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The town meeting log

Felorin: Hi, and welcome to our special Tenth Anniversary town meeting!
Felorin: As you may have heard, Furcadia is about to become the first MMORPG to celebrate ten years of continuous operation. We at Dragon's Eye are so happy about that!
Felorin: We've come a long way from those early days, when there was no dream patching, and we were excited the first time we got 100 players logged onto Furcadia at once!
Felorin: And we couldn't have gotten where we are today without all of you. Furcadia is for you, and unlike most games, most of what's fun to do here is made by you as well. So from all us here at Dragon's Eye Productions, thank you very much for everything you've done the last ten years to make this a great place to be!
Felorin: We look forward to the next ten years, and plenty more after that.
Felorin: We're going to be doing a lot to celebrate our anniversary. We started this week with our one month Kiwis in Digo Market, available this December only, and we're continuing today with this town meeting.
Felorin: The main celebrations start this upcoming Friday, for our Week of Celebrations. Emerald Flame will be telling you more about that. But I'll just mention that the webpage with all the info is www.furcadia.com/tenth!
Felorin: One other web page I want to mention. We're trying to promote Furcadia to new people to celebrate our anniversary too. Right now we're just 74 votes short of getting on the front page of www.mpogd.com in their top 100 poll. There are over 800 people listening to this meeting, if some of you will go vote right now, we could be there! Just click Vote!
Felorin: They let you vote once a day, if we all keep going there I bet we could win Game of the Month for December. I'd consider that a nice Christmas present if y'all could do that for us.
Felorin: We're going to do a question & answer session after our talk, but first we want to take some time and tell you what we've been up to & what we have planned for the near future.
Felorin: Something I'm very excited about right now is the Tenth Anniversary Furcadia CD project I thought up.
Felorin: We're going to gather together some of the best dreams people have made that have quests, games, puzzles, and so on that can be played solo. We'll ask permission from all the furres who made those dreams and see who wants to be included on the CD. Everyone whose work goes on the CD will be paid in Golden DragonScales for the republishing rights.
Felorin: Then I'm going to make a special version of Furcadia that will let you go into and play all those dreams as a single player game, without even needing an internet connection. Of course for anybody that's finding out about Furcadia for the first time from this CD, we'll have the regular version on there for them to try as well!
Felorin: I'm going to start out by going through a lot of our past dream contest entries. But we're not limiting it to that. If you know of a good dream we should look at, there's a thread now in our Tenth Anniversary Forum where you can recommend it. Here's the link: http://forums.furcadia.com?showtopic=31429
Felorin: We're also going to ask people who let us use their dreams to give us permission to put them unencrypted on the CD, and to grant full permission to others to reuse their patches, DragonSpeak, etc. So the CD should be a very nice resource for dreammakers, full of art, sound effects, DS, and ideas you can incorporate into your own dreams.
Felorin: We'll see if we can get some extra music, art, and other goodies on there as bonuses. No promises yet though!
Felorin: I do imagine at the least we'll have Talzhemir do a nice piece of original art to be appear on the physical CD itself. ^^
Felorin: Anyway this should be coming out sometime in early 2007. We'll be posting more about this project on the forums and elsewhere as it develops.
Felorin: Right now I'm thinking when we release it, we'll make it available by mail order directly from us, on Digo Market. We'll send an email to everyone letting them know it's there.
Felorin: We will probably make a downloadable version available too, whether direct from us or on some of the big game downloading sites, or both. For people that don't care if they get the physical CD, and want to get it right away.
Felorin: After that, I'll see if I can work out a deal with some game publisher to get it put in a nice box and sold in the budget section of stores, too. We'll see!
Felorin: Anyway I'm really looking forward to getting that all put together. We'll probably make a few cool new maps that you walk through to get to all the dreams we include, too. They'llbe organized in groups, quests in one place, puzzle games in another, etc.
Felorin: We might throw in some dreams that are just for sightseeing and exploring, too, with an explanation that it shows what kinds of places online Furcadia has to offer.
Felorin: Oh, I have a newsflash from Gar. We've just moved up into 3rd place on mpogd.com! Thank you all for voting, moving up from 6th puts us on their front page!
Felorin: You know, with 4000 people on Furcadia right now, not to mention any friend you have that aren't on right now... I bet we could make it into first place tonight if we try. Anyway, on with other news!
