Monthly Treeverse Update #36

The thirty-sixth edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read more for game development insights.

An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!

---

The next upcoming build will be available for all holders (before the official alpha). By connecting your Metamask wallet to an Immutable Passport, you will be able to log in to Treeverse when we launch. We will share exact step by step tutorials on how to do this closer to launch.

With the announcement of Capsule Heroes, art production has sped up a lot, as you will see in this update it is the most we’ve had in a singular article. Important to note: this does not include all of the art done within the month!

Art Update

Engineering And Design

This past month we’ve continued working on stress testing our servers. We had some networking related issues due to packet overloading, which we resolved. After fixing those, we realized some bottlenecks in our other services, which we have been working to replace this month. Most of the functionality has been restored, and we’re now actively testing it. This was the big ticket item for the month.

We also noticed some obvious issues with our AI and combat after adding our telegraphing feature the previous month. So we are also actively working on improving these. It won’t be in its final form, but we’re working on getting it to a releasable form and state. As a part of this we swapped out our main character controller and are still investigating ideal configurations for our alpha release.

Our QA team has also been constantly looking out for bugs, and going through various parts of the game. We’ve been fixing those too.

Our migration to Unity 6 also resulted in a few issues in our lighting, so we’ve been working on those too.

New features

• Switch authentication services and main hub service to use dot net application instead of the existing unity DOTs severs

• Migrate additional shader code to unity 6

• Character and Gear shader switching code

Improvements & Fixes

• Improved AI behaviour, navigation and ability selection

• Fixed various issues with AI navigation

• Improved collision rules between monsters and players

• Fix issues with various UI panels, not showing up in edge cases

• Fix code related to ability cancellation

• Test out phased abilities

• Fix issue with regeneration being tied to tick rate

• Fix character preview placement issue

Going Forward

We still have remaining work before we can launch alpha. A couple of tasks and bugs have been quite challenging to solve, but we’re getting much closer now. The final few things as mentioned last month are the NFT integrations. Most of the ground-work for this has been laid out already, but has been a lower priority task for us than the scaling issues.

Once those have been solved and tested internally, we will do a softer launch to our holders, followed by our larger release to the public.

---

Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.

Monthly Treeverse Update #35

The thirty-fifth edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read more for game development insights.

An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!

---

As mentioned in the last monthly update, we ditched the idea of giving an exact date for this alpha but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped or slowed down development. We know exactly what needs to be done, and are tackling the tickets one by one.

We understand there may be some frustration regarding the initial delays from the timeline we mentioned, but this is part of the journey. In August we did launch the early build to hundreds of people as you may have seen on our social media, so you know it’s here, but we are polishing it more and adding a few more features to give gamers the best experience we can at this moment. The team appreciates your patience.

Art Update

Engineering And Design

Stress Testing

This month has mostly been working on stress testing and optimisations so we can handle larger number of users. Our initial tests with a large number of bots didn’t include also spawning each of them into isolated dungeons where each dungeon spawns a large number of monsters.

This quickly showed us issues in more realistic play environments and we started working on optimisations that can help combat these issues. This also highlighted some issues when large number of dungeons spawned and started overlapping with the main world, which are still being worked on.

We also had some issues with saving large amounts of data in bulk. We’re continuing to work on and test this to make saving more robust.

We’re also made some key improvements in our games server architecture. It still requires further testing but should allow for slightly smoother playing experience with our game servers.

New Features

Whitelisting Feature: We’re working on our whitelisting feature using Immutable, so in our next play test, our holders can gain access simply by holding one of our NFTs and linking those wallets to their immutable accounts.

Telegraphing: We were missing a key telegraphing feature that made combat a bit more easy to follow and track. This has been added now, and should show damage areas when certain monsters perform attacks.

Analytics & Leaderboard: We’ve started tracking some more analytics on the server side, such as play time. And have worked on setting up a leader board that can show the top players in game. We will likely use this to show some of the more key metrics.

Improvements

Ability Cancellation: Based on feedback, we also introduced ability cancellation to make the dodge feel slightly better.

Name Selection: We’ve made some improvements on name selection, should be able to create names containing both upper and lowercase now. We’ve also added some basic profanity filtering for names.

Internal Tooling: We’re also working on improving internal tooling, to make adjusting things easier, as well as allowing us to create worlds dynamically in runtime.

