The Guild 3 News

Hello everyone,

We sadly have to shift the launch of patch EA 0.9.17 to early next week. Organizing marriages is not as easy as it seems and due to the fact that our QA likes the topic very much, they are in particular picky this time. Everyone who has planned a wedding once before knows that there is no end to the preparations - and sometimes the groom does not show up because... well... he is dead... or something else happened to him. Therefore, we'd ask you for your understanding that we need a bit more time to test all the edge cases and finally please the strict eyes of our testers.

Your The Guild 3-team

Oachkatzlschwoaf?

Yep, Oachkatzlschwoaf!

You might ask yourself: What’s an Oachkatzlschowaf? For those of you who aren't familiar with German - there is a huge difference in the accent and dialects across Germany and Austria. I'm from northern Germany, but most of our dev team is from Austria - so it even took me a while to understand the word. If you speak German, a good trick is to try pronouncing the word veeery slowly. Alternatively, you can ask a friend from Austria or Bavaria. If neither of those are an option for you… It's an “Eichkätzchenschweif”, a squirrel’s tail. The word is jokingly used to test a person’s German skills in Austria and Bavaria.

Why are we talking about this? As we've already mentioned before, we work in sprints. A sprint usually lasts two weeks. The tradition of giving each of these sprints a catchy name has been established since last year. For example, the sprint that ended last week is called “Church” and the current sprint is called “Holy Moly”.
“Oachkatzlschwoaf” was a very special sprint. It went pretty much exactly from the launch of the hotfix patch EA 0.9.16.5 on December 21st to January 20th, so it lasted exactly one month. Despite the Christmas holidays and absences due to the cold that is common in winter, we managed to finish a lot of tasks. Finally, the most beautiful moment was when the church interiors were installed and the first NPCs went in to pray.

By the way, if you have a great idea for a sprint name, please send it to [email protected] with the subject "Sprint Name Suggestion" ;-)

But now to the good news of this DevDiary: All features of patch EA 0.9.17 have been implemented and the patch is in our Stabilizing environment, in which, as you as loyal readers already know, intensive testing is carried out and only bugs will be fixed. In addition to fixing bugs in EA 0.9.17, the team is already doing initial work on the upcoming patch.

Our conservative guess right now is that patch EA 0.9.17 will be released next week!

By now you might know from the previous DevDiary what will be in patch EA 0.9.17: the interiors for the churches, a priest you can interact with, more objects you can interact with and the wedding ceremony.
What else can you expect in our upcoming patch?

We have improved the tooltips of all actions: Actions that may or may not be permitted by law continue to display "illegal" or "legal", all other actions no longer have this information as it is not necessary. In addition, you can now see in the tooltip how your dynasty's moral alignment changes when you use the action. Alignment is a prerequisite for later joining a guild. We will do something more with the guilds - together with the arsenal - in the following patch.

We delved deeper into the pathfinding system and found the cause(s) for characters sometimes disappearing into the ground or taking strange off-road paths. That was quite a big change, which among other things also required that we had to put our hands on the road networks in all maps... Even if we couldn't possibly find all the causes, they should have become much rarer now.

In the last few weeks we have received increasing reports of problems with the multiplayer mode. We've been trying to figure out what's causing this and we found and fixed several possible issues. After the patch has been launched, we will need your help: please let us know if your problems have been fixed or if they are still occurring. Thank you!
Another big topic in the community over the last few days and weeks has been that some players were no longer able to save the game. We might have found a good solution for all players. In addition you will receive a notification if there are problems with saving and you will be able to set your custom save game folder if you wish to do so.

Finally, let's say a few words about the patch's feature set:
We've put the biggest chunk of work into the cutscene system, which is new from the ground up. Remember the old, static wedding cutscene and the orphan adoption cutscene? Good. You can forget them :-) Because with EA 0.9.17, both the adoption and the wedding will take place in the interior of a church. So you will be able to see your own wedding and adoption with all characters involved, as well as those of all other human and AI players.
This also means that from now on you have to get engaged before you can get married. Oh yes: you can now also marry “on the spot” and skip the wedding ceremony, however, without getting the bonus of just being married.

Another new feature in the patch is that dialogue options of your active character will open automatically - you no longer have to click on the notification at the top of the HUD.

There is more in the patch, of course, including a good chunk of bug fixes. Please be patient. The patch is coming soon!

Your The Guild 3-Team

Dear fellow believers, dear sinners,

the churches are not yet accessible in The Guild 3 - at least not with your camera. But we are working to change that :-)

As you could read in DevDiary #25 just before Christmas, all churches in the game will get a fully interactive interior. We distinguish between the small village churches and the churches within the city walls, which also include the cathedrals. So you will have a relatively small interior space in the village churches and a much larger and richer interior space in the city churches.

In general, all characters are able to enter the church. So you will see NPCs enter the church, sit on a bench, say a silent prayer and leave. You will also be able to do the same with your characters.
Inside the churches there is the baptismal font, which you can use to change your faith, and the donation box, which you can use to donate a few coins to Mother Church. There is also an NPC priest in the room. You can talk to him if you want to adopt a poor orphan or enter a monastery yourself.
Of course, you can also watch the AI dynasties while they are using these actions.

