Blood Sucking Fiends
The Halloween event is on its way, and while it's not 100% complete, we're getting close. All of us on the event / sponsorship team have been pretty busy lately, considering everything we've been up to recently (Item Contest, Costume Contest, Halloween, planning for Christmas, and a number of sponsorships both current and upcoming).
So with all going on, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to make the Halloween event as good as it should be. The Summer Festival was going to be pretty tough to trump, and I had more time to work on that than I have on this. Fortunately, now there will be another developer backing up, and a team of artists are directing their efforts towards the event. The outcome, so far, has been amazing -- and I'm really looking forward to the 29th!
We launched the countdown timer yesterday and put up the first stage of Halloween graphics in the header graphics. One of the many joys I get out of working here (and I know several other Gaia staffers are this way) is releasing something exciting and then checking the forums to watch users as they begin to notice the change. Sometimes it's very positive, sometimes it's very negative. With events, we're getting a better hang of doing cool build-up stuff.
Now I just hope I can get all my work done on time!!!
Q & A
I received a PM from Pheochromocytoma the other day with a set of questions about items, and I asked him if I could respond to those questions in my journal. He said yes, so here they are!
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Say gaia would allow for you to make any sort of item you want regardless of time, profanity, code or copyright what would it be?
Hmmm, that's a tough one. Gaia's been doing a pretty good job at taking care of my Classic Rock lust (see Ziggy Stardust avi smile ), except that we could use a few more hairstyles (Roger Daltrey 'do anyone?).
But if I had to choose one item, it would probably be a skull. That is to say, an item that swaps out the entire head portion of my avi with an actual skeleton-like skull. I think I could do a lot of really cool stuff if I could have just a skull sitting on my avi's body rofl
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Between time periods I have to change my avi so that it can be seen (day=dark, night=light). If there was an item to regulate light tone to fit a specific individual's needs, how laggy do you think this site would become?
I assume here you're talking about when you're in Towns/Rally. Hmmm, I don't think the solution here would be an item necessary, unless it was an item that emitted light (so you wouldn't have to change your avi) like a flashlight or a torch.
The solution that would be most likely, and something we've wanted to do for a while (but has been an unlikely candidate for being worked on until we address certain inventory storage issues we have) is an outfit saving feature.
Lots of users have asked for this same thing, mostly because it just makes sense that it should exist. For those of you who don't know what it is, basically, it would be an interface where you could dress up your avatar and then save that outfit under a particular name or category. You would be able to save multiple outfits like this. Then, if you ever wanted to change your look, all you had to do is select one of your previously saved outfits (assuming you still have all the items in your inventory necessary to make it).
So either light sources or an outfit saver would address that issue. The latter is probably the best solution, because light sources in Towns would mean we'd have to add dynamic lighting code to it - which would mean more lag, especially on older machines.
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Whats up with those blue screens? If you could equip them like the dragons or death shadow (etc etc) what would you have it do? I'd have it change scenery, so my avi would pop out more.
I'm going to have to intuit a little bit about what you're asking here. I think you're talking about putting backgrounds behind an avatar (presumably animated ones?).
We've talked about putting backgrounds behind avatars, and in some ways we've done things similar to that. The Winter Rose Monthly Collectible has a pose with white petals falling about your avi that has this effect. This month's Vampire Hunter Monthly Collectible has a pentagram that acts as sort of an ambient setting for your avatar.
As far as more detailed scenery, it's something we considered, but executing something like that is very different and would change the way we compile avatars significantly.
Animations are another story entirely. Right now, our avatar compiler doesn't support animations of any kind (as far as I'm aware). If we did, it would be a big technological leap forward in terms of avatars (and would be super cool). It's not all roses, though - there would be a few downsides:
We'd have to rework avatar compiler code a lot, which may result in things that used to work now being glitchy
Our various Flash components (Towns, Rally, Games) may have to be changed to support the animations
Avatar compiling would be a much heftier task -- so either the site would slow down more whenever new items came out, or we'd have to spend a lot more money on servers to support it
Animated graphics are larger than static ones, so download times on our pages and in our games/Towns would be longer. Bigger downloads on the site also cost us more money in bandwidth.
But it's a logical next step for Gaia avatars, so I imagine at some point in the distant future, this may be come a reality. Key phrase: distant future.
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If you release something like that as an item, would you guys be able to update it continuously, or does an item become a read only data?
Your avatar is generated when you save it from the "Customize Me" screen. If we wanted to change your avatar automatically, we'd have to recompile it. If numerous users had avatars that needed recompiling, it meant that we'd have to run our recompiling code for every single user that had that item equipped. Right now this is an impossibility, but eventually it may be feasible.
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If you bring back the zombie status, how many people would you expect to be pissed off at you?
I'm not sure. Lots of people have been asking for it, I think the people who are still currently zombies make a very, very, very, very minuscule percentage of the userbase. At the same time, there's something to be said for historical events remaining historical events smile
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Will we EVER get the staff or katana from any tsubasa reserve chronical quests?
Well, there are more Tsubasas DVDs coming out, and therefore more Tsubasa items from us smile
Community Member
First biggrin
EDIT: After reading it I must say one thing. You guys are flippin busy! domokun