Felorin: I'd also like to tell you a few things about how our update is progressing today.
Felorin: I know some of our plans for it were discussed in the last town meeting, but that was a long time ago.
Felorin: There are probably a lot of you listening today who weren't even on Furcadia yet when we had that last one!
Felorin: I'm sorry we haven't been able to get this update done a lot sooner. Believe me, nobody wants it out as much as we do - we depend on Furcadia to pay our bills, and not getting things like this done are a big problem for us!
Felorin: But we've been working hard, and making good progress on it.
Felorin: Our current version already supports colored text, and truetype fonts. Talzhemir's made a beautiful new skin that's going to be the default look in the new update. Though the current two skins will still be supported as well.
Felorin: We have our minotaurs and kitterwings ready, we're previewing them here in the Town Meeting dream for Silver Sponsors to see. Of course they may still change some more before the final release.
Felorin: The kitterwing's special ability is changing size. We're working on giving her some special sparkles, too, probably with a particle system.
Felorin: We've laid some of the groundwork for the update after this one already, where we are going to support full 24 bit artwork in Furcadia, along with translucency and a lot more animation you can do. With much finer control over the timing too, in smaller time increments.
Felorin: This update is probably going to have a 24 bit title screen, and allow you to upload 24 bit portrait art into your portrait space as well. (We may allow non silver sponsors to purchase portrait clearing for a month so you can update your old portraits if you wish, and possibly cut the price down temporarily too.)
Felorin: We're going to have the option for you to put whispers in separate windows in this update, the way some proxies do now. They'll be part of the same interface as our pager / buddy list / chat program, which will hopefully be done in this update as well.
Felorin: It'll let you put chat channels in separate windows too. In addition to the Event, Felorin, and Talzhemir channels and all the Beekin channels, every group package will come with at least one chat channel as well!
Felorin: Group packages are going to also come with a web page, a custom desctag your group members all get to have in their description, the ability to have larger dreams and more DragonSpeak and more localspecies, and a whole lot more.
Felorin: Silver Sponsors will be able to have slightly larger dreams & DragonSpeak too. Gold Sponsors even more so - and they will get all the features of Silver Sponsorship for all of the characters on one account.
Felorin: Speaking of desctags - we're going to introduce some new ones that you can buy right inside Furcadia for just a few DragonScales. Should be fun!
Felorin: We're also going to have the adult verification system, which will show a "verified 18+" desctag for those who sign up for it. We'll probably start accepting signups for that before the update is out. That's been discussed on our forums as well.
Felorin: We're going to be adding a new map for those who have that tag only, and who want to socialize in a setting reminiscent of Disneyland's "Main Street USA". We call the dream Olde Town. Again, our Silver Sponsors can see a sneak preview of it - our town meeting is being held in it right now!
Felorin: We're redoing Furrabian Nights also, expanding it into two dreams (for more upload space) and giving it a whole new look.
Felorin: We have another new set of avatars underway, which we hope we'll have ready in time for this update as well.
Felorin: Some of you old-timers may know that an artist named Kestrel worked on our Phoenix and Dragon avatars, and drew the beautiful dragon that's on our main webpage.
Felorin: We've recently worked out plans with her to do the first of our new series of premium avatars, which will be male and female versions of all our regular species! She's going to start with the male and female feline, which she'll begin work on next week.
Felorin: We're very excited to see how these turn out. Many of the patch items you see all over Furcadia are hers, including a lot of the big statues people like to use.
Felorin: Another pet is being drawn by Indigo Nightfall, whose art you may have seen in various dreams. A couple of them can still be seen over in the Wolf Howl contest and exhibition dreams for a few more days.
Felorin: As for myself, I've finally programmed DragonSpeak to let you change walls in Furcadia. Long overdue, I know. I'm just waiting for sanctimonious to get the next test client build ready, so I can try that out!
Felorin: We're also going to be making some DragonSpeak to let you do things with pets, possibly to accept and give out cookies, maybe even DragonScales. There's going to be a lot of other new DragonSpeak as well.
Felorin: Every furre will get their own webpage about their character in this update, totally free! You'll have some options to customize it, put up longer versions of your description, etc. People will be able to click on you and call it up any time.
