Renown News

Hello Everyone

As always, a huge thank you to our amazing backers and supporters. The Kickstarter being a success is a huge win for the future of Renown. A big shout out to our moderators here on discord for their awesome help likewise.

So we’ve got a bit of a more wordy update for you. Given it's been a little bit, we figured it best to go into detail about what the team has been up to.

Kickstarter Send out waves – Xsolla store, and the future of our Crowdfund.

The first thing I wanted to clear up is how we’re currently handling Testing Key send outs for our Kickstarter and our PlayRenown store.

Due to how Kickstarter works, we need to “manually” send out the keys. This means that we take the data, extract anyone already sent a key, format that and send it off to Xsolla to distribute.
Learning from our previous Indiegogo, there isn’t really a way to directly automate this process from Kickstarter/Indiegogo. This also means we’re required to send Kickstarter keys in waves due to the volume of support we’re receiving. Currently Kickstarter waves are sent Wednesday at 9:00 AM CEST - 12:00 AM PDT - 6:00 PM AEDT.

The alternative we came up with is to use https://playrenown.com/ if you’d like to support our work. It has a much more limited range of tiers but has many more payment options including PayPal and others, alongside the keys being sent automatically on Backing.

As was promised to our original backers, the “legacy” skins will be unavailable for purchase and thus exclusive at the end of the month. We really appreciate the community's understanding in letting us bring those back for a short run. It directly helped with the success of this Kickstarter, and thus the future of our work.

We’ll likely do a fairly full swap over to the Xsolla storefront in the near future as well, so all backers are directly getting keys sent instead of waiting for a week.

Mental Health Break/Working Holiday

One thing I just wanted to raise with the community so anyone new doesn’t think we’re lazy buggers slacking off, is that we’re completely exhausted after this campaign. Preparation started in March, and we’ve been going full tilt since then.

Chatting about it as a team last week, the solution is a quick Mental Health Break/Working Holiday. Basically for the next two weeks, our work might be a bit slower and more random/fun (Mental Health part) but we’ll still be around doing tickets, chatting with the community and generally keeping on (Working Holiday part).

The downside of this, and the reason I bring it up, is things might be a bit slower for the next two weeks. We really appreciate the understanding of this community, and a quick rest will do wonders for future progress.

Onto some much more relevant updates, Mr. Z has been kind enough to do a big explanation of his recent work;

Update from Mr. Z

Mr. Z speaking here, today I’ll be going over some of the more technical aspects of our recent demo and how things have held up (or not!).
This current demo did surprise me quite a bit in how well it held up under stress. We had the help of modern server hardware on some of our servers and some very clutch optimizations.
We were able to achieve a player count of about 70-80 with stability for a much longer period of time than before. We even had working voice chat this time, the last demo the voice chat was causing massive server instability and had to be disabled.

Of course it wasn’t all good news, after about twenty thousand buildings were placed on the map, we started running into fairly serious performance issues. Fixing this is going to be the focus going forwards in the optimization department and once it's done I believe we can have a stable full week wipe with at least 64 player servers.

We may also need to enforce more sensible building limits as people built so large this time around that one extremely large clan base was costing up to 11% of the building performance on the server.
Due to the popularity of this demo we ran into another issue, Cheaters and griefers… Going forwards a lot of work is going to be done with Anti Cheat and Moderation measures. There's a lot of things cheaters can mess with currently and while not totally devastating, the fact there was no anti-cheat at all in the demo meant they could do it with impunity.

We’re glad to see the game got so much activity that this has finally become a high priority issue to deal with. Despite being a bad thing to have cheaters, it's a very good sign that we’re making good progress towards getting the game ready for early access.
Another thing that went quite well for us in this demo is the map expansion that KZ worked on, which gave players enough space to build out their bases this time. More of the map is spread out, perhaps too much right now for our current supported player counts, but once the game is stable at 100 players it should be an ideal size.

The additional POIs on the map added way more variety to the gameplay experience. It also made it so that smaller groups and solos could stick to the borders of the map and be relatively unmolested by larger clans who prefer to stick near the center, which has the higher concentration of loot and PvP encounters. One very hopeful thing to note is that the map expansion didn’t actually reduce performance by a perceptible amount, yet the map size is significantly bigger now.

