recent Study conducted by NASA Scientists confirms the theory that aliens suck at estimating Earth units of time... First things first... we totally misjudged how long it would take to finish the stuff we've been working on. A significant increase in expletives from the programmers should have clued me in a little sooner. (Next time I take whatever the programmers estimate and multiply by a thousand.)

where there's smoke... Ok, so it has been awhile, what has been happening? Did we fall off the face of Atriana? No, of course not.  We are working as hard as ever.  Some really exciting things are in the pipeline for Atriarch and smokin!  The way the player construction system works is different than what I've seen anywhere. It is a lot of fun.  I really can't wait to share it.  We also have continued to expand the alien culture and world.   More on that will be coming your way soon.

WF Clients take up time... Part of the delay has been due to World Fusion business. We had to divert a bit of attention to our engineering clients to make sure they were taken care of in a top quality manner. (The work World Fusion does for its clients supplies a good portion of the funds for Atriarch development.)  Since we are a small team, things move slower than we would like. Yet, as you know, we are committed to seeing the unique, alien world of Atriarch come to fruition.  I'm really excited about it too!

New Website... The new website was planned to be launched after worst-first testing began.  Therefore, the new website will happen as planned after testing begins. The game is our top priority at the moment.

Bringing Back a  Friend... Tuesday Updates... The good part is that there really is so much to update and share and talk about. So, we decided to go back to updating every Tuesday like we did before instead of waiting for the Worst-First-Testing Phase to begin.  We look forward to sharing more about the alien world of Atriana with you every week.  See you next Tuesday!

Hello, my apologies for the delay on this one, not wanting to delay things further I will leave you to the latest update from World fusion the creators and developers of Atriarch..

Yes, we know things have been quiet around here. We are happy to report that although the website has been quiet, we have been working up a storm. It all seems to be coming together... albeit a few weeks later than we anticipated. In two weeks, we will send out emails to a small group of Worst-First Alpha testers. The people who are going to receive emails were part of this alpha test originally a long time ago when we had to put it on hold. We feel it is fair that that they are the first invited. It will be a very small group at first. When we are ready for an actual full-scale beta, then people on the beta list will be added.

This is very exciting! It is all coming together. We look forward to seeing everyone in the alien world of Atriana soon!

This is the original concept sketch of the Tyrusin Player Character.

Lepidus at mmorpg.com has been patiently waiting. We have a full Atriarch interview going to him soon. We'll let you know when its available. Also, we'll be kicking up the Atriarch Vault question of the week again soon. Lots of other fun stuff coming ... just as soon as we get this alpha test up and rolling :-)

By my accounts a lot of the above should be kicking off any day, lets keep those fingers crossed!

This might sound strange at first but there might be a big future in Alien Beds and Arm/Tentacle chairs as community member tuozine has pointed out, and when looking deeper in fact there is a lot of sense in this thread, so much so that I thought you might want to take a peek and add your own idea's to the Atrian Ikea Thread.

Here's a small snippet from tuozine's initial post to warm the imagination..

So, now I am off thinking about how a cavolon might rest. Maybe something that lets the tentacles dangle, and not particularly comfortable to other beings with two legs. Perhaps they like to recline on their sides when entertaining company, with their tentacles curled up in a hollow designed just for that purpose.

See you soon,

..to prepare for worst-first testing.

Serafina, Lead Designer of Atriarch will explain:-

This is an exciting, very busy and frustrating time for the Atriarch Team as we focus on preparing Atriarch for the first few people to step into and test the world. Exciting, because things are really coming together for Atriarch! Very Busy, because the reason things are coming together is because we are all working our alien butts off. Frustrating, because we really enjoy interacting with fellow gamers and the Atriarch community, but there just isn't enough time.

Anyway, we are going to have our heads buried while we prepare for Worst-First Testing. We are aiming to have our worst foot forward by the end of July. If everything goes as planned (which still has yet to happen), we will be right on schedule :-)

Therefore, our updates (and new website) are going to be a little less regular until we reach our testing goal over the next two months. This is bittersweet for us, because interest in Atriarch has really heated up! More than ever people want increasing amounts of AT information. At the same time, we more than ever really want to focus on getting some major bugs fixed and features implemented. So that's where our immediate focus lies.

Alien Furnishings: Although most of what we are working on right now is stability and server issues, we always leave at least a little time for content development. We talked a lot about player-construction in Atriarch. However, we never mentioned what would go into these buildings. That's because we didn't have any items at the time to go into them. That's now changing. We have an artist working on various alien styles of furnishings for buildings. By furnishings, we mean things like chairs, tables, statues, pots, etc. It is at the conceptual stage, but so far the concepts are looking great! You are welcome to contribute ideas if you like, even if it is just a description of what you'd like to see.

Atriarch Community: If you are craving Atriarch discussion, debate and information, there is some healthy discussion on Atriarch Vault and Atriarch Watcher. We also pop online to answer a quick question when time permits. Also, there is a new webmaster in town for Atriarch Vault, so Mattrios will be kicking it up a bit with some Atriarch fun :-)

Well, you heard it, expect more from US at the Atriarch Vault from here in.

