Motown

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Everything posted by Motown

  1. Please welcome the volunteer forum moderators that will be assisting Identity's Community staff in its day to day operations! This team has been specially selected from the Identity forums for their reputation for remaining unbiased during forum discussions, and for their interests in making a difference within the Identity community. However, some of these individuals may be recognized as volunteer Administrators from Asylum Entertainment's "Asylum Altis Life," a modification for ArmA 3, and are trusted to continue the renowned work that they have become known for. Each member of Identity's volunteer forum staff has their own unique personality and moderation style. We hope that you will get your first taste of who these individuals are from this introduction topic. Thank you for being a part of the Identity community!
  2. DEV BLOG #001 Greetings Citizens, It has been just over a year since you helped successfully kick start Identity into existence! We want to thank you all for your continued support by providing you all with regular updates following the development process for Identity. Engaging with our community is one of the best ways we can show our thanks, and a development blog is a perfect opportunity for us to bring you along for the ride. As you’ve seen throughout the past year, there is no game out there that is quite like Identity, and through your support, you have proven to us that Identity is a vision worth turning into a reality! Feedback has shown us that you all really appreciate our attempts to respond to virtually every question we receive on social media. Twitter and Facebook have been a huge boost in exposure for Identity, and so it is time we begin to explore other avenues of exposure to help our community understand a bit more about the game. In the coming months, our fans will see their first glimpse of gameplay for Identity! We are all extremely excited to show off our first gameplay video, which will fully explore the mechanics of apartment and housing customization. With this video, you will see that we have stayed true to our original art direction from the original Kickstarter trailer, while maintaining high standards in realistic lighting and graphics. We can safely say that we have improved many of the areas of our design that needed attention since February last year. Apartment & Housing Customization Apartments and houses within Identity will have a fully customizable interior. You will be able to change the wall paper on every wall in every room, place furniture anywhere there is space on the ground, swap out doors, windows, baseboards, crown moulding, and even wainscoting! We have made no compromise to the level of detail in which you can customize your apartments or homes, in order to truly express your sense of home decor. With this level of control, there is virtually no chance that the interior of two homes will ever look alike. There will be hundreds of furniture items available to purchase in-game in every style and design, from traditional to contemporary. Furniture in Identity can even be crafted, sold, or traded to other players, and those who wish to try their hand at crafting hand-made furniture from a variety of materials can place a crafting table anywhere they wish inside their homes! And if you wish to share your space with a partner, friend, or even a group of friends, homes and apartments will be available for sale throughout the world that support multiple roommates depending the size of the space and how many bedrooms are available. The home-owner may even grant build permissions to any number of roommates, even visitors, to help them decorate their living space. When you are finished, invite your friends over to compliment you on your interior decorating skills! If you’re anything like us, we know you will spend more time cleaning up this virtual home than you do your real one! Radio This week, our team has also placed a lot of our development efforts into building a functioning radio system that will allow you to listen to your favorite real-world radio stations through placed radio objects inside your virtual home, or car! Yes, you can flip through the channels in your car radio, which will also broadcast to the immediate area outside your car. Imagine driving down the street and having everyone you pass know you listen to NSYNC! One other major part of this feature that we are excited to tell you about is player operated talk-shows which you can personally host, or tune-in and listen to, from your car radio or home. The way we currently have this planned out for hosts, is to have actual physical broadcast stations on the map that you can enter as a player and begin hosting your own radio talk-show. Player’s listening from their car or home can browse a list of channels currently being hosted at that very moment, and listen to you live, talking about government conspiracies and UFO’s! We are really hoping that this feature will have a major social impact for Identity. Like you, we see a lot of potential in something like this for budding stars within the community. We would absolutely love to see many of you sprout a career that started in a game we developed, and ended with us listening to your lovely voice on our actual car radio! The Town Square (Social Module) Many of you already know of, and are eagerly anticipating the release of the planned “Town Square” module that is currently still in production. While we can’t give you an exact date on when that will be ready, progress is steady, and we are as excited as you are to meet you all for the first time in a virtual environment. You may already be aware that Identity is largely influenced by a landmass in the south-eastern portion of the United States. The Town Square itself is only a small portion of a larger city built into the final version of Identity called Ash Hill, a reference to Asheville, North Carolina where we had originally planned to move Asylum’s office. We picked this area of the world particularly because it offered a wide range of geographical variance. The transition between Identity’s mix of biomes needed to feel natural, and this area offered most of what we had been looking for. As for the other cities in Identity, their influences may become more clear to you now. Myrtle Beach is obviously Turtle Beach in Identity, and Roseport is less subtle, but a mix between Atlanta and New York City. When we first started, we kept everything, including the structures and world props level to the ground, a mistake we have since corrected. We quickly realized that cities are rarely ever flat, and knew that setting that precedent now would benefit Identity in the future. The next time you see The Town Square module, we are confident that you will notice the difference compared to earlier screenshots, what such a small transformation makes for immersion in a game environment. Moving Forward We want to thank our community for being so patient with us. Over the course of the past year, we’ve seen many work-in-progress screenshots of assets destined for Identity, and while we believe they serve as a sample of the work we have already put into the game, we know that many of you are still anxious to see video. Our current priority is to get things ready to show off, or more specifically, the housing/apartment customization first. We are convinced that many of you will appreciate the time and effort we have put into this feature, so that you will be able to fully express yourself through your character and virtual home. We know we’ve been pretty quiet this past year, and the criticism we’ve heard from our fans on that through social media and the forums have not fallen on deaf ears! We will start to release regular updates through development blogs and continue to find new ways to interact with our community, to show you our gratitude for your support. You yourself can become more involved by contributing to the discussion with your ideas at www.identityrpg.com/community. We’ll see you there, and thank you again! Always remember that we are gamers too and we are as excited as you are to play Identity at launch!
  3. @PARATUS

