Ivar & Sons Auction House
Snow Drift in front of the Ivar & Sons auction house.
Nighttime in Apotheosis is looking better than ever; we’ve added more lights and adjusted the ambient light level a little. More importantly, Ivar & Sons’ auction house is now open for business, and the entire area is highly polished. Notice the door underneath the auction house – it leads to storerooms and office space associated with Ivar & Sons, and it will be instanced. We think you’re going to enjoy that, once it’s ready.
One of the doors leading to the instanced area under the auction house. Who knows what opportunities heroes may find down there?
Trading with other players can really add to a well-made MMO. In the long run, we plan to have complete harvesting and crafting options for players, but these elements will be optional in Ship of Heroes, rather than required to progress. Making crafting optional means we need robust trading options for players so they can buy what they need, either from those who wish to focus on crafting or from NPCs, instead of forcing every player to be a crafter. Now we’ve demonstrated two of these options – trading with NPC vendors in the city, particularly for premade augmentations, and trading with other players through the auction house for crafted augmentations. Of course, other kinds of items will also be available for buying and selling, including infusions.
Example of the auction house UI.
The map that Snow Drift is running through is the draft map for the upcoming Beta test of the CCT. Observant viewers can spot numerous small changes and improvements. This process will continue until we freeze this map for the Beta. After that, we’ll start adding our changes and improvements to the next map, which we may use for the invasion test closer to the end of 2019.
The auction house entrance has a nice view of the city.
The fireworks are our way of saying “Thank You” to all of you who continue to support us with your comments, your positive suggestions, and your donations. Your donations make a big difference in how quickly we can create Ship of Heroes.
During July we intend to do another engine upgrade to 4.22.3, which should help us refine some of our FX a bit more, among other things. The devs at Epic keep giving us cool stuff to play with, and we can’t resist. We also plan to publish a newsletter soon to show a few examples of the wide variety of characters that can be created in our powerful CCT. And of course, we’re steadily preparing for the CCT Beta itself. So stay tuned, because there’s a lot to look forward to.
Fireworks are popular in Apotheosis City.
Have a great 4th of July.
Technical Notes
Right now a player can put items up for sale and purchase items in the auction house. Searching works, and so do most functions associated with trading. However, we’re just starting on the lists of items associated with harvesting and crafting, and a lot of that content will not be developed until after 2019.
Emissive lights on the buildings downtown have been restored, for the most part, though we still have a bit more work to do in this area. We also plan to add more lighted advertising signs to improve immersion. All products advertised are fictional and suitably futuristic, so our apologies if you wanted to buy one.
Following our usual practice, this video was recorded in a client/server arrangement to match what a player would experience.
In the auction house UI, auction duration is now a formatted date rather than an approximate description like “Very Long.” It will display days if it is has more than a day remaining, hours if more than an hour remaining, and minutes otherwise. If for some reason an auction’s time has expired and it’s still in the list, it will appear as Expired, though that should never happen. This field is also already set up for localization for language support later.
Searching by key word is working in the UI.
We turned off a few lights to show how the super-speed ice FX looks at night in the screengrab below.
Close up of the ice FX – the ice trail almost looks like water on the dark city streets.