If you have anything you would like to ask about Atriarch then please tell us HERE

If you have visions of Atriarch and how it might play, look, sound, or something different, etc..etc.. then please post your thoughts HERE

Random Act of Pointness:- We will randomly be giving out Atriarch and Atrios Points to poeple who frequent the Atriarch Vault Boards

Thank you for reading, we look forward to seeing you again soon.

Hi, this week we see a new creature added to the Atriarch Bestiary In the form of a Golo, I will leave the explanation to World Fusion, the designers and creators of Atriarch:-

Golos like to dig; it's what they do. They are good at it, and they do it a lot. Golos dig for various reasons. In the wild they do it to pursue various prey and to locate the mineral deposits they need to regenerate themselves. An area that has a large population of Golos tends to be a precarious area to traverse. Generally, the ground will be unstable and littered with holes that are exposed or covered by drifting soil. The unwary traveler can easily fall into one, some of which can be quite deep. So, always bring a rope. If you are lucky enough to capture a Golo, their body often contains various minerals that can be extracted and used to determine the content of the local soil.

(Some, but not all the support for these features are implemented yet. However, we post this to give an idea of the types of things we plan to do with creatures.)

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

Hi there, it's a little later than posted on the Atriarch news Page but this is for those that havn't seen it yet.

It was one of the largest E3's ever. There were over 70,000 people in attendance. There were not hundreds, but thousands of games being showcased. It was a gamer's paradise... or so you would think. The first morning, the convention's air-conditioning broke down. Did I mention 70,000 people? Once you scooped away enough of the air to clear a path, you would find yourself in South Hall, the "pulse" of the convention. The second you walked into any of the massive exhibit halls at the LA Convention Center, your very being was assaulted by 500 million-watt screens and surround sound cranked to 4000 decibels. Los Angeles is still registering aftershocks on the Richter Scale.

At this stage, many independent developers would cower in the face of such an ostentatious display of screen size. Noooooo! Not us! The Atriarch Team was not daunted. It takes more than blinding colors and deafening sounds to stop us from bringing Atriarch to the masses! Our screen may be small, but our world is big. Atriana will swallow all of those human-designed, eleven-story screens and spit them out as alien pooh! (hmm... note to self... add alien pooh to the feature list.)

Despite the cacophony of site and sound, Atriarch's siren song (sung in Atrianese of course) lured in the curious to our high-tech, mobile Atriarch exhibit (aka: laptop). Our nimble nature paid off. A live demo of Atriarch found its way to press, publishers, technology partners, and my favorite, some avid Atriarch fans! It was great show for Atriarch. Everyone who saw Atriarch was excited to see it in action (a real live game rather than just screenshots), which of course made us ecstatic! We had the chance to show off some of the new character creation (still under works), latest skill features, and a fresh approach to player-construction.

Of course, the show was not without its glitches, but I'm going to leave those more exotic tidbits for the discussion forums.

There's also a Best Atriarch Story from E3 in this weeks news post which I'll leave Serafina tell you all about:-

It was the first day at E3. We were sitting in the one quiet area at the conference, the floor outside of Kentia Hall. We were giving a casual demo of Atriarch to mmorpg.com. I had just walked my Lokai character into the guard tower to grab up a Khanja staff and stone when a man none of us knew walked by, did a double take, walked back, and started staring at my screen. He then excitedly interrupted our demo, "That's cool! What game is that?" Of course, I gave him an Atriarch sticker. I thought that was pretty cool. Despite all the new, shiny objects around us, this gamer locked right into Atriarch. What was even better was that it happened during a demo, so I have witnesses.... hehe Woo Atriarch!

Until Next time..

Welcome Back, here is the latest on Atriarch

Until now, this was mostly just design on paper, but it has been implemented into the world... woohoo! Kicen Plants produce a pod that is necessary in creating an offspring (aka: character lives). Players can harvest Kicen Plants and salvage a birthing pod. This can now be turned into a Specialty Skill.

Once the pod is harvested from the Kicen Plant, a player can plant (right now all that means is drop on the ground) the pod anywhere in the world and create a birthing location. The birthing pod is where the player's offspring will be born into the world should the current character die. If player character dies a list of the available birthing pod locations will be listed. The player then chooses from which pod it wants to birth.

Some interesting questions here are: How many offspring lives should be allowed? Can other players harvest pods for you? Should Kicen Plants be common or rare? Should other players be allowed to move your pods? Will this create an economy based on Character Life bartering? Birth pod brokers? These questions are easy things to tweak in the game as we test out the different possibilities.

You can find the rest of the post and much more at the Atriarch Web Site.

Kind Regards

Welcome, I appologise for the delay in news postings of late, with this mind we will get straight to business:-

New & Enhanced Salvage Skill: We already implemented the ability for Players to harvest resources. We also already implemented the ability for Players to have Skills. What we have not done until now is make harvesting require a Player Skill. We have now melded those features to create the latest Basic Player Skill: Salvage.