Felorin: We've also been redoing a lot of the fundamental server programming to enable features like the Instant Messenger, and to make Furcadia more stable and reliable. This is a big part of why it's taken so long for us to get this update done, but we hope you'll all find it was worth waiting for! The next update should go a lot quicker.
Felorin: We've also made Furcadia more reliable and hopefully lower on netlag with our move to Layered Technologies. If you remember how much more we had lag and crashes back when we were hosted on BurstNet, we hope you'll agree it was worth moving to a more expensive, higher quality hosting service.
Felorin: We also moved from a server machine with two CPUs to a machine with four. Currently Furcadia is still running on just one computer, with web server and email server machines hosted at the same site.
Felorin: Personally I think my server programming is the most efficient of any large online game anywhere in the world. Well, and sanctimonious's programming too!
Felorin: In 2007 we're planning to finally move it onto multiple machines so we can grow even bigger. My code was designed to allow for that back in 1996, because I knew we'd eventually need to. How's that for thinking ahead?
Felorin: Well there's tons more I could say, but we have other people to hear from, and we want to hear your questions and get to those also! So now I'd like to turn the floor over to Emerald Flame.
Emerald|Flame: Hello all! We have a bunch of fun activities planned for you for the 10th Anniversary Celebrations! The main pages for the events are at http://furcadia.com/tenth/. Be sure to check back there regularly as we are adding new events and content that you sent in often.
Emerald|Flame: Speaking of you sending things in, Furcadia is really all about the wonderful content that you provide. With that in mind, we need a lot more of that content to display as part of our celebrations! This page tells you what we are accepting http://www.furcadia.com/tenth/contributions.html, but I'll go in to a bit more detail. We are sorry but we will probably not be able t0 post up everything that is sent in, but for the dreams, eCards and screenshots that we accept and add, we will give out some participation awards in Golden DragonScales.
Emerald|Flame: We are looking for historical dreams from the past ten years! Do you have an old Guild dream or a dream that did something revolutionary for it's time? Maybe you have one of the first towers built or made something cool in DragonSpeak when a new set of code first came out? Please send in your dreams by the 12th. Make sure you give us dates and a paragraph about the dream as well as a screenshot to put on the pages. You can follow the dream packaging guide listed on the page listed above.
Emerald|Flame: We want your screenshots! Lots and lots of screenshots from throughout the last ten years. Felorin even has some from the first week Furcadia was in, do you? Please send your Furcadia name and a description of what is going on in the shot, as well as any names and dates you remember. We'd prefer them to be the whole screens but we might accept some text snippets or just the graphic screen. Again, not all will be accepted, but Scales for those which are.
Emerald|Flame: We've had eCards in Furcadia for sometime, but we want some special ones just for the 10th Anniversary so you can use them to invite back all your old friends as well as new ones! Be sure to check out all the details at http://www.furcadia.com/tenth/ecards.html for sending them in and don't forget to send them to all your friends! I'm giving out Scales for the ones we add to the page!
Emerald|Flame: Groups and Guilds have been a huge part of the growth and community of Furcadia. We'd like to invite all of them past and present to get a booth in the Celebration Dream to advertise and meet with old and new members. Please send in a short description (fits in one post) of your group. Be sure to include any webpages and the furc URL to your dream. Adult groups can advertise but they can only post webpages with PG-13 content. Some groups may have to share booths if we get a lot of submissions. Hope to hear from you all!
Emerald|Flame: The Furcadia Forums are a great place to talk with everyone about your Furcadia experiences. I've made a special forum just for our Tenth celebrations! There's even a thread there just for you to write up your Furcadia Story or one of someone you know and miss. There's also a lot of discussion, joke pages and news there as well! Be sure to check it out and post your story too!
Emerald|Flame: Along with the webpages rich with content, we are also putting up the old Worldcon dream to hold events in and load the historic dreams! During the summer of 1999 Furcadia participated in a virtual Worldcon in conjunction with the real Worldcon and many other online communities. That was the same time that main maps like Vinca, Challenges, Furcadiabian Nights, etc, were added in a huge update. Many refered to the time before that as "Old Furcadia". We hope to have a version of "Old Furcadia" up as well. Be sure to visit the all the dreams and the events we will host there. I'll go over a few of the planned activities now.