But the biggest part while working on the modifications of the churches is the wedding scene! Instead of having a rigid cutscene like before, we want you to be able to watch your characters getting married in one of the churches in the game world. Of course, this also enables you to watch the other dynasties at their wedding ceremonies.

We plan to release the interiors for the churches and the wedding scene in Patch EA 0.9.17. Unfortunately, we don't have a schedule for the patch yet. As soon as we know more, we will inform you immediately. However, you can assume that the patch will be released in mid to late February at the earliest.
You are already used to this, but we would still like to mention it: Of course, the patch will also contain a lot of other stuff including bug fixes.

After patch EA 0.9.17 we will start working on the interior of the arsenal. And we also want to implement at least one other interesting feature for the arsenal. You will learn more about this in the upcoming DevDiaries.

Your The Guild 3 Team

Hello everyone,

Christmas is approaching and the year is finally drawing to a close. The last 2 weeks have been hectic for us, not only because - as usual ;-) - most of us bought their Christmas presents at the last minute, but also because we first released patch EA 0.9.16 and then immediately started working on patch EA 0.9.16.5. We had done massive reworkings of the game's core systems to include the interiors for the residences, so we assumed we would get a huge number of crashes or other blockers reported. Fortunately, that was not the case. So we decided at short notice to finish a new map planned for next year and to include it into the patch as a small Christmas present for you. We hope that you like the Cologne map, even though it still has a few rough edges that we won't be filing away until the next patch.

We can't emphasize enough how grateful we are for your patience and support with the Early Access of The Guild 3. We would like to thank you once again for finding and reproducing bugs that we missed during the final test runs before each patch. You are really great! Without you, the community, we would not be where we are now: implementing the interiors for residences, churches, arsenal and town hall and finalizing the work animations in the exterior areas of the business buildings! Thank you!

Btw. our internal QA asked me to please include the following plea in this DevDiary: please include your email address when you open a bug ticket in our Redmine bugtracker. We do not have the time to contact everyone but sometimes, in particular when we have troubles reproducing something or we just would like to give you an answer on how to solve your problem, this would be useful - in the latter case also for you ;-) Thanks!

The new year begins for us with the implementation of the interiors for the village church and the city churches. We want you to be able to enter the interiors just like your residence. There will also be objects in the churches that you or your characters can interact with, such as the baptismal font or the donation box. There will be a priest with whom you will also be able to interact. He should then also lead the wedding ceremony if you decide to tie the knot for life :-) In addition, NPCs should now and then sit on the benches in the church to pray.
And we of course continue to hunt bugs and balance the game.

In the new year, we will be able to tell you more about the churches and the other planned interiors.

We will now go on the Christmas vacation and gather new strength for the year 2022.

We hope that you can relax as well and enjoy the holidays. See you again in 2022!

Your The Guild 3 team

Build number: 637514

Hey folks,

Patch EA 0.9.16.5 should stabilize the game so that you should be able to play smoothly during the holidays.

Despite the team heavily working on bug fixes and new features for next year we also invested some additional time to make you a little Christmas present: Cologne! This map also features a small surprise in the form of a "tiny little" new building ;)

And yes, there will be a DevDiary before Christmas in which we are going to talk a bit about our plans for the patch to come. Stay tuned!

Please note: Saved games from EA 0.9.16 will work with this patch, but not all of the bug fixes you find below will then be in effect!

Content
- We added the brand new map “Cologne”. Please note that the map is fully functional, but is not finally polished - it is only a “First version”.

Bug fixes
- fixed a crash bug when loading a saved game
- fixed a crash with a specific graphics driver
- fixed an issue that prevented players with non-latin keyboards to type texts in-game
- fixed an issue in multiplayer where it was possible for clients to display destroyed buildings after joining a running session
- fixed an issue in multiplayer where the characters turned invisible after a building was destroyed
- fixed an issue in multiplayer where children remained invisible after they turned 5 years old
- fixed an issue in multiplayer where the camera was not kicked out of a residence which has been destroyed while player on the client computer was inside
- fixed an issue where the camera was moved to a corner of the map after focussing a character who was in the process of exiting an interior
- fixed an issue that prevented you from moving characters who were sitting on two specific seats in the mansion
- fixed an issue that caused characters to be stuck when ambushing close to the far trade market on the "Humble Beginning" map
- fixed an issue that caused employees to blink out when trying to unload into a full storage
- fixed a number of issues with work animations
- fixed an issue where employees showed the text "failure" over their heads while gathering resources
- fixed an issue that caused actions to sometimes fail when they should only be canceled (e.g. user stops a character that was running to the church to execute another action - in these cases "failure" got displayed)
- fixed an issue in the exterior areas of buildings where characters sometimes were ordered to move to a point which was outside of the exterior area

Known Issues
- the daytime ambient sounds - like birds chirping - are for some reason played even during nighttime. We will hunt down and fix this nasty bug for the next patch.
- some actions like the pray for luck action can’t be executed when several other actions are currently executed on the same building