In the next dev blog I’ll be discussing some game design (rather than technical) focused topics about how the demo went and what we’ll be making significant changes to. There's a lot to talk about between the combat and survival mechanics so it may need to be a two parter dev blog for next time…


KZ’s Progress Update

Kz has also been hard at work doing some majorly large arts tasks. So far hes:
Designing and optimizing more Interesting/bigger points of interest also planned to make current Point of interest more interesting alongside more interesting Npcs to go with
Here’s a list of what he has planned:
* Not currently on the map
· Winterhold
· Winterhold Village
· Safezone
· Fishing town
· Stronghold
· Coastal Keep
· Northwest Village
· Bandit camp
· *Trader camp
· *Rus camp
· *Mongol Camp
· *Viking Village
· *Port Village
· *Port Centre
· *Port docks
· *Port Keep
· Island Castle
· *Farm
· Tavern
· *Sewers
· *Mine caves with crumbled entrances

Npcs planned:
· Winterhold peasants
· Winterhold guards/archers
· Winterhold swordsmen
· Winterhold Knights
· Winterhold lord
· Dewsbury Guards
· Dewsbury Merchants
· Yarlford Fishermen
· Elkmire Soldiers
· Calchester Knights
· Calchester lord
· Caershire Villagers
· Thirsty Swan barkeep
· Thirsty Swan Drunkard
· Selasund Peasants
· Selasund Vikings
· Dannamore Nobles
· Dannamore Cooks
· Dannamore Knights
· Dannamore Lord
· Brimdurn Peasants
· Brimdurn Monks
· Brimdurn Champion
· Brimdurn Guards
· Brimdurn Knights
· Brimdurn Lord
· Brimdurn Sailors
· Woodland bandits
· Woodland Travellers
· Steppe Travellers
· Travelling merchants
· Street Riff Raff

He has also been working on cleaning up the armour system and killing as many Clipping issues as possible.
so far he has fixed:
· broken chainmail texture on Jupon
· Jupon under leathervest
· Jupon over Pauldrons
· Jupon over breastplate
· Jupon under certain breastplate
· all coifs sit correctly over armour now
· fixed Peasant vest under jupon
· fixed Coif clipping issues
· fixed emblems not working on jupons
· Fixed emblems not working on tabards
· Fixed hosen clipping through boots
· fixed character skin clipping on some characters skins
· fixed archer helmet clipping with arming cap
· fixed gambeson clipping with breastplate
· fixed Womens hosen clipping with shirt
· Fixed monk outfit bulging out
· fixed mail hauberk clipping through leather vest
· fixed overthrow rigging issue
· fixed gambeson broken under peasant vest
· fixed tunic clipping through leather gauntlets skin
· fixed broken tunic under peasant’s vest
· fixed broken women’s tunic
· Fixed peasant shirt clipping through leather vest



Once we have polished most of the clipping issues off he will look into getting all the backer skins up to scratch and ready for EA
We will show these off in game via sneak peaks. He also has plans for optimization work making sure nothing is detrimental to fps.
Of course, there’s also implementing all the points of interest and increasing map polish.

Again thank you so much for the awesome support folks. We’ll be putting out another dev blog in a couple of weeks with our overarching plan for the coming months.

As always a huge thank you to all our amazing backers, both in the past and from our Kickstarter.

I’ve got some quick-fire updates for everyone so let’s dive in!

“The One for All Renown Demo” – Starting June 27:
So, we’re firstly very excited to announce the return of Renown’s Alpha Demo as promised to the community.

It’s only been a couple of weeks so don’t expect big changes. However Mr.Z has been working hard at fixing what he can, trying to improve stability and optimisation.

For the duration of the Demo, full testing access will be open on steam if you know folks who are keen to try Renown but haven’t backed or played yet.
We should hopefully be posting launch and wipe times for each region soon.

Our Community Manager Volker has also been kind enough to whip up a Server Region Survey.
This survey will directly help inform us of which servers we’re missing, need more of, or are solid. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc-rFISah0j7lTWrvLMh6j_H7TdkJ4FmhFoWY6pOJI7bWYWCA/viewform


Kickstarter Credit Notice:
One thing Kickstarter suggests we remind the community.

If you’ve pledged on Kickstarter, payments are sent to your card/bank during the first week after the 27th.

The recommendation is calling your bank if you’re worried about the payment. Otherwise, if you have any issues, they should email you, letting you know.

Testing Key and Title Distribution:
Likewise, we’ll be starting our Title and Key Distribution after the 27th. We do need to beg for some patience from the community as we’re doing so.

Testing keys will be sent out via Email during the Demo so all backers will still have access to the game at this time. Due to the steam testing key policy, we’re forced to use Xsolla testing keys for a while longer.

