Ready those eye sockets..

Yes, we've heard you. You have all been waiting very patiently (some not so much, but we still <3 you) for updates of any kind. The team here at YahRly deeply regret putting you through all this and it is with great pleasure that I, Calibrate, have been given the chance (*found the time*) to give you an update worth waiting for!

Yesterday I polled some of the players on whether they would like a video preview of the Friends & Messages window or the Navigator window, I guess it was no surprise that those who voted, voted unanimously on the beloved Navigator of which you have never set eyes upon before. So let's cut the waffling, enjoy my lil prodigies~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N8xgE6Wwqo

So there you have it, we hope this will appease your appetites for a little while until you all get restless again and force us to show you the level up screen... I've said too much.

Voice those opinions friends. Here or the YouTube page will do fine, we'll do our best to respond publicly if necessary - just don't ask for that thing I didn't mention about 5 seconds ago allegedly ;) Stay hungry.

-Calibrate

Updates + Q&A

Hey Lasoons,

Dasaii was meant to write a blog post but it doesn't appear he ever will so I guess it's up to me to post some updates. March has been a pretty slow month for us here at Lasuni. As most of you have heard, Wombat has left our team to persue his education, and we thank him for all his hard work.

This month we've managed to fix a few bugs on the website and added some back end tools that we never had a chance to add for us to moderate stuff though we won't go into much details as that might bore you.

In terms of client development, things have not stopped - we've rebuilt the path sending algorithms to keep everything in sync, while using the least amount of system resources. So when you and a friend decide to walk to the same tile, everything should be in sync and should prevent you from both landing on the same tile (which will work great for race type games and musical chairs).

We've also started implementing how avatars will work with various items and palettes. As stated on Kennen's post:

“When we make items we generally make 1 color, then use photoshop to recolor it. Due to the way palettes work, and to minimize space used, we'll recolor only the hue and not the darkness and saturation as that can break the palette meaning we have to import the entire image into the client - which leads to a larger file size and slow loading times. Whereas if we just recolor the hue (leaving saturation and darkness/lightness the same) we can then generate a palette which works with the original image, leading to an increase of about 2 kb rather than 200 kb for the entire sprite. That's per-item. At 804 items, we've saved tons of space, using only 2.43 mb vs 10.78 mb”

We're implementing a similar system though we'll just be sending an array of colors to the game client rather than storing the palettes in-game. This will allow us to dynamically add items without having everyone reload the game as they have to do now. The game client will download a grey-scale version of the image from our content delivery network (cdn) then change the colors dynamically to suit. This will serve 2 purposes, 1 being faster load times as the game only has to download 1 image rather than 1 for each color, and second, it'll allow us to explicitely set the correct colors for items, so a blue shirt and blue trousers will match, whereas at the moment they are the wrong shades (which many of you have complained about).

On a smaller note, we also changed our Lasuni site's footer to the one that'll appear on the new website once we launch.

A few Q&A:

Anonymous:  Will we be able to unblock blocked people from our space?
Answer: Yes

Estria:  Can you guys just tell us the deadline? Please, we're all freaking! seriously...
Answer: Deadlines are impossible to say as there's so many variables.. we're literally building the game from scratch so it's not like we're just updating some graphics.

Anonymous:  I just sent my Application :) Hope you choose me!
Answer: Good luck!

Anonymous:  Is the notification button on the preview the one from google+? ;)
Answer: Both are flags, but it's not the same image, we hand pixel our own artwork!

Anonymous:  Can I re-apply for Event's Co-ordinator? :D Lolol
Answer: We keep all applications on file for a year, but you're more than welcome to if you feel it'll make is pick you.

iTao:  Oh what?! Your removing our avatar from the top of the page! I like the look of it up there :'( lol
Answer: Yes, we feel it'll make the site look more clean and fine tuned without a massive bar at the top of the of every page.

VPlus: What about new mini-games like WAL? 
Answer: We have plans for a new mini-game in Hubble, though it won't be released initially. Think PixelTBS.

