A Sneak PeEk Environment out-take from coming video; player-ownable farmstead I'll get right to the bits which I know you're all excited for and wondering about: the upcoming gameplay video. We'd really hoped to get it out in January, but I sit here at 10pm on the 31st finally getting time to write up this dev blog. It won't be tonight, but it's going to be really, really soon. We did run into some delays for animation content which set us back almost two weeks on the video content. The delayed art was external and out of our control, but it's all handled and now we're polishing it up to show you first-hand. It's days, not weeks, away. Around the Studio It was an incredibly busy month for everyone on the team. My last bit was consumed with ever-so-exciting annual tax preperations and hunting for new blood. Andrew's been hard at work getting the last bits of technical content for the video flushed out and Henrik has accomplished some really big things bringing the Town Square together. Prototype UI design for inventory and shop transaction As you can see above, Artur's new UI design overhall for Identity and the Town Square module is looking fantastic. After Scaleform (our old middleware for UI) was abandoned by Autodesk, we had to rebuild our UI from scratch. In hindsight I'm glad that happened as I really like our new systems much more! Also of note is a very heavy overhaul of foliage (trees, bushes, grass) and other environment bits using photogrammetry. This is a fairly new method used in creating incredibly realistic art assets. You're going to be blown away by the results our resident photogrammetry guy, Philipp, has achieved. We've begun working with another studio to hasten art development for Town Square and other parts of Identity. Some of these guys have worked with us in the past, and the art we're getting back is some of the best in the industry. Full Steam Ahead After years of effort, I have to admit it's pretty fun and exciting seeing the Town Square module coming together. In the last weeks we've both launched our development game servers on the Google Cloud as well as a working development client on Steam. Internally, we're now at a point where we can prepare for access to the game world just as you'll be experiencing it in the Town Square. With the release of Town Square, all Founder package holders are going to be issued a key to redeem Identity on Steam. Town Square will be played through Steam and your Steam friends will be able to join you in the same game instances. Committing to the Asylum Finally, after more than two years of trying, the Canadian government has granted a work visa to our Executive Producer, Sean (also known as Motown) and he's been here at the office for the last couple of weeks. We've already seen a boost in productivity having one of our key developers on site, and I'm excited to see where it leads! There's still some room in the office, though. We're looking for talented technical artists, Unreal Engine generalists and animators especially, but we always love to meet talented individuals no matter their field of expertise! If you, or someone you know, would be interested in working for Asylum, check out our careers page. The Twitch Clips If you've been following Identity's development closely, you probably already know that developers stream their work live on the Identity Twitch channel every Tuesday and Thursday. We also use that time to answer almost every question that gets asked about Identity's development and gameplay. Now that we've been doing this a while, we've answered a lot of questions. Our awesome community manager, BeachBall, has taken the time to compile a massive list of questions linked to clips where they're answered by a developer. Get comfy and head over to the Twitch Clips Directory forum thread. If you haven't found this already, be prepared to spend a good bit of time listening to all sorts of awesome information. This is the best place to get to know the fine details Identity!