I want to reassure all backers that Early Access and the Full game will be on Steam. Xsolla is only our stop gap measure to ensure all Backers have testing access to the game.

Discord Titles will be available via the “Get-Backer-Roles” bot channel. We’ll put out another update with specifics on how to use this Bot to get your titles after the 27th.

Xsolla Store – Alternative backing methods – PayPal, Google pay and other:

We’ll also be bringing back our Play Renown Storefront for backers who are outside the Kickstarter backing regions, or for those without credit card access.

This store will have the exact same pricing (excluding currency conversion) as the Kickstarter, and purely functions as an alternative for those who aren’t able to use Kickstarter.

This site should be coming back online sometime soon after the 27th.

Also please see attached for some awesome photos coming out from KZ's new work on Lighting Systems. These are still in testing and should hopefully be coming to a patch soon.


We very much hope folks will enjoy The One for All Renown Demo. Thank you again for the amazing support of our work.


Till next time.

Hello everyone!

As always, a huge thank you to our amazing backers and supporters. A big shout out to our mods here on discord likewise.

We’ve got some big news regarding the next couple of weeks.

Return to the OTK Expo 2024:
Firstly, and in no particular order, we’ve been invited back to exhibit at the OTK Expo 2024. In this case we’re not running in the competition (given that would be a bit unfair given we won in the past), but we’ll be doing an interview update segment during the Expo Stream.
If you'd like to see an early pre-view of just our segment:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’ll be linking the Expo Stream, when it goes live. This will be running on the 4th of June.

Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest (27th May to 3rd June PST)
We’re also very excited to be taking part in the “Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest” between the dates of the 27th of May and 3rd of June, on the Steam Platform.

That means between these dates we’ll be running a free open demo of the current survival alpha. If you’ve got friends looking to try Renown out, or to just better understand the state of the game, this is a great way to try it out.

These events have also always provided us with huge amounts of both game data, and player feedback.

Extended Survival Map Ready – Algara
Another area we’re hyped about is our new extended survival map “Algara”.

You can find a lot more details about this map in our previous dev blog. Without overly going over the same, its roughly 60% larger than our previous survival map, and has an emphasis on increased building space for player bases. In the future it’ll also act as our test bed for the new PGC biomes we’ve created but are causing trouble when all combined onto our 4x4km map.

The map is currently playable for backers.

Renown: The Final Crowdfund
The last area of anxiety and excitement for our team has been preparation for a final Crowdfund during this event. As you know, we’re extremely grateful to the community here and our backers who’ve made our work possible this far.

However, we’re still only a small team of dedicated folks going for just over 4 years now.

We’ve been doing a lot of meetings with Publishers and Venture Capital.

The problem with this is at best we lose creative freedom, and in the worst cases (looking at the paperwork), they take control over the entire community, project, marketing and even when/where we can launch.

Kz has been working hard on a whole new set of cosmetics, and we’ll be providing new titles and packages. We’ll of course be offering testing and full game access as before at the lowest same price as on our store page.

Please see as follows for a pre-launch link to the new campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playrenown/renown
It’ll be going live with the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest.

One thing we really didn’t want, was to create a sense of pressure or FOMO on our old crowdfund by announcing this one early. We’ll be closing the old Indiegogo in the next few hours, and we’ll be temporarily taking down our Xsolla Play.Renown when the fund goes live.

This will likely see a return in the future, however with the updated packages.

As always, should this campaign fail, we’ve got plans for redundancy and fall back. We are dedicated to getting Renown out on steam, no matter what.

Again thank you to our amazing testers and backers. We truly couldn’t have gotten this far without you, and we’re super keen to keep going.

Till next time.

Welcome Renowners, Mr. Z here with some exciting news about a new map and changes to our backend.

One of the biggest complaints we’ve had in our Survival playtests has been the lack of space to build bases on the map, given the map was originally designed for a 4 Team Raid mode, this is quite understandable. Fear not because we’ve addressed these issues by completely revamping the map. The newly named map: Algara Isle, now has the shape of an island with water on all sides, and the former map boundary cliffs have been removed.




The overall size of the map is roughly 60% bigger, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Originally, the Winterhold castle area took up a pretty large proportion of the map, with the area being unavailable for player bases. Most of the new areas with this map extension have added quite a bit more building space for players. We’ve also added brand new POIs to the map to give players more locations to fight over and to spread the loot a bit more, as it was too concentrated in the Winterhold area, which let high performing groups of players dominate most of the loot too easily.



