Closed beta has been a little slow during the holiday season which was as expected. We have pushed our release date from the originally thought December date and are now looking at an around February release date. We hope by the end of February that we will have a good and stable product to release to the public as an Public Beta offering.
During closed beta, we’ve had a complete server change. Moving from a small host with shared style web hosting suitable only for development, over to the AWS Cloud area using VPS instances and completely separated databases to provide our system with the best possible servers, response times flexibility. Our AWS Lightsail services are located as close to the Second Life servers so that response time from within second life is super fast.
Our volunteer beta testers first played around with the HUD itself. Testing out all its features such as trading, eating, drinking and the usage of tools. We had a lot of bugs fixed here which you can see from our changelog at https://slcolonies.com/changelog-posts/ - starting from v0.9.1.0 we had come out with numerous fixes which would have been annoyances in public release.
We then moved onto the gathering system using our tools. Pickaxing our way through iron veins and collecting iron ore. After this stage we moved onto the crafting stations to make sure they were doing what was needed with the database. Smelting ore into iron ingots. That was fun!
Playing around more with crafting stations we had rezzed out logging station, carpentry and the likes. Put everything together and made a complex items in the carpentry called a plough. This tool will later be tested on our farming fields.
Currently, we are testing other types of gatherables like our cows. Clicking on them enables one to gather milk if they have the clay pots in inventory as a tool. Drawing a weapon and hitting these farming animals will kill them and give the player meat which can then be further processes using other crafting stations, such as the butcher & cooking stations.
Our developer is hard at work updating the farming scripts. When we had originally made them, a majority of its features were script internal. What we like to do with SLColonies with all our items, be it gatherables or crafting stations, is all of its settings are pulled from a central database. This allows us as moderators to view what is happening around SLColonies as a hold and make adjustments to balance the game so that markets still have a good supply & demand. For example, should we find that there is a flooding in the market of iron ore, then obviously there are too many iron veins out there. The solution could be to increase respawn times, decrease gathering amounts, increase time to gather and quicken up other areas of the game to create a supply of something else while the other starts to lower in supply and become in more demand again.
Our original idea for a farming field was to have 1 type of farm per type of grain/food one wanted to grow. We’ve since decided to overhaul this and make it 1 type of farm which would grow multiple types of grain & vegetables depending on what type of ‘seed’ you as the farmer planted into it after ploughing it. This opens the doors to huge amounts of flexibility in other areas of the game involving crafting stations, as we could technically make crafting stations do different types of animations and reveal different textures depending what you are crafting. Example: Smelting station if crafting iron ingots, an ingot could appear with the iron ingot materials loaded, or if crafting gold, gold would show instead.
Anyway! Once we have completed testing the farms, we will be moving on to brewing kits, which allows players to brew and age various types of alcoholic beverages. End product which would be barrels could have a price setup on them by a tavern keeper and a player with a drinking vessel attached will be able to pay and fill their drinking utensil for a drink which affects their stats. We will also be working on a pitcher style of system, where a maid for example can fill up from a barrel and walk around a table serving the guests their drinks by simply clicking on their drinking vessels or something similar. This would be great for interaction and roleplay.
We will then move onto the final 3 areas of testing, which will be the Vendor system, Marketplace HUBs & Rental Servers. Then, it is on to Public Beta!