Venice Unleashed, The Delay, and Updates

It’s been quite a while since we announced Venice Unleashed… maybe a bit more than a while.

Now, there’s been a lack of updates (and news in general) in the past few months, and even though we prefer to stay rather quiet, we understand that this ‘silence’ can be frustrating for some.

 

So what happened? Where’s Venice Unleashed?

 

Well, the truth is that Venice Unleashed has been delayed for several reasons, with one of the most important being our desire to push more features that were initially considered for the Open Beta, to the Closed Beta.

To be honest, we could have released Venice Unleashed approximately two months ago, but what you would get would be a semi-finished product and as a result we would have to extend the closed testing period while we were implementing new features.

We thought that was unfair for the people that would not have been invited to the Closed Beta and we decided that it was for the best to quietly keep developing it until it was in a more complete state.

 

Of course, this wasn’t the only reason it was delayed.

Both me and kiwidog also have other obligations, such as university, work and various other things, causing our free time to be limited (even during summer).

But that’s that.

 

Now, what’s the current status on Venice Unleashed, you ask. What’s left to be done?

 

Well, there are several things.

My focus has currently shifted from the client to the backend services and I’m working on optimizing server-side performance in order to provide a stable and strong environment for our players when we launch.

On the client-side (which is currently kiwidog’s focus), the extension system is still not ready, as we decided to change several things in the way it works and handles extensions, and some of the new features that we developed haven’t been exposed via it yet.

Other than that, we’re also still in the process of removing most Blaze dependencies from the client, as we will no longer be emulating Blaze (and by ‘not emulating’ we don’t mean we will be emulating it locally, we mean that we’re actually stripping it out of the client and using our own backend services instead which provide us more flexibility and control, while opening the way for other features in the future *cough*LAN*cough*).

 

I’m hoping that we will be able to reach Deployment Phase 2, which is Internal Beta Testing, by the end of the month, which should bring us one step closer to Deployment Phase 3 (Closed Beta Testing).

In the meantime, here’s a video demonstrating our revamped WIP Loading Screen (excuse the choppy video, my PC is acting weird lately…):

 

In the next blog post I will talk about the Enlistments, give some statistics, and more info on how many players will be picked, how the will be picked and how they will be informed about their selection.

NoFaTe out!