Here KZ wrote us some details on what the goals of the new map expansion are:

Main Goals of the Map Expansion:
Increased Space for Building: The primary objective was to provide players with more room to construct without feeling crowded.

Enhanced Player Interaction: Despite the expanded area, maintaining player encounters was crucial to fostering community and interaction.

Abundance of Points of Interest (POIs): To prevent the expansion from feeling like a mere walking simulator, numerous POIs were scattered throughout, offering exploration and activities.

Balanced Development Opportunities: Ensuring that building in the outer regions remained worthwhile was a key consideration.

Integration of Features and Optimization:
Gradual Introduction of Biomes: The expansion serves as a platform for introducing and refining biome mechanics, allowing players to experience varied environments.
Incremental Feature Testing: Features from the larger map are being methodically integrated and tested in the expansion, optimizing functionality and player experience over time.
Continuous Improvement: The expansion provides an opportunity to address existing issues in the larger map, refining gameplay and performance iteratively.



There’s a couple of questions many of you must be thinking, why did we expand the old map and what's going on with the upcoming survival map? As many know, navigating the waters of game development is a very volatile experience, and often requires changing course quickly. We’ve made a slight course correction as we were expecting to be able to release a new map around this time, but unfortunately we ran into a lot of obstacles along the way. The biggest of which was performance issues that we haven’t been able to resolve yet. When making the new map we decided to use a new system for placing foliage in Unreal 5 called PCGs. It produces some pretty impressive and organic looking results but unfortunately it has nuked our performance to well below our intended targets.



Given the time crunch we’re currently under (we only have 4 developers), we decided to revamp the old existing map to alleviate most of the issues players had with it as it was pretty playable already. Thankfully, the expansion of the old map seems to have had no effect on performance. There were also other performance issues with the full survival map, and we haven’t had enough playtesting on it to balance out all the Loot and POIs. A map extension to our old map seemed like the obvious thing to do and it seems to have paid off as we’ll be getting it released in a major patch shortly.



So what’s the plan with the full survival map? Our focus right now is shifted at the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest at the end of March. That’s right, we’re doing another demo and this time for a Festival, we’re going to have a lot of players during the festival so this is the perfect time to gather up the gang for a new wipe. After that demo ends we’re going to redirect and redouble our efforts back into the full survival map. We’re very excited to get it playable since the map’s large size is also going to necessitate the introduction of rideable Horses to the game, which have been expected for a long time.



We have some other good news relating to the backend of the game.

We’re now using Epic Online Services (EOS). EOS gives us 2 new features we’ve been badly needing, a good anti-cheat service and VOIP. To be perfectly clear, the game is still coming to Steam without question, EOS is compatible with Steam and lots of games on Steam are using it lately.

Anti-cheat has long been on our minds, despite the game still being in Alpha we’ve already attracted the attention of hackers. Nobody likes hackers, we’ve all played many games that have been ruined by their presence, so we’re taking a proactive approach early to deal with them.

One key feature that was missing in our last playtest was Voice chat. It’s a very integral feature of PvP open world survival games and its absence was felt pretty strongly. We were relying on a duct tape solution for voice chat that was sending the voice data through the same game server that players were on, but unfortunately that has massive performance issues and simply doesn’t scale to the player counts we’re expecting. We’re now using Epic Online Services Voice, which shifts the performance costs of Voice chat to the Epic Backend instead of our game servers. We can’t wait to see what silly antics players will get into now that Voice chat works again.

We’ll have another dev blog soon with a big announcement, follow our announcements channel on our official Discord and Renown on Steam to stay appraised.

Alpha 1.1.7

Fixed recipes missing Axeheads
Fixed networking issues that caused lag
Optimized animals path finding
Fixed issue with Barrel shield
Fixed a bug with the Bed respawn timer
Fixed not being able to click the spawn buttons while being raided
Fixed not being able to spawn in while the game is saving
Final save warning is 10 minutes now
Rewrote NPC spawning logic
Fixed many NPC spawns
Throwing weapons cost stamina now
Fixed Petard sound attenuation
Fixed an issue where the inventory would disappear randomly
Fixed not being able to move Banners
Fixed Alt Overhead Morph to Slash anim with Greataxes
Fixed an issue where all Furnaces would stop smelting
Fixed Petard Damage detection and added a more reliable splash radius against players
You can now input queue an arrow after firing
Fixed an infinite arrow bug