Salvage as a Player-Defined Specialty Skill: What is great about Salvage as a Basic Skill is that it can be made into a Player-Defined Specialty Skill directed at any potential Resource. What that means is that after a player has acquired the Basic Salvage Skill, a player can specialize it by directing their skill toward a particular resource. That is done through the player's actual actions in-game, not by choosing it on a drop-down list, nor by applying points.

For example, if a player wants to specialize in Kicen Plant Salvaging, then a player would direct their efforts and activities around the Kicen Plant. Salvaging from a Dubo Plant may improve the Salvage Basic Skill, but would not necessarily increase the Kicen Plant Salvage Specialty.

Right now, Kicen and Dubo Plants are the only resources that can be Salvaged. You can't do much with them yet, but they are salvagable which is necessary before we implement utilization. We will keep it to a couple plants for initial testing. It makes it easier to work out the kinks with a few plants rather than many.

New Character Selection In Development: As most you know, we have our Worst-First Testing planned for July. We figured it was a good time to get the Login and Character Selection looking better. Some of you may have seen some unauthorized screenshots floating around that show a not-so-purty initial entry into the world of Atriana. The poor Cavolon's tentacles were cut off. The Lokai's hands were missing. I won't even start with the Tyrusin and Eshlar. Anyway, we are fixing all this. For testing, we should have the first part of our new login and character selection process working. We'll post screenshots when ready. To the dismay of some Tyrusin, the Lokai and Cavolon will have all limbs in tact :-)

New Website Under Works: A quick update on Atriarch's new website. It is still under works. We are really excited and looking forward to launching that soon. However, we have no specific date yet for "soon". We figured the timing would be best if we wait until after E3 and closer to testing so that all the momentum builds up together. This is going to be one hell of a Rebirthing Ceremony!

All this and more can be found at the Atriarch Web Site, So feel free to pop over and read up on all things Atriarch.

Kind Regards

Amongst the news of late World Fusion have been generous enough to release not just a sample of music from the original works by Mark R. Irvin (aka: MRI) but have released the entire CD for Download, be sure to head over to the Atriarch Downloads page at the official site to gather your copy.

I would like to appologise for the lack of news and community info of late, the reasons behind the absence are now relieved and the service will resume as normal as of the weekend, many thanks for stopping by the Atriarch Vault.

Kind Regards

Hello, I feel I must appologise for the delay in news and events over the last couple of weeks, anyone that is regular to the Atriarch site will understand that things have most certainly not stopped as far the development of Atriarch goes. My reasons for the delay are not permanent and the news and community events will continue as normal as of this weekend.

I wish everyone well and thank you all for your patience and for poping in to Atriarch Vault.

We look forward to seeing you soon.

The Atriarch Audio Support is in place, I will let WorldFusion explain..

Woohoo! The team's work from the past few weeks has come to fruition. We are very excited about the newly implemented sound and music support. We are proud to continue our support of open formats. All of Atriarch's audio data is now stored in ogg format. The best part is that, unlike our previous audio, it now has very little impact on the performance. That's always a plus :-)

This is great news and if that wasn't enough to be joyous about then you'd better bend your ears/eyes to this next segment;

Now that we got this behind us, we are moving on to the next phase of our schedule: prepare the current set of features for testing in our worst-first testing. hmm... that is such a short sentence, yet it packs a lot of work. There are several loose ends that need tying up. It is one thing for it to work on a few local machines, but quite another to ready it for the mog hammer. Of course, we have all confidence of achieving what we set out. We just don't promise exact day and time ;-) We'll keep you posted as we chisel away.
Good news is that everything is still right on schedule :-) Woo Atriarch!

We must applaud the Atriarch Developers for their endless work and keeping the schedual for worst-first testing on time, we look forward with great anticipation to the opening of the testing gates no matter how big the gap in these gates maybe.

Moving topic a little, we here at the Atriarch Vault thank the WorldFusion Team for arming us with some important items for dispersal into our community, these being in the form of Atriarch points(we have already started a thread for Weekly Questions and Answers so pop over and have a look), here's what WorldFusion had to say on the subject;

Mattrios from Atriarch Vault contacted us about starting up some community projects. We thought it was a great idea. He has an alien satchel of Atriarch Points to hand out as his discretion. We are excited to see what he comes up with. If you are interested, drop by and let him know.

For those not knowing what these are or what you can use them for, then please see THIS PAGE to find out more.

The Final breaking news this week is about the E3 in Los Angeles, heres the news on that;

We'll be at E3 in Los Angeles. If you will be there and like to see a live demo of Atriarch, email (info@atriarch.com) us to schedule an appointment. Or you can just look for the infamous Atriarch tshirts and stickers :-)

Thank you for reading, it's been a good update this week, we look forward to next time.

The Atriarch Bestiary is coming on well, this time we see an addition in the form of The Durakk!

Nemesis of the Tyrusin. Bipedal. Organized. Brutal. Sentient. Have a long memory and a historical account that differes from the Tyrusin. Durakk hate Tyrusin because they feel they should be the ones partaking in the global economy and that they have been made to suffer at the hand (or paw) of the cruel, inferior species. (They think it should be the Durakk on the back of the Atriarch t-shirt.)

There is also a screen shot of the Durakk in the Bolera Caverns

See you soon