That's it for this month's blog post, as always if you have any questions leave 'em in the comment section and we'll add them to the next blog post. We'd like to thank you all for your continued support and for waiting so patiently, just remember that we want to launch the new client just as much as you want to play it!

Updates and More + Preview

Hey Lasoons,

It's been almost a month since the last blog post and we thought you might want another one. The past month has been an exceptionally busy one. We opened applications for Events Coordinators and were overwhelmed with the number of applicants. While we can't hire everyone, we wish we could! We were able to narrow down who we thought would be the best person for the job and that's when everyone said hello to Virtuoso! She's been doing an amazing job at working with the other staff, coming up with events and competitions. She even has a 7-part event that she's been working on, which you'll all be excited to see once it's out (I know I am!).

After hiring Virtuoso, we realized it would be best to bring on a new community manager to work closely with the Event Coordinators and make sure everyone is doing what they're supposed to be doing. That's when we hired Alex to be our new community manager. Like Virtuoso, he has been doing an amazing job directing the team and putting together lots of events which you'll see in the near future.

While we understand everyone's frustrations with timezones and events, we are still looking for one more Event Coordinator, preferably within an American time zone. In the meantime, we've been adjusting times on our events so that it covers the widest variety of timezones so everyone has a chance to attend the events.

So you may be wondering what's to come in the near future. A pretty big party that we've started planning is when we reach 10k players! We're at 9,631 now, so we estimate that we'll be at 10k in about 2 months based on the average registrations per day. If you have any great ideas, send them to Wombat or any of the events team.

In other news, the client development has been going quite successfully. Public/Private rooms are coming along nicely, walking has been completed with the exception of fine tuning. Calibrate has been working pretty hard on the inventory system, so that just leaves a few more UI elements to do.

Time for a preview! Behind the scenes, Dasaii has been working on touching up our current website. While he wants to keep it a secret, I've decided to share a sneak peak with you, if you see him around, don't tell him!

 

A few Q&A:

Harmsarella: Will you get to be able to block users from your house/space?
Answer: Yes

Harmsarella:Will you be able to decide the weather around your house or will it just match the lasuni one?
Answer: You'll be able to pick the weather once, but it won't affect the furniture. (A spring tree will still remain a spring tree).

Estria: That's pretty nice! Also, can we have an image preview next blog post? thank you. :)
Answer: See above :)

Anyways, that's it for this blog post. Thanks for reading, if you have any questions you'd like answered, leave them in the comments and we'll be sure to get back to you.

Site Updates / Bugfixes

Hey Lasoons,

Just here to update you all with what we've been working on since the last blog post. We released a small bug fix, made a couple changes to the website, and were able to launch a quest with the help of a few Lasoons.

A few days ago we discovered a bug that users were exploiting which allowed them to gain extra silver by throwing snowballs/waterballoons onto a tile with multiple players. We've since released a patch for this bug and were able to push the update out to stop it from being exploited.

As for a change to the website, we're introducing a way to block players on the website - which means you'll no longer have to see posts or comments from players that you don't like. While this feature is still a work in progress, you can access the block function on the Manage Friends, on the Block List tab. Simply add a player to the block list to block them, if you accidently blocked someone, or have made amends to them, you can unblock them by checking their username and clicking unblock at the bottom.

On a side note, we've also updated our Terms of Use, so be sure to read over them. Particularly, it includes a new clause about flame wars on feed posts, comments, and chatting in-game.

Last week we also launched a quest which was our first ever to involve help from the community. We had a great time planning out the quest, helping to dress the NPC's, and coming up with the story line for the quest. We'd like to thank the players who were able to help with the quest and we hope you all enjoyed it.

If you're not sure which quest we're talking about, check out this page though the quest has just ended.

So you're probably wondering what's to come in terms of events for the next month. The player Estria just informed us about Carnival, a festive season in Brazil which starts next month, so we're gonna plan an event and perhaps an item to go along with the event, so keep your eyes peeled for it.

In other news, Valentines Day is nearing as well in about 3 weeks, so we'll also be running some specials in Hubble Attire for Valentines Day items, so be sure to check out Hubble Attire to get your hands on some seasonal rares!