    This is John's former house, where he lived when he first registered the company, before moving to Kanata with his wife to build the company here where we are located now. This was before our Kickstarter campaign. During that period, John, and I (the only 2 on the project at the time) were both working together remotely. He from his house; me from Detroit, Michigan. This is nolonger our registered corporate address. I wouldn't have had my work permit approved if it had been, considering Canada's immigration services require that foreign workers have an office location to work from.
  4. "founder hat" instead of a kickstarter hat

    Hey there! Yes, there are two hats. Kickstarter Backers will receive the Kickstarter Logo founder's hat, and website backers who purchased a package from the site will receive the Identity Logo Founder's hat. Neither logo will appear on any official item during gameplay, and are unique only to these two hats. It may only be represented as "Founders Hat" in your inventory, but we can easily distinguish between who will receive what within our database, despite it appearing as one item on the website.
  5. Can you put your hands up in the game?

    Yes, you will be able to put your hands up and surrender to player police officers and criminals who wish you take you hostage. Note that anyone can restrain you with handcuffs or zip-ties while in a surrender animation state.
  6. Hola a todos!

    Housing, including farms will cost more (in-game currency) than apartments because there are a limited number of them available on the map for sale. I can't give a price estimate on them yet, but expect prices to be somewhat realistic to real-world prices. Yes, we will translate the game to many different languages for the full release, but the Town Square module will probably only be available in English.
  7. Hola a todos!

    Hey Seis, Welcome! To answer your question on agronomy; while there isn't a specific job or career in Identity for this, players can farm, care for (water, fertilize), and cultivate plants in a field, much like Farming Simulator or Facebook's Farmville (but in 3D). The food you recover from this process is mostly used for eating only, but individual ingredients can be used to craft recipes that offer different benefits to the player. It's not a very complicated system, as a design decision. We wanted to keep it rather simple, so you won't be able to breed plants, or required to maintain a spreadsheet of soil types for the best yield, or use the plants you collect for anything other than food. The type of seed you use, as well as how active you are with watering and maintaining the plants as they grow will determine how long you have to wait to harvest. Some will take longer than others, and won't be realistic. It ranges from 15 minutes to potentially even a full day depending on the type of plant you're growing.
  8. Let's talk about that Dev Blog

    Hey Xzothi, I'm happy to see concern for this. It's admittedly a pretty lengthy process just to add a single dynamic character model to a game, especially in our case where animations are broken into hundreds of bits that are blended into each other. And then vertex painting has to be done for each body, head, and every individual piece of clothing too. Parts of every clothing mesh also have to be manually culled by our devs so there isn't any clipping or z-fighting when player characters are wearing multiple layers of cloths (t-shirt + jacket). I'm missing a great deal of the process too in this explanation, but I hope it helps indicate why female character models are often added some time after the male character model. It's a huge task just to get one into the game, and that first character model is used to work out any kinks and bugs with skinning, rigging, inverse kinematics and animation so solutions won't have to be repeated twice for both after they've both been added to the game together. Much of this work is already done of course for both male and female characters, so if it doesn't make it into the first iteration of town square, it will be a top priority for the first major update after Town Square launch.
  9. Let's talk about that Dev Blog

    I just realized that's in metrics, but Identity's world and economy is based in the US where we use Imperial units. Although I suppose it will be a choice for the player as an menu option.
  10. Let's talk about that Dev Blog

    Thanks guys! Canada has been good to me so far. The cold weather is an tolerable tradeoff for all the other perks I didn't have at my old place! Shopping and all the restaurants I could care for are practically right next door to my apartment within walking distance. Can't complain! If you liked that UI from the sneak preview, wait until you see what Archer has been cooking up for the Town Square. I'm excited to see it in action! The video is also looking great. We're just waiting on a couple animation and clothing weight painting tweaks as far as I know, and it will be good to go as soon as we get that back from the animator. Wolf has been working on this for over a month now and he's ready to be done with it and move onto character customization for the Town Square. So so excited to see everything coming together this past month, and I can't wait to finally jump into the Town Square and meet all of you for the first time using voice chat!
  11. DevBlog #010

    If I remember correctly, the Artist's computers have better graphics cards (1080ti's), while the programmers computers have better processors.
  12. Unfortunately no ride-able horses as mentioned previously, but it's definitely an idea to keep in mind. It's not entirely out of the question, but at the very least, we could potentially see them roaming rural farm-lands in-game.
  13. Refunds