Bug Fixing

Networking: When players reached a certain amount of experience, it broke our quantization values for networking, so this has been fixed. With large player counts, we’ve also noticed a big CPU cost in networking and have started work on optimising this.

Login: Recently in our live builds, we had some issues with the login flow which forced us to take it down. We didn’t have the best observability setup, so have refactored login flow to help us catch some of those login issues better. We also took this opportunity to refactor the code related to our pop-ups, and will continue to observe this.

Preview Fixes: After login changes, we had some bugs with character previews. This has been solved now.

Sound Issues: Have fixed various sound issues we’ve found

Ability Fixes: Fixed various issues with different abilities.

Going Forward

We will continue working on the stress testing until we’re things are robust. We are working to allow holders access to the game as soon as we can again, and make a new build so you can play, whilst we fix the more “behind the scenes” issues.

---

Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.

Monthly Treeverse Update #34

The thirty-fourth edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read more for game development insights.

An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!

---

We’ve finally started rolling out hundreds of playable builds to players this month. Over the last few years we have realized that talking about deadlines early never works out well even if we are eager to share things with our community. From now on we will give plenty of room and only announce a deadline once we are certain on launch.

The good thing is we will be sending out many more builds to users every few days!

For more details on how we are approaching this upcoming alpha launch, read the Going Forward section below.

Check our account for many gameplay videos, here are a few below:

Video

Video

Video

Video

Art Update

Engineering And Design

We started doing external testing and fixed a bunch of things as we continue working towards alpha release. We were able to provide testing opportunities to a small group of community members and holders on IOS, Windows, Mac and on Android. We worked on fixing major critical issues and also ran a small scale stress test with 1000 bots without significant issues. We plan to slowly increase this to 10,000 and then eventually 100,000 after resolving some database related issues.

We got multiple builds out within the span of this month, with patch notes to show what we fixed / have been working on. We’re also working on finalising the launcher on desktop, to make it easier for people to test the latest versions as we provide builds for those.

We also got the pre-requisites for being on the android developer program, so can start pushing android versions like we do for IOS versions which should be quite a bit easier that it currently is at the moment.

New Features / Added

• Progression Tree feature allowing you to view information about the game and what you have access to / can unlock.

• Anti-aliasing quality control options

• Dots debugging for tracking potential bugs / issues

• Progressive loading of many UIs on client

• Level locks to dungeons & teleporters.

• Diagnostic logs to help find potential cause of crash.

• Free camera. Can zoom in/out and rotate up and down.

• Confirmation screen when exiting a dungeon.

• Endless Clouds launcher is functional, but still needs a bit of work for handling edge cases.

• Graphical options

• Daily experience reward feature & streak

• Basic profanity check for names

• Saving of player analytics data such as monsters killed, items crafted, gathered, damage taken etc.

• Versioning between client and server

• Developer only build option to speed up how long it takes to build the game for testing purposes

Fixed

• Stop colliding with dead bodies

• Prevent double counting of logged in players

• Destructibles are working now

• Error spam due to VFX

• Green/blue eyes

• Map input block to stop players accidentally exiting dungeon

• Fix disconnection issue when trying to connect to server sometimes

• Fixed distance/range of some projectile abilities

• Crafting / Transaction system fixes that were causing crashes on game server

• Major networking bug that was causing application to crash

• UI issue on android where button clicks where not getting registered should now be fixed. Requires further testing on a wide range of devices

• Major android shader issues resolved

• Dodge abilities normalised, but the range is too long, so that’s been fixed

• Minimap rotation fixed

• Fixed various collider issues around the world and in the swamp especially

• Fixed engraving issue causing clients to crash

• Fixed abnormal prices of some items

• Various tags added to items

• Backtrace performance issues fixed when multiple players in the same area

Going Forward

We are pushing back our alpha release date. We don’t have an exact date for you. We will release it once we have all the things we want it and its tested properly.

With the reward campaign meant to take place at Alpha launch and the first big open launch ever, we want to take a bit more time to polish the build. This is to ensure we make the most out of this launch.