Here are the stream notes for Identity's twitch stream on February the 1st Remember - Certain elements are subject to change, especially specific numbers, etc... - One Way Replication - A system that could come to apartments, where people in apartments, when looking out of the window, can see the world going on outside, with people and cars moving, but people outside can’t see into apartments. This would get around the performance problems for people outside having to load in all the apartments, and people inside the apartments can see the world. When looking into apartments from outside, you will just see an empty room. - Loading screens - When entering apartments which are separate instances, you will enter an elevator and going up is the loading part, to make it as seamless as possible. - Luxury Apartments - These apartments will be pledge rewards only, meaning you can not purchase them with ingame money once the pledge rewards have been taken down with the new shop. They generally offer more space than normal apartments and are meant to be unique. There will probably be other small little perks such as more storage space. - Pledge Apartment Info - The homeowner package is the minimum pledge to start with a house, giving you a very compact studio apartment. After that is the Up-sized package, giving you a normal, 1 bedroom apartment. The Speed Demon has a Luxury 1 Bedroom Apartment and the VIP has a normal 2 bedroom apartment. Apartments that are higher tier than these can not be purchased anymore and came with the most expensive kickstarter pledges, such as the Two Bedroom Luxury Apartment from the $1000 kickstarter package, and the Penthouse Apartment from the $2500 and $5000 kickstarter packages. - Location - Pledge Apartments will have better location that normal apartments that can be bought in came. - Inspiration - Identity is based on modern day society and is based on cities from the East Coast of the US. -Drug Making - Drug making has quite a bit of realism for immersion, but not so much as to teach people how to make them in real life Some “ingredient” names have been changed and the process is more fun than realistic. - Renting Homes - You can rent out your house, but not apartments. However, if you own a 2 or more bedroom apartment, you can make a non-formal deal in game where they pay you rent and you give them access to your apartment and permissions to edit their room. -Death Row - This is not a planned feature. Community servers can consider a ban a lifetime sentence - Module Progress - There will be small things added over time, as module 2 is being approached once module 1 is out. Town Square will be constantly updated, and it will be out for a “fair bit of time.” -Check out Jade TV who steams modelling items for the Identity game (they’re super realistic): https://www.twitch.tv/jade77 - NPC’s - There will be animals and street vendors that will be NPC’s. E.g. if you own a shop, you can’t be there 24/7 so you can get an NPC to be your shopkeeper. Apart from that, there will be very few to no NPC’s, so that when you see a car, or someone you know it is another player (a potential risk). - Town Square will be accessed through Steam, and everyone who has access (Founder pack+) will be given a steam key. - Brewing - You can set up a distillery in your house to make alcohol that will be given a date, with the point being the older the alcohol is, the rare/better it is. - Day/Night: There will be 3 hour days and 1 hour nights and this feature will be in Town Square. - Previous Versions - There definitely could have been an earlier Town Square, but everything would have been much worse, with low quality models, etc… After seeing GTA V, they realised they needed to step it up, and knew they could do better, so the Devs spent more time to make it a lot better, hence all the delays. - New Website - With the new upcoming website there will be a new store with different payment methods other than PayPal (e.g. Paysafe). - Cops & Robbers - There will be systems to make sure there aren't for example, 1 cop and one hundred criminals on or 10 criminals and one hundred cops online. - Body Armor - Not planned as it will give too much of an advantage to people robbing other people. - Modules - Module 2 should feature bank heists and criminals, and Module 3 should introduce race tracks and cars. Link to Twitch VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/224698296

There will be some available to purchase with in-game money, so no need to worry!

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly..... Renting house and also being able to "rent a room" is cool. Also being able to brew something and have dates on it. Cops and robbers is a good thing also. Owning a business and being filthy rich and not being able to upgrade to a luxury apartment sucks. The only way to obtain one is to shell out through the nose now with your pledge. That's just b.s. (just my 2 cents) Also, the highest package that I have personally seen is $500. Never even seen the $1000+ packages.

Anytime you have a weapon it will be holstered in a visible location unless it is in your hands.

John says that "It's days, not weeks away." so VERY soon

Hey Xzothi, I'm happy to see concern for this. It's admittedly a pretty lengthy process just to add a single dynamic character model to a game, especially in our case where animations are broken into hundreds of bits that are blended into each other. And then vertex painting has to be done for each body, head, and every individual piece of clothing too. Parts of every clothing mesh also have to be manually culled by our devs so there isn't any clipping or z-fighting when player characters are wearing multiple layers of cloths (t-shirt + jacket). I'm missing a great deal of the process too in this explanation, but I hope it helps indicate why female character models are often added some time after the male character model. It's a huge task just to get one into the game, and that first character model is used to work out any kinks and bugs with skinning, rigging, inverse kinematics and animation so solutions won't have to be repeated twice for both after they've both been added to the game together. Much of this work is already done of course for both male and female characters, so if it doesn't make it into the first iteration of town square, it will be a top priority for the first major update after Town Square launch.