Emerald|Flame: Besides this Town Meeting, the first big event will be Homecoming Day on Dec. 15th. This is the day we'd especially like all old players to come back to say "hello" and help us celebrate! Be sure to pass the word of the 10th Anniversary to everyone you know to get the word out! Post on your IMs, blogs, Myspace, forums and any place you can think of to help us find as many old users as we can (and maybe some new ones!). I'd like to encourage all the Groups and Guilds to hold reunions in their own meeting spots on this day as well! Let all your members past and present know!
Emerald|Flame: December the 16th is the actual 10 Year Anniversary of the first day Furcadia was open to the public! There will be activities all day in the Celebration dream loaded to the Vinca. At 4 pm FST Felorin and Talzhemir will give a talk on the making of Furcadia and the first ten years. You can listen in person, on the event channel, or you can read the log of it posted to the Celebration pages. Fair warning, the dream will only hold 299 furres, so anyone idling or anyone spoiling other's fun will be removed from the dream. Hope to see you all there!
Emerald|Flame: On the 17th we have a fun surprise for you! We are holding a Celebrity Auction of Creators and some Associates! They've all picked their own things to "offer" and it looks to be a lot of fun. This will be a hard coded auction with one winner per "auctionee". You will want to have at least a portion of your DragonScales before the Auction to be sure you can bid as high as you wish. The prices listed on the page indicate different levels of service you get when the bidding reaches that price.
Emerald|Flame: The 18th is Dreamers Day. This is the day to celebrate all the wonderrful patches, dreams and DragonSpeak you make! Listen in on the event channel for dreamhopping parties and featured dreams! Some of our Associates and Creators will be giving talks this day about dreamweaving, DS and patches! Check the pages for more updated news closer to time!
Emerald|Flame: I first designed the Beekin program back in 1998 after Felorin asked me to make it so new players had one on one help with Furcadia issues. 8 years later, we now have a thriving group of volunteers that serve their online community! Dec. 19th is the day you can give a Beekin Volunteer a hug and thank them for all they do to try and make Furcadia a nicer place! I will be giving a talk on the history of the Beekin program that day. Cironir will also be giving a talk on community!
Emerald|Flame: Last, but not least, we will be holding a Groups and Guilds Day on the 21st! This is a chance for us to celebrate all the awesome Groups out there, both past and present! Group leaders are encouraged to be in their booths in the Celebration dream and talk to potential new members. Don't forget to send in your Group information! I will also be giving a talk on the new Group Packages and you can ask questions! Talzhemir may also give a talk on Roleplay on Furcadia! Remember you can tune in by typing =event!
Emerald|Flame: We are very proud to be the first MMOG to reach the 10 year mark with no years off and we'd like the whole world to help us celebrate! Thank you all for everything that you do to make Furcadia possible by your contributions both on Digo Maket and the wonderful things you make! Remember to tell everyone about our "Fabulous" 10 Year Celebration! http://furcadia.com/tenth/
Felorin: Thanks, Emerald!
Emerald|Flame: Thank you, Felorin and Talzhemir! I also want to say thanks to all my wonderful Associates and Beekins who make it possible to put on these events!
Felorin: And I want to thank all of my partners here at Dragon's Eye, that's Emmie, sanctimonious, and my bestest friend Talzhemir, without whom I never coulda done all this.
Felorin: Thanks to everyone for playing and telling your friends, and especially thanks to those of you who get our Digo Market goodies that pay the bills and keep us going. (Did I mention we have the www.digomarket.com domain now? Did I mention that DragonScales make a great gift? Ok!)
Felorin: We're ready now for what's a lot of people's favorite part of our Town Meetings...
Felorin: It's Question & Answer time! Silver Sponsors can get in the question line to ask your questions. All of you listening in on the =event channel can whisper your questions to TownMeeting. We won't be able to answer everyone's questions of course, but we'll answer as many as we have time for!
Felorin: Cruncher asks one of our most popular questions. When will the update be out?
Felorin: Well, I'm afraid that game development is such an inexact science/art, that we never know when anything will be done until the moment we finish it.
Felorin: Other game companies don't know either, but they announce their guesses publically, then dissapoint their gamers whenever they turn out to be late. We don't like to dissapoint people. We are going to try to have our update out within a few months, but we'll see!
Felorin: Kosan asks, will there be a furcadia email for players.
