by Hyper Anthony | Nov 27, 2011 | SW City Interactive, SW City News
Hey everyone!
The next leg of work involving the Fort Masen Archaeology Questline has been completed. We still haven’t reached the end of the dungeon, but there is a lot of new content to keep diggers occupied for quite a good while! Here’s what we’ve got:
November Changelog
QUESTS: (4)
‘Coaxing Spirits’
* Descritpion: A large Hotep idol is blocking your path to progress deeper into the Keep, and have been tasked to find out what happened.
* Prereq: Completed ‘Opening the Gate’
* Find the spirit within the Masen Keep Commons to begin!
‘Unearthing Statuettes’
‘Unearthing the Bronze Statue’
‘Unearthing Cannons’
* Description: An unlikely friend within the Historical Society is working with the Hyokos to protect their culture, while simultaneously recovering Imperial artifacts to appease the society’s patrons.
* Prereq: Completed ‘Opening the Gate’
* These 3 quests are repeatable
* Speak with the Gray in the Fort Masen Historical Society to begin!
DIGSITES: (2)
Masen Keep Commons
* Just beyond the foreboding doors of Masen Keep lies the Commons, an open space that was once used for trade and commerce. After the siege, the space was converted into a hall of reverence and worship… focused on a massive idol that was placed in front of an old passageway. Many artifacts and personal items of the inhabitants still remain.
* 20 digging nodes
* Two collectible sets, and a handful of other valuable items
* ~20 new items to collect and trade with other players!
Masen Keep Cannons
* The interior cannons were once Fort Masen’s last line of defense, which ultimately proved futile during the Siege. The damaged remains were left as a testament to the Imperial Army’s might, and have been long forgotten on the ledges and rafters that loom over the Commons.
* 6 digging nodes — each node takes a large amount of time credits and stamina
* One collectible set
BUGFIXES:
* Players who completed ‘Opening the Gate’ before November will need to speak with the Gatekeeper at his location in the Commons. Their version of the digging permit was bugged and he will swap them.
* A profile icon is available in the digsite — it was previously in the digging loot table, but that proved to be problematic so it is now a stand-alone, hidden item in the area.
* Several new NPCs were missing an NPC image, and this has been corrected since they went live.
* (Thanks to Comit for helping with many of the bugs, some of which weren’t so much bugs as they were me being dum )
There’s not really a ton left to do in order to get this done… so I may work on this again over Christmas. Until then, this should be plenty to occupy anyone who happens to come across it.
by SW Comit | Nov 14, 2011 | SW City News
The SW City Government Auditing Board has finished it’s per-decade audit on the city spending budgets, and has revealed some rather alarming trends. Records indicate tens of billions of Flint being spent to implement multiple forms of mass transit infrastructure that is ten fold more than called for with the current population base.
“This monorail line loops all the around the Faldon Desert. Why would anybody go out that way? Ticket sales indicate it is it never even used, which, led to the much alarming fact that there aren’t even any trains for the entire monorail network!” states Jerald D. of the accounting firm.
The report goes on to point out eminent domain payouts to citizens to demolish their buildings in order to replace it with rocks and landscaping. In some instances, entire neighborhoods were plowed over with man-made mountains.
“I used to visit my grandpa in the neighborhood just north of Town Square. But now there’s a bunch of steppes there. It’s like it happened overnight! I don’t even know where my grandpa is! Does he just live underground now?” asks just one of many upset and confused citizens.
In recent years, the report dug up that many of the government workers have not even showed up to work for years at a time, the greatest offender being a Mr. Flint Prestonous whom, due to his seniority perks within the government, alarmingly has the greatest salary.
“He always goes on about needing to ‘feed his birde wife and birde kids’, but I’m pretty sure he has neither, and could probably buy my house out from under me if he felt like it!” says a riled Nimbusian who, up until recently, was a regular tipper of the city greeter.
by Hyper Anthony | Aug 5, 2011 | General News, SW City News
Shear and Skew have been enabled in Alphaworld for eager builders. 
Before support by the v4 bot was abruptly dropped earlier this year, builders had become very fond of shear for its unique properties that assisted with landscaping and mathematically-precise building. Hopefully now we’ll see some more of that cropping up again!
by SW Comit | Jun 29, 2011 | SW City News
SW City’s economic deficit has hit record highs as the city’s productivity levels plummets combined with all of the government taking long term luxurious vacations. The economic slowdown has surpassed the great recession of 2003 in which real estate prices collapsed due to a massive nougat hive being uncovered underneath the city.
One Nimbusian citizen exclaims: “I’m still recovering from the 2003 crash, we don’t need this right now! When I drive down main street, all I see are Grey hobos and nougat filth! Where is everyone? Get back to work!”
Analysts predict the city will need to begin borrowing from IIC faction cities such as Zelena to bring it out of this debt.
by SW Comit | Nov 5, 2010 | SW City News
SW City Town Square is about 11 years old and has undergone changes all throughout this time, retrofitted with the latest n’ greatest AW had to offer.
I can’t overstate how much effort has gone into making this area run at peek performance over the years, applying any new performance trick that came around. Throughout the last couple weeks, thanks to some performance related Q&A with chrispeg, the latest series of performance sweeps has been completed.
What’s changed:
- Reducing object count by replacing clusters of objects with scaled objects while maintaining the exact same appearance as before. This has been going on since scale first came out, and the object count has been reduced several thousand in the area.
- Many objects built before prims came out have been upgraded into their prim equivalent, which shaves off many unwanted polygons.
- Only showing particle emitters when you can see them (applies to PEs that were indoors or underground).
- Some underground areas are invisible until you go down there.
- Removing over-zealous use of the ‘visible no radius=#’ commands. This does more harm than good when used on low poly objects, whoops!
- Replacing all the tbtree###.rwx tree objects with the newer t_awtree##.rwx objects (2162 vs 191 polygons!) Approx 20k polygons removed by doing this alone.
- Replacing masked based windows with opacity commands
- Thanks to Absolute Monarch’s texture counter app, I was able to track down textures that were only used a few times in the scene and replace them with more commonly used textures. A texture uses the same amount of memory whether it’s used 1 time or a 1000 times, so too much texture variety is bad!
- Replaced the ad rotators with php rotators, removing the need to store all the ads in the rotation in memory.
- Replaced all the signs that were spelled out letter by letter (using the letter masks) with single object signs. Less objects, less texture variety.
- Upgraded all the astart/astop/animation sequences around town with the new timer commands.
- Countless more one-off tweaks specific to buildings in the area
You still won’t get butter smooth performance in the 150m-200m vis range, though I can at least get into the teens frame rate @ 200m vis which is not too bad considering the density and complexity of the area.
Are you familiar with how laggy town square is? I’m curious to hear if you notice an improvement now 
by SW Comit | Oct 30, 2010 | SW City News
Happy Halloween everyone 
SW City town square has been spruced up for the event, including a special visit from a certain NPC who may be giving out goodies 