MattScott

Glad you guys had fun!

Hey everyone, Sorry about the outage. We are back online. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday. We had some days off, but still made decent progress. At this point everything in Social is working except for collisions on the skinned meshes like statues. We started work on Financial this week as well. There are some issues with streamed assets that are getting loaded twice due to older and newer code running at the same time. We'll dive into that next week. For now, here's another video with progress. Working collisions are: Joker Ammo vending machines Mailboxes (specifically, the spot in Social where people gather most often) Marketplace Kiosks Static Meshes Streamed Terrain 2021-12-03 15-42-55.mp4 Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Apologies to the community. It's now been 45 days since my last update. I have been in Europe for the last 5 weeks, and my schedule was been incredibly busy during the trip. If I had to choose a single word to recap progress, it would be: "frustrating" Back on October 2nd, we had a big breakthrough, and I was feeling really good about next steps. You can see from the screenshots in that post that we had finally gotten collisions working on the sidewalk. That update was posted minutes after we got a build that worked. What we didn't realize at the time, was that if you stepped onto the grass, you immediately fell through the world again. Additionally, several different types of placed props and static meshes in the map also had collision problems. During the weeks that followed, we fell down a lot of rabbit holes attempting to find the issues. While we could have individually made those objects conform to the new collision system, doing so would have been wildly unsustainable. Once we start work on Financial, there are thousands of objects and checking everyone of the them would be a nightmare. Instead, we chose to take additional time to step through line by line in the collision code on the current live version of the game versus the engine upgrade. We need the conversion process to properly rebuild each map and all of the collisions in one pass. After a bit of digging, we were able to identify the core issue for terrain, so that is working properly now. As with all things APB, of course there are still issues. For some reason we have some oddball props and items that still aren't colliding properly. So the team is still working on restoring old 1.20 collision code to handle every specific case. Below is a video running around Social with nearly all of the collisions working. As I stated in the last update, ignore the lighting, we haven't turned that code back on yet, so everything is either fully lit or not lit at all. You can see once we get to the placed crates, those don't work. And the statues don't have collisions. As soon as we have those sorted out, we will reprocess all of Financial to see how that district does. apb-engine-update-2021-11-19.mp4 Thanks, Matt

The game is back online!

Hi everyone, Sorry about all the maintenance and downtime. We've been adding pieces to help with performance. I was notified about the downtime that started this morning, but it slipped past me and I didn't get a chance to post it. We're currently down for a bit longer. I'll post when the game comes back online. Thanks, Matt

Apologies. This one slipped past me. There was another resource increase scheduled that I forgot to post.

We are back online!

All everyone, We have just started some maintenance to add more resources for the game. Be back soon. Thanks, Matt

As previously confirmed. Servers are back online.

Hi everyone, We've taken the servers down for maintenance to address a couple issues that popped up. I don't yet have a time estimate, but we'll try to be quick about it. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, After two years, we are live! Please bear with us for any speed bumps. I have no idea how the servers will handle traffic. You can download the game here: https://www.gamersfirst.com/fallenearth/ We are working on the Steam version next. Thanks, Matt

We are knee deep in launch prep, but I wanted to drop in and thank everyone for their amazing response to this news! The community response is so much more than I expected. I will do my best. We are making good progress on other projects, so I'm looking forward to having more free time to interact with the community.

Hi everyone, It's been far too long between updates, but as some on you may have noticed I made a post on Twitter on the 2 year anniversary of taking down the Fallen Earth servers. After that I posted again in response to a tweet. While I should have posted that here to begin with, I am happy to confirm that "Fallen Earth Classic" is going to be a real thing. We are now at the very late stages of getting the servers back online, and as some of you on Discord have noticed, parts of the game are responding again. There will be an announcement soon on the day of launch, but before that goes out, I want to raise a couple discussion points here to set expectations properly. 1) I'm doing this in the spirit of fun and just getting the game back online. There were decisions that had to be made in order to pull this off. As we go through the rest of my bullets, just know that in each case I had to balance getting this back online in a reasonable amount of time versus the laundry list of things I'm sure players would have wanted. We did our best. My hope is that players will enjoy the challenge of re-conquering the wastelands from scratch while they wait for the next version of the game. 2) Steam doesn't work right now https://store.steampowered.com/app/113420/Fallen_Earth_Classic/ is now live. We are waiting on Valve to restore the old game. As soon as that happens, then we'll post an update here. 3) Previously, we had some major issues hosting the game. Nothing changed here. Those issues are wide ranging. They include being forced to host on old, out of support 32-bit Linux servers, attempting to work around a horribly bloated database with item duplicates everywhere, and expensive external hosting costs. This time around, we worked through each of those issues as we built the plan for bringing the game back online. We successfully recompiled under 64-bit and we're using new operating systems. We also completely wiped the server. (SIDE NOTE: I sometimes refer to this as "servers", but only because the physical implementation of Fallen Earth requires more than 16 different services spread across a number of boxes). That means that you wont have any previous progression - including characters, items, or G1 purchases. I know that's a bummer. Trust me. We looked at other ways to do this, but many of them would have required a lot more work, testing, and time. This is an experiment. We wont really know how the game is going to perform till we get a bunch of players online. Which leads me to... 4) There will be no paid options for the game. For various reasons, I don't want to monetize this version of the game. It is truly free-to-play (refer back to #1 above). I'm going to look at turning on the highest level subscription rewards for everyone, but there wont be any ability to purchase anything from the online store. With that out of the way, I look forward to seeing you guys online. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Sorry for the delayed update. I know there's been a few weeks without an update. In general, I prefer to only share significant milestones with the community. As I previously mentioned, our focus has been on making sure we can load the converted 1.20 Social District in our 2.2 build. With a bit of software engineering work, we were finally able to get the Social district to load in the editor, though without proper lighting, shadowmaps - and importantly, collision did not work on the legacy feature data meshes. APB is an extremely large and complex game. It has taken extreme discipline in addressing specific parts of the game that do not work. When we go to fix a system, such as collisions, it's very easy to stray off-course and try and fix two or three other systems, only to have two more break in their place. By hyper-focusing on feature collision, we were able to track down where the system lost its data, and also add in collisions automatically on level conversion. As as a result of that effort, we now have collisions working in the map. The team would like to share with you a few screenshots of the 1.20 Social District in our 2.2 client build. Veterans of APB will notice the lack of palm trees. This is substantial progress. We have a minor crash to address, and then the team will start work on the other maps and missing functionality. Thanks, Matt