    Important Note: Currently available Pledge packages are temporary and will no-longer be available for purchase after website-changes are made in the near future. Pledge rewards and account credit will be automatically deducted from the account upon receiving a refund. Administrative action will NOT be taken against accounts that are issued refunds. Refunds can only be processed if purchases fall within the 180 day window Paypal offers for buyer protection. Important Note(STEAM): Due to technical limitations, refunds cannot be provided to accounts that have been manually linked to STEAM by the account holder. If you claim a STEAM Key for the "Identity: Town Square" module, it will no-longer be possible for "Asylum Entertainment Inc." to process refund requests due to our inability to de-activate the steam key after it is claimed via the STEAM desktop client. Future purchases from the STEAM Store or marketplace will require STEAM Support to process any refund requests, and will be subject to STEAM's own refund policy. The Account support forum is not an efficient channel for refund request, as Asylum Entertainment staff and volunteer moderators who would normally visit this forum to offer assistance with account related matters do not have access to its user's financial history with Asylum Entertainment via PayPal or other means. We are committed to pleasing our customers and donators in every way, and we respect that there are personal reasons in which a user may feel compelled to request a refund. We therefore ask that users who would like to request a refund do so via the Paypal website, or through Paypal customer service (1-888-221-1161) - the only method of Payment that we accept at this time. Please allow for a minimum of 5-10 business days for requests to be granted by Asylum Entertainment Inc. We strongly believe this newly recommended process will be much more efficient for those who may experience unintended delays in response to email requests, as it will not require pledgers to provide additional account information, or manual database queries. Asylum Entertainment and its hard-working development team appreciate the patience and understanding of our community members who understand that Game Development is a slow and challenging process. We are a small team working diligently to produce a unique game experience that has never been attempted previously. We thank you for your continued patience and support. Below is a visual guide illustrating the steps required to complete a refund through Paypal services. STEP 1: Select 'Log in' to PayPal STEP 2: Confirm PayPal Log in STEP 3: Select "More" from the ribbon at the top of the page, and then select "Resolution Center" from the drop-down menu. STEP 4: Select "Report a Problem" STEP 5: Find & Select your Pledge Payment to Asylum Entertainment, Inc., and then select "Continue" STEP 6: Choose the most relevant option relating to your problem. For refunds, we recommend selecting, "I have a billing issue" and then pressing continue before choosing "I want to report an issue that's not described". Either way, we'll find it. Last Updated: 9/17/2018 (September 17, 2018) @ 2:08 PM EST
  14. New Screenshots (UPDATED)

    Different people working on different things. Marvin and Antoine, who did these lamps and fans don't work on any part of the video.
  15. New Screenshots (UPDATED)

    From Today's Gaming Hour Stream
  16. The police system won't be like altis life right?

    Hey Sjondefries! Good question! Unless it's a private server that requires it, players will not have to apply to join the police force. On Official servers, the process to join the police career is mostly automated. You may have to qualify through a training tutorial to get started, and then again after earning the right to become a detective, but you won't have to worry about talking to any players or staff on Official servers to become a cop. Private servers may choose to manually select their police officers, and will have the option to decide how that process is determined. If they'd like to interview people to qualify, they can.
  17. My One Year Forum Anniversary

    Wooo, congratulations Devonor! Thank you so much for being such a long standing, contributing member of our community. We appreciate you, and everyone else who has been so patiently waiting for this game with us!
  18. Identity referral program

    Hey @KAMIKAZE ! We really like your idea for a referral program. This is something that we would really enjoy implementing after a few more things are in order, such as the new shop page, or after users finally get to login to the Town Square to address some of the concerns some users have with the project. Thank you for the suggestion! I'll share it with our Project Lead, @Paratus during our next meeting.
  19. Greetings from an Aspiring Mountain Man

    My name is Sean too! Welcome to the community McFarland! It is absolutely our goal to give players the choice to live off the land without ever stepping foot in a city within Identity, but be careful out there in the woods! There may be a few surprises out there!
  20. Continue The Story

    his pet dog, Clifford, when suddenly a mugger...
  21. Just pledged my $60

    Welcome to Identity, Brad! Thank you so much for your support, and for being a part of our ArmA 3 community before this!
  22. Rust

    I played a little bit of Rust with @DJScias, one of our forum moderators, today! The server was "Rust Factions Role-Play | www.FactionsGaming.com" Seems like a nice community for those of you interested in Rust! Fun Fact: The shredded bits on the lower half of the logo represent shredded Identity documents, or a city skyline!
  23. Introduction - Zoex

    Welcome Zoex! Great to see you here buddy!
  24. Identity Flyers?

    Whoa, I didn't expect anyone to notice the flyers! I love Lewis! I handed him one when we met at PAX East. The flyers looks like this! Made by Brad Durham, our UI artist!
  25. Experienced Police Officer

    Hey Kracken! Welcome to the Identity community! People like yourself with experience in law enforcement will be a healthy benefit to the police career in this game. We hope we'll receive your approval by hopefully doing a good job representing law enforcement in Identity!