It is just four days until we release in Steam Early Access! We are looking forward to grow our amazing community with a large influx of new players from the Steam Platform.  We’ve been bug squashing, we have a wiki live and also have details of the Vanguard edition

 

Transferring your CardLife Account to a Steam Account

Our founders who supported us during the game's early development phase will be given the choice to transfer their existing game account into a Steam account. Look out for an email with instructions on how to do this early next week. Those who transfer their account to a Steam account will still keep their Founder status.

If you do not want to use a Steam account to play CardLife, you will be able to continue playing via the launcher.

We are unable to transfer CardLife accounts into a Steam account until launch day of Early Access (October 9th 2018). This is because the keys that we will receive from Steam are only active on release date. If we allowed you to transfer early, you would lose the ability to play the game until launch. It is important to note that those who do transfer and redeem the Steam keys will lose the ability to launch the game via the CardLife Launcher. DO NOT GIVE YOUR STEAM CODE AWAY, IT IS NOT AN EXTRA COPY OF THE GAME!

 

The Vanguard Edition

We had stopped selling the Founders Edition in preparation for our imminent Steam launch. Players who purchase the game after October 9th will become Vanguards (until the next stage of development). Founders will keep their Founder title within game but will also receive the unique crafting recipes from the Vanguard edition. Those crafting recipes are:

 

The Vanguard Lamp Post
Light the way and provide another layer of visual flair to your buildings

 

The Vanguard Statue
A special statue which is a cardboard recreation of the Vanguard ship in Robocraft.

 

The Vanguard Statue is modelled after our Vanguard ship within Robocraft. Here's a beautiful artwork of how it looks within the Robocraft game

 

 

And for a sense of scale for the Vanguard lamp post, check out the image below:

 

 

Of course, please welcome our Vanguards with open arms! We hope that this will allow us to see some incredible structures and stories shared within the forums.

 
The Official CardLife Wiki

We partnered up with Gamepedia to create the official CardLife Wiki. There are already 329 pages so far and we need your help to improve upon it! Visit the Wiki now, contribute and we will be giving out prizes to the top contributors after the first month.

https://cardlife.gamepedia.com/CardLife_Wiki

 

Planned Server Maintenance and Server Reset

In order to prepare for our Steam release we are preparing our servers to be down for maintenance at some time on Monday, 8th October. During this time we will be resetting the servers, which unfortunately means that any building that you have created will be removed, terrain will be reset and any items in your inventory will also be removed.

We are hoping that this will be the last time that we will reset the servers. However there may be a time in the future when a technical issue may require a reset. But we will do our very best to maintain them from now on to protect your buildings on our official dedicated servers.

Stay tuned to our twitter account @CardLifeGame to be kept up to date on when the servers will be back up and running.

 

The Big Bug Squash

The team has spent the last four weeks squashing as many bugs as possible. During this time we have not focused on introducing new features to CardLife as we wanted to release the most stable and polished version on October 9th. During this time we eliminated over 200 bugs but below are a list of the ones that we felt you’d be interested in seeing addressed as part of our most recent patch.

 