Thanks guys! Canada has been good to me so far. The cold weather is an tolerable tradeoff for all the other perks I didn't have at my old place! Shopping and all the restaurants I could care for are practically right next door to my apartment within walking distance. Can't complain! If you liked that UI from the sneak preview, wait until you see what Archer has been cooking up for the Town Square. I'm excited to see it in action! The video is also looking great. We're just waiting on a couple animation and clothing weight painting tweaks as far as I know, and it will be good to go as soon as we get that back from the animator. Wolf has been working on this for over a month now and he's ready to be done with it and move onto character customization for the Town Square. So so excited to see everything coming together this past month, and I can't wait to finally jump into the Town Square and meet all of you for the first time using voice chat!

First off, congratulations to @Motown for finally being able to work in the great mystical land of Canada! I think I speak for everyone when I say I wish you luck there and happy to see you finally with the project physically. VIDEO: Sad to see that the video is delayed by a couple days, but I'm still happy to see it coming out soon and can't wait to see what it contains! Here's the photo that was the sneak peak if you haven't seen it yet: U.I: The new U.I looks really clean and really can't wait to see what the other parts of it look like! Here it is if you haven't seen it already: STEAM: Interesting to see the full on integration with Steam that is happening and really happy about it. Will make playing the game and playing with other people much easier. Tell me what you guys think off all this information, let's start a discussion!

I mean, you're comparing one Wikipedia page which cites sources from unreliable scholars that has been debunked and ridiculed for producing inaccurate recordings of the number of deaths within The U.S.S.R. and The People's Republic of China to an individual that has analyzed these theories, in depth, as a political scientist... Is one interested in engaging in an actual discussion that involves reading hundreds of pages of information? Or, is one willing to remain close-minded on the subject with Wikipedia sources? Edit: This was posted without reading the previous post. It is a lot of content for the average working-class citizen, whom works a minimum of thirty hours per week, to read... trust me... it's a practice that involves a lot of time and dedication in order to understand the information in depth... cannot blame you.

Alright, I'm not in the mood of an argument and your clearly very educated on the topic unlike most of your fellow left-wingers. You are clearly preaching a different type of communism than the one everyone knows as communism.

Right, let the person play as they wish. Besides it will be fun to watch them blast the shit out of one another.

Theres so many you dont really need to make one just join one. Try the Lupranos they got a good set up

All weapons will have holsters either on the hip or chest (not sure) or back. There will be no such thing as a concealed gun. So any weapon that a player has, can be seen.

Yes, when you create your character you will create a name for him/her.

Yes, you will be able to put your hands up and surrender to player police officers and criminals who wish you take you hostage. Note that anyone can restrain you with handcuffs or zip-ties while in a surrender animation state.

Anything beyond 45 minuets is really out of the question. Gunplay is a major part of the game, not something that we want to keep players from doing. Jail is not meant to keep trolling at bay solely. It’s to make players actually think for their actions and take precautions rather than thinking they can just kill a player and get away scot-free.

While Identity will have microtransactions, they're entirely cosmetic or low-impact. By this I mean items which will not give you a competitive advantage. We're not selling good vehicles for real money. If you look at those currently for sale, you'll notice they're all toward the low end. The advantage is only for the early game; when you first start playing you'll have an easier time getting around. However, after playing a while you'll move on to bigger and better things which you purchase with game currency. We're extremely careful here in that powerful items will never, ever, be sold for real money. Apartments will only be sold for some areas of the world, mostly in large cities, using microtransactions. They're also unlimited in availability and mostly social in nature. They can function as storage, which is their only advantage, but that's precisely why they're not located in areas near important resources. This is something we take VERY seriously and we're being quite careful about how they're implemented. These microtransactions are designed to make your first days more convenient, but in no way will someone who spends more real money ever have a competitive advantage.

The micro transactions right now are meant to be purely cosmetic and only a select few apartments, they aren't meant to give you any advantage, apartments are mainly for storage and customizing the interior, so we feel it's not really a big deal. We dislike micro transactions just like the rest of you.