Coming to Beta: Fellowship Chat and Hardware Acceleration

[Muf-Muf]

Dear Humans and Elves,

With the update to 0.21, we will also include two big features for Beta: the Fellowship Chat and Hardware Acceleration.

Fellowship Chat
This feature will allow you to chat with your Fellowship Members, and is available to everyone who is in a Fellowship. When you log in, you will see a new icon on the right side of your screen:

When you click that, the Chat window will open, allowing you to read the messages sent by your Fellows, as well as typing your own, of course.

We hope you enjoy this brand new feature! Please let us know your feedback!

Hardware acceleration
With version 0.21 we are releasing the beta version of our hardware acceleration for the Elvenar city. The feature will be enabled by default, but can be disabled via settings menu.

We would like to ask all of you to test this new feature with us, so please keep it activated. Hardware acceleration will become a standard feature for Elvenar later. The World Map and Battles already use it and we are planning to switch the city soon. To do that in the best way we can, we need your help to test this new feature. Please report your issues to us in case you face any, by posting a thread in the 'Report a Bug' section of the forum.

What is hardware acceleration?​

The work of rendering the graphics gets transfered from the CPU to the GPU (graphics card) saving the CPU power for other tasks. The GPU has lots of processing cores specialized on rendering operations that can handle these operations parallel.

The benefits of hardware acceleration​

Hardware acceleration helps to increase overall performance in the Elvenar city. This is especially true for players with bigger cities and players with older machines. Hardware acceleration gives us the opportunity to add more life (e.g. in the form of animations) to the Elvenar cities later. Examples could be animals running around or birds flying. Furthermore it prepares us to grow cities even further, which is particularly interesting in later stages of the game.

We try to reduce the impact on memory consumption and to come up with smart loading processes. The Elvenar hardware acceleration will be released in a beta version first to improve it even further together with you: our players.

As always, we are looking for your feedback! Please share your thoughts with us in the discussion thread!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team

 

[Muf-Muf]

Dear Humans and Elves,

The hardware acceleration feature will be delayed until a later point (likely update 0.22), as it is not yet 100% ready to be released as it is now. In our tests, we found some unexpected behavior, stopping us from releasing the feature now. We had hoped to release it today, but we do not want to give you this big new feature as long as it still contains bugs, which would give you a bad gaming experience. We want the hardware acceleration to be as smooth as possible from the start, which is why we are delaying its release now. We trust that you understand this decision.

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team