BUG FIXES

1. Fixed a bug where Creatures are glitching through Doors
2. Fixed a bug where crafting a large stack of new projectiles, after running out of the previous set, causes them to be unusable.
3. Fixed a bug which caused caves to be pitch black when the cave contained light sources.
4. Fixed a bug where the sloped fence foundation and sloped fence had the wrong sprite.
5. Fixed a bug which caused the health and stamina bars to incorrectly update.
6. Fixed an issue which caused players combat animations to not appear correctly.
7. Fixed a bug which caused players who disconnect from the server to lose mouse functionality on the Main Menu.
8. Fixed a bug which caused Cobalt items to not fully appear in the crafting menu in Creative Mode.
9. Fixed an issue which caused the game to crash due to being out of memory.
10. Fixed a bug which displayed an error message reading “str [ok]” when disconnecting from server instead of the expected error message (“You have been disconnected from the server”)
11. Fixed an issue where players were able to see low level detail on the environment from up close (instead of only happening to terrain in the distance).
12. Fixed a bug which caused items to lose enchantments if dragged straight from the enchanting table to the equipment slot.
13. Fixed a bug which caused newly set key bindings to not update on some crafting tables.
14. Fixed a bug which caused your selected mods to be forgotten when you log out and back in.
15. Fixed an issue which caused some creatures to stay in a 'T' pose instead of animating correctly.
16. Fixed an issue with the Direwolf Pelt which caused it not to tile when applied to items.
17. Fixed an issue which caused items not to properly craft if you typed in an amount to craft (instead of using the mouse to click the '+')
18. Fixed a bug which caused creatures to stop attacking you if you turned your back to them.
19. Fixed a bug which caused the creature UI not to appear above your health bar if shot from range.
20. Fixed a bug which caused the creature names to be invisible if they were in front of water.
21. Fixed an issue which caused the animation of the crossbow reloading to finish before you could actually fire the crossbow.
22. Fixed a bug which caused the crossbow recoil to change depending on the direction you faced.
23. Fixed a bug which caused terrain drops not to fall to the ground when digging upwards.
24. Fixed a bug which sometimes caused users to not to be able to place stairs opposite doors.
25. Fixed a bug with crafting which would accidentally cancel the crafting queue if you hit 'I'.
26. Fixed a bug which caused you to hear all the games audio at once when leaving and rejoining a server.
27. Fixed a bug which caused stats which were being hovered over to stay on screen even after closing the inventory.
28. Fixed a bug where pressing 'F' whilst having a drawn bow would not reset the bow to idle.
29. Fixed a bug which caused you to place terrain you had selected when clicking resume on escape menu.
30. Fixed a bug which caused creatures to slide towards you from long distances if you turned towards them after running away.
31. Fixed a bug which made the chat expander extremely hard to select.
32. Fixed a bug which caused your shadow to react erratically when holding a torch.
33. Fixed a bug which caused your hotbar to scroll when scrolling through the journal.
34. Fixed a bug which caused your hotbar to scroll when scrolling through crafting tables.
35. Fixed a bug which caused the user's client to crash if they walked on to specific tiles in the world.
36. Fixed a bug when eating food which caused the game to say '2x Food' was consumed instead of 1.
37. Fixed an issue where an invisible barrier was blocking players in certain locations in the world.
38. Fixed a bug with scrollbars in the Permissions Console.
39. Fixed a bug which displayed (str) near some menus in permissions console for players given permission to edit.
40. Fixed a bug for players who maximised the size of the Connect the Dots screen, as they could not minimise it after.
41. Fixed a bug which caused creatures breathing loops to sometimes stay active after despawning.

 

FEATURES:

1. We have implemented an interest management system which will only load structures, terrain and creatures within a certain distance of you, improving performance.
2. Multiple customisations of the same item will now each save as unique items, instead of overwriting the original customisation.
3. We have made a significant improvement to the infrastructure of AI which will make them more reactive and will improve performance. This is our first step towards better AI in CardLife and further improvements are planned.
4. Infinite Servers: We have implemented a new feature which will cause buildings to decay over time, if the user does not log in within a certain period the building will be destroyed and the items will become lootable.

 

We posted about the Infinite servers in the last blog. You can read more about that by clicking the link below:

http://cardlifegame.com/index.php/devblog/247-dev-blog-93-reactive-world

IMPROVEMENTS:

1. Made changes to the name field on the Connect the Dots screen to make it more readable.
2. Made the right hand side of the Permissions panel display a “Coming Soon" message as that panel currently has no functionality.
3. All equippable items now have run animations.
4. We have added in an “inventory is full” message.
5. Improved frame rate performance for players near large structures.
6. Reduced the long hang players were experiencing when returning to main menu
7. Improved available space for some items which had restrictive Connect the Dots screens.
8. Improved the hitboxes for sliders in escape menu

 

Name changes within In-game Chat

There will be some changes to the in-game name system which we wanted to make all players aware of.

Previously we had required users to come up with a unique display name, however last month we introduced an update which included a Hash in the name along with a number attached to it. This meant that someone who really wanted to be called Chris within their own game could do that but they would have a Hash next to their name. This meant their name would appear as follows:

Chris#1234

In our tests we realised that there were some issues with this system during our transfer to the Steam platform. We found that the game would pull the name from a user's display name. While in theory this sounds great - what happens is if a player has a character in their name that our system does not recognise? They would simply be named “Steam user”.

Obviously this is a bit rubbish, so we are going to be removing this system and returning back to a Unique display name model.

Doing this does present some issues which you should be aware of. Firstly, let's say we have a bunch of players calling themselves “Chris”. The very first person who ever named their character “Chris” will automatically claim this display name “Chris” and have the hash and the numbers next to their name removed.

For those who named themselves “Chris” but were not the first to grab that name, they will retain the hash and the numbers next to their name. However these players can get in touch with us via our Support Zendesk and can request to change their name. In that email to support, we need the email address attached to your Cardlife account and a list of ten names in the order of which you’d prefer to be known as in-game:

 

https://support.freejamgames.com/hc/en-us

 

In summary, if after the most recent update your name has a hash and a number attached to it and you would like to change it, do get in touch.

 

Thank you for supporting us so far

We’d like to issue a MASSIVE thank you to all founders who have joined us over the last two years. Your support has been invaluable helping us to refine the CardLife experience and we hope that you continue to enjoy playing the game. Steam is the next leg of our development journey and we have a ton of plans to continue to refine, improve and add to the game.

Remember, you can share your thoughts on the game within the forums, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

All the best,
Chris