As promised, Q&A:

Razzer:  I hope that spaces get released soon, And I don't mean like next year.
Answer: Spaces will be here this year, just no definite date as of yet.

Thanks for reading our blog!

Outside Spaces + Q&A

Hey Lasoons,

It's been almost a month since the last blog post and we thought you might want another one. The past month has been an exceptionally busy one. We opened applications for Events Coordinators and were overwhelmed with the number of applicants. While we can't hire everyone, we wish we could! We were able to narrow down who we thought would be the best person for the job and that's when everyone said hello to Virtuoso! She's been doing an amazing job at working with the other staff, coming up with events and competitions. She even has a 7-part event that she's been working on, which you'll all be excited to see once it's out (I know I am!).

After hiring Virtuoso, we realized it would be best to bring on a new community manager to work closely with the Event Coordinators and make sure everyone is doing what they're supposed to be doing. That's when we hired Alex to be our new community manager. Like Virtuoso, he has been doing an amazing job directing the team and putting together lots of events which you'll see in the near future.

While we understand everyone's frustrations with timezones and events, we are still looking for one more Event Coordinator, preferably within an American time zone. In the meantime, we've been adjusting times on our events so that it covers the widest variety of timezones so everyone has a chance to attend the events.

So you may be wondering what's to come in the near future. A pretty big party that we've started planning is when we reach 10k players! We're at 9,631 now, so we estimate that we'll be at 10k in about 2 months based on the average registrations per day. If you have any great ideas, send them to Wombat or any of the events team.

In other news, the client development has been going quite successfully. Public/Private rooms are coming along nicely, walking has been completed with the exception of fine tuning. Calibrate has been working pretty hard on the inventory system, so that just leaves a few more UI elements to do.

Time for a preview! Behind the scenes, Dasaii has been working on touching up our current website. While he wants to keep it a secret, I've decided to share a sneak peak with you, if you see him around, don't tell him!

 

A few Q&A:

Harmsarella: Will you get to be able to block users from your house/space?
Answer: Yes

Harmsarella:Will you be able to decide the weather around your house or will it just match the lasuni one?
Answer: You'll be able to pick the weather once, but it won't affect the furniture. (A spring tree will still remain a spring tree).

Estria: That's pretty nice! Also, can we have an image preview next blog post? thank you. :)
Answer: See above :)

Anyways, that's it for this blog post. Thanks for reading, if you have any questions you'd like answered, leave them in the comments and we'll be sure to get back to you.

Progress Report

Hey Lasoons,

Another year is upon us and we'd like to share our current progress state with you. At this time we're still pretty heavy into the development of the new client. As you know, switching to flash has been a huge undertaking and we're striving to create the perfect product, but doing so does force us to have to recode an entire game and server.

Some of you may be wondering why we're redoing the server as well, and the reason behind that is that we're trying to resolve several issues that we've had with the current server. One of the major issues is the packet format which is not compatible with flash. Putting that aside, another major issue is lag. While we've tried recoding several parts of the server, andwe've come to realize that we should have implemented it a different way which is exactly what we're doing. While we can't promise no-lag, we're trying our hardest to get to the point where there is none at all.

In terms of the game client, we've finished the new friends window [client side, serverside is partially done], chatting is fully functional (with smilies!) and they do look really nice if I do say so myself. (See below for a preview)

Users joining a room / multiuser (basically the ability to see other users join rooms) is done, though we're trying to work out a few kinks with the pathfinding engine. It is a bit buggy in the current version, but we're working on optimizing and improving it. This alone is one of the major sources of lag which we're trying to improve upon. We've essentially recoded the whole room system to work with spaces. This includes the server's ability to store a server-side 'image' of the room, so the server can tell if two users are walking to the tile and prevent them from standing on the same tile, or walking through each other. This will be a huge benefit to Lasuni as it will allow queues in rooms and racing style games.

We've revamped the loading screens [as seen in prior blog posts], we cut back on the graphics and made them look a bit nicer too. This will also decrease the overall file size that's loaded so that means a faster loading time to be in-game.