Going forward, we will no longer provide any estimates or deadlines publicly. We’re adopting a policy of “ When Its Ready”. Things will be released when they’re ready. We’ve made this mistake of announcing/hinting towards estimated dates in the past (hence the 1-2 weeks) meme, and unfortunately got caught up in it again. This won’t happen again. We will continue providing updates on our progress via these monthly reports, where we are headed, the issues we face and also provide testing opportunities for select community members.

But we know so many of you are eager to play so before the official alpha we will slowly roll it out to more people prioritizing holders until all holders have access even before the official launch.

We’re going to keep pushing regular updates to the testing versions based on feedback and bug reports, and adding new things incrementally, community members can take a look for themselves.

---

Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.

Monthly Treeverse Update #33

The thirty-third edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read more for game development insights.

An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!

---

As usual, you can never estimate game deadlines, a certainty in game development aha! We wanted to launch our Open Alpha in August but now moving into September we are aiming for this month. Not much to say here, we have bugs, we fix bugs, more bugs come, and we keep fixing! The plan stays the same. Once we have a build we are happy with we move to a stress test, from there if everything is fine, we launch the Open Alpha for 2 weeks - 1 month.

If you know much about game development, when QA testing the same thing hundreds of times, you get kinda bored of it — but the team is having fun as it’s improving with each play test.

Art Update

we have many dozens of animations every month^ (these arent usually included in the update unless it’s with the vfx)

Engineering And Design

We've continued working on getting our alpha release out. We've faced various bugs and issues, and have since worked on setting up the pipelines to make catching and fixing these easier. This has unfortunately led to some delays in our mass stress tests and getting this build out for users to play, test and enjoy, but we're making some really good progress.

New Features

• Teleporters : Introduce teleporting functionality throughout the map as a QOL measure.

• Crash Handling: Introduce automated LLDB backtrace functionality to log native crashes on the server.

• Combat

  • Added flat healing bonuses

  • Introduce summoning feature.

  • Introduce abilities that allow ignoring collisions with players. Useful for things like dashes/charged based abilities

• Thin Clients Updates: Improve efficiency of thin clients so we can run simulations on server.

• Max Players on Screen: Update networking to prevent networking bandwidth explosion

• Networking : Introduced input pipeline to allow sending large amounts of data between servers.

• Loading and Saving : Properly load and save appearance.

• Settings Page : Introduce ability to adjust various graphical qualities

• Hot Bar: Introduce Hot bar for switching equipment quickly

Improvements

• Dungeons: Show all types of dungeon rewards, not just the items.

• Networking: Improve ghost acknowledgement system

• UI: Remove enum based window type code structure.

• Server Selection : Simplified server selection mechanism.

• Spreadsheet tooling: Introduce spread sheet to scriptable object tool for levelling experience data

Bug Fixes

• Culling : Fix character frustum culling when still in view

• Character Appearance : Skin Colour and Eye colour fixes

• Foliage Shader Fixes

• Player Animation Fixes: Fixed animations switching to idle when fps was too high on client

• AI updates

  • Improved how creatures look towards players.

  • Improved monsters reaction distance so you can't safely kite from a distance

  • Fix rotation freakout when monsters return to home

  • Fix wander range exceeding limits.

• Networking

  • Fixed bugs with serialisation

• Dynamic Lighting: Fixed issues with lighting resolving at camera level instead of player level.

• Chat : Fix issue with chat messages being sent twice

• Quest Saving: Fixed issues with quests not saving

• Active dungeon saving: No longer save active dungeons due to issues in saving

• Notifications Fix: Fix issue with barrage of notifications on initial login.

• Quest Fixes: Fixed various quests that became broken due to quest changes previously.

• Item inspection: Can now inspect items in all sorts of panels now

• Projectile Transform Logic: Fixed issue with calculating projectiles, so they travel properly now

• Inputs : Fix inputs triggering shortcuts for panels whilst typing

• Reviving feature

  • Fix issue with revivable object not being destroyed.

• Login Fixes

  • Fix early return issue when we have multiple login attempts in the same frame

  • Fix issue when you try to re-login with the same connection

• Disconnection Fixes: Fix destruction of entities when a player disconnects.

• Materials: Fix issues with null renderer effectors.

• UI : Fix issue with opening and closing panels.

• Memory Leak: Fix a very severe memory leak on our game servers.