As for what's left to do, the list goes: Inventory, Equipment, OMG Help, Room Creation Window, Settings Window, Spaces [partially done], Furniture Engine [partially done], Avatars [partially done], Website Updates [partially done]

Now a lot of you are probably wondering about a deadline and such, but we're sorry to say that we can't make any promises as of yet. When we get a bit closer to releasing, we'll definitely inform everyone about a proper release date / party.

Anyways, the new year is nearly here, so we'll see what it brings.

Until next time~

The Future of Lasuni

Hey all,

Just wanted to give you an update on the development of Lasuni. First lets look back in time to March, when we first announced we were working on a new interface / UI. We started building spaces and working on a large, but mostly iterative update to Lasuni that would include spaces and a slightly different UI [as seen here]. As many of you are aware Lasuni is currently built on the shockwave platform that is quite simply out of date and not supported on many platforms [no Linux support, limited Mac support]. So midway through the development of Spaces we decided to switch Lasuni to flash!

There are many benefits for us in regards to using flash, but the main and most important feature is that the barrier of entry will be much lower for new users [and existing ones!]. From the offset we decided that we wanted to get this big update [which is essentially re-writing the entire client, and a large proportion of the server] out quickly, to surprise the Lasuni community with a much larger update than you might have been expecting. However, it’s been taking us longer than we would have hoped to complete the update.

There are significant improvements that we’ve been baking right into the core of Lasuni, such as it’s no longer confined to a set size window. You can re-size Lasuni to be as large as you like, or even play full screen! This enables us to have much larger rooms that don’t need to load in additional rooms - as such North and East Hubble are no more, replaced by one much larger room, Hubble! The new Hubble is equivalent in size to 4 current rooms, rather than just the 2 rooms Hubble consists of today.

Also, we haven’t been entirely truthful [sorry] on the blog in regards to the new UI. Whilst many of the features of the new UI we’ve been talking about are true, such as the search bar in the inventory window [seen here], the windows all have an entirely new style and look. Every window has been redone to make them easier to use and more consistent with the new look of the Lasuni client!

We haven’t only been focusing on the Lasuni client though, part of this update we really want to start pushing Lasuni up to an experience that will be much more enjoyable for new users. Currently we feel the experience is pretty confusing and a number of users don’t even access the client after registering. We are working on numerous other additions that will hopefully improve Lasuni for new users. But I’ll save some of those updates for a later blog post.

So that’s all for now, I’ve included an image of how Lasuni will look in the same area as North Hubble with the updated UI and windows. Hopefully you’ll like it, we’ve been working pretty hard on it!

---

TL;DR? To summarise, Lasuni is moving to flash. It’s taking longer than we hoped - sorry, but it should be worth it!

Click to see full size!

A nibble of what's to come!

So very sorry it's taken us so long to write a blog post but it's very hard for me (Ambear) to write about development when I can't exactly tell you what's going on!

Anyways, above you can see a redesign of the forest in East Hubble! You will notice that a lot more is going on in the image above!

Firstly the forest is a lot bigger then it is currently. There is ACTUAL GRASS on the ground. The trees are full sized and not cut off from the map.

Notice any animals in the picture as well? :)

Development is going very well from what I have seen! Jason has been working very hard alongside Calibrate and I expect things to be done before you know it!

Till next time...

More North Hubble

As promised...

Thank you for everyone that attended the birthday event! We all had a blast!

Happy Birthday to us!!!

(Click the image to view larger)

This week's blog post won't have anything to do with the development of the new Lasuni client. SORRY! (It's looking amazing though) Just saying. If you'd really like to know how things are going follow @sermos on twitter for his lovely updates.

Above is your invitation to the 2nd Lasuni Birthday party! If you aren't subscribed to our email updates this is probably your first time seeing this image. If you are subscribed <3 (we love you) you've seen it! We're so looking forward to Fridays events! (Saturday if you're in Australia) If you are unsure what time the party is check the news article on the Lasuni website or just click here to find out!

Till next week!