Going Forward

We plan to introduce even more tooling and ways of figuring out where bugs are occurring and fixing them much faster. After this we should be able to run some stress tests on the servers, and hopefully start rolling out some larger user testing.

All of the current issues we are facing does really help prepare us for our eventual live-ops of this MMORPG. Once most of the critical bugs and issues have been resolved, we are eager to allow our community and other users to start playing the game and earning rewards.

We thank you for your continued patience, and look forward to getting the build into a playable state for you all to enjoy.

---

Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.

Monthly Treeverse Update #32

The thirty-second edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read more for game development insights.

An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!

---

The time is coming.

We expect to launch Treeverse Open Alpha sometime next month, closer to the middle or the end. Make sure you are subscribed to this Substack or following our Discord to get the latest news. Rest assured you won’t have to fill out any forms (unless you are looking for an iOS build).

We are supporting PC and Mac in this build and making them the recommended device(s) whilst also having an open APK (Android) and Testflight (iOS, 10K limit).

Now, we are saying this early, but do NOT expect this to go smooth. Before we launch our reward program, we will test the exact same build at scale. This is the first time we are testing if our servers can scale to tens of thousands of users at once. It’s a big jump from a few hundred in our dev build.

Regardless, I am extremely excited to get this out. Even if there are hiccups and small delays, we are getting closer day by day.

Also, we are looking at doing our TGE ($END) before Q4 2024 so stay tuned for that! Follow Endless Clouds Foundation on X to stay up to date.

Art Update

Engineering And Design

This month we’ve been working on getting our next build available to play. We still have quite a lot to do to make the build stable and at the same time provide enough working features to allow us to gather the data we’re after for this next play test coming up.

Below are some of the engineer related tasks we’ve tackled his month.

New Features

• Server Analytics : Track various player data based on in-game actions

• Skills : An abstraction on top of abilities, and any other behaviors we might expect players to do

• Server Disconnections : Gracefully handle disconnections between different servers and react properly when databases are disconnected

• Mouse & Keyboard Input : Support for mouse and keyboard input.

• Mini map Rework : Practically reworked entire thing so can consider it a new feature now

Improvements

• Server Selection : Simple drop down for server selection

• Editor support for directional lights in subscenes

• Show abilities engraved on a weapon from the inventory screen

• Rewards : Added pooling of rewards

• Combat : Caster can increase intrinsics when using abilities

• Intrinsics : Show popups when an intrinsic like health, or energy changes

• AI : Change our core AI library and add basic features

• Items

  • Changed items so we can support tracking of instanced items in quests and more

  • Add stats to items as it was previously missed

• Colliders : Improve the way colliders are baked on entities

• Server : Add variable frame rate manager to control frame rate

• Saving : Support for human readable column data, inventory saving, quests saving.

• Immutable Passport : improve flow of using immutable passport for login

• Shop : Remove unnecessary windows required to sell something.

• Consumables : Show shortcut key and show first available consumable that can be used by player.

Bug Fixes

• Interactables : Fix teleporters

• Misc : Character preview fixes in android and ios

• Quests : Cleanup quests properly on character logout

• Build : Fix various build failure issues as they come up

• Animation : Fix animation issues

• Camera : Fix rotation of camera in android and ios

• Ability : Fix indicator issues, invalid skill errors, skill casting using keyboard,

• Graphics : Fix fix related issues causing certain assets to disappear on mobile devices

• Inventory : Support transactions when two inventories are full, but swap equal number of slots

• AI : Fix bugs when out of range, and when player is dead. Stop rotation when entity is dead

• Party : Fix UI bugs with overlapping buttons

Going Forward

Early August we will be teasing the Open Alpha until we have a definitive launch date. Join us! The rewards for Open Alpha will contain $END, $SUPER, $IMX and $MON. Expect more details on this in the later posts.

We plan to run some server stress tests as soon as we build the internal tooling to allow this, and if things go smoothly there, slowly roll out the game to real users until we’re happy with the overall stability of the build.

The mobile builds have not yet been optimized so we have added mouse and keyboard support. We highly recommend users play on a windows desktop or Mac for the play test. The game should still be playable on modern high-end mobile devices though.

We're looking forward to this next release. It’s likely to have a lot of hiccups as we iron out major and unexpected bugs, but once that’s solved, most of our future releases should be much smoother.

---

Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.