Felorin: Yes, we plan to set things up so that Furcadia staff will continue to use @furcadia.com addresses, while Furcadia players will be able to get an account with your-furre-name@furcadia.net. That way you can have a nice Furcadia email address, without getting people mixed up about who is staff here. Watch for more details when we work out how those will be made available.
Felorin: Hikaru Tyris asks, what is a Kitterwing. Talzhemir, do you want to answer this? You invented them!
Talzhemir: A Kitterwing is the itsy bitsy tiny form of a Faerie Furre, according to the default source material, the "canon" called "Dragonlands".
Felorin: Oh, Jesus just asked if Catorce from PokeParadise will marry him. Well, I guess we'll have to let Catorce answer that one!
Felorin: Tag McIt asks if the Bovines are going to be a free species. (He says he's attracted to horns. And sparkly things.)
Felorin: We've decided to call them Minotaurs now, because that's how they're drawn, and it sounds cooler than bovine (or cow). And yes, they'll be totally free for everyone to play as.
Felorin: Calite asks what plans we have for the far future.
Felorin: Well, some of these are covered in past town meeting logs you can find on the forums... Attention economy / mana, spectator mode, multiuser simultaneous editing of the same dream, voice chat, phoenixspeak, friend finder/matchmaker, and the mysterious "Dragon Eggs" of which I will speak no more tonight.
Felorin: Ba asks if there are going to be jobs to earn DragonScales. Good question!
Felorin: DragonScales is meant to be a currency system so that you, the players, the furres of Furcadia can buy and sell things to each other, hire each other to do things, etc. Dragon's Eye is meant to be kind of like the government that prints dollar bills for all of you to use. What you do with them is up to all of you - and constantly delights and surprises us!
Felorin: Part of my idea was that by making them exchangable for wings, dragons, etc. that would be kind of like the early US government backing dollars with "the gold standard", promising they'd exchange them for something of value so people would trust the newly invented money. We do give out DragonScales as prizes in some of our contests, by the way, like the Wolf Howl dream contest we announced prizes in last night. But we imagine most of the "jobs" will come from your fellow players!
Felorin: Kreegar asks what prices will be on Group packages, and if you can get a for-life version.
Felorin: I want to mention, Emerald Flame will be giving a nice talk on Group and Guild packages on the 21st, and there will be a Q&A *just* about that subject after that talk. There's more than I could possibly cover here tonight! They will be priced in increments, from $5 a month for the cheapest, up through $10 a month, $15 a month, and so on. Each one having more features and goodies than the last. We don't know the top price yet. There are no plans currently for a for-life version, just for the subscription versions.
Felorin: Kanuhi asked if the whisper windows will work with proxies, and can you combine them together in a tabbed single window?
Felorin: How smoothly a given proxy will work with our whisper system will be up to each individual proxy author. I imagine eventually a good proxy would put in an option "have whispers displayed by proxy or by Furcadia". Of course we'll be adding special features like displaying the avatar and portrait of who you're talking to in their whisper window, using Furcadia fonts and features and borders, etc. So we imagine most people will switch to ours.
Felorin: As for a tabbed interface - yes, and I'm wanting to develop over time a really cool interface for dragging things together and making them combine again. Currently I'm thinking of "the paradigm of woobling", but I really need to invent a better way to say all that. As well as how it'll look & how it'll work.
Felorin: Sakura Ishtiama asked, do group packages mean you have to pay to be in a guild now? Absolutely not. First, if a guild wants one of these, the owners of the guild would buy it and all the players in that guild could just enjoy the extra stuff. (Though some guilds might want to have several people chip in to pay). Second, EVERY guild that's running now can certainly keep doing things just the way they are now, totally for free. They only have to pay if they want to add some of the new extra stuff. Everything that has been free remains free eternally.
Felorin: Tsukasa asks if Gold Sponsors will get a discount on Digo Market items.
Felorin: We don't plan to offer any permanent discounts for sponsors, but we have considered the possibility of occasionally doing a special one day or one week sale item or package that only sponsors can buy. We might try that sometime. Also remember that Silver Sponsors get 5 Silver DragonScales a month. Gold Sponsors will get 1 Gold DragonScale a month. You can use that like a dollar off coupon for anything in Digo Market any time, or save several of them up to use together!
Felorin: I'm not sure if everyone knows, you don't have to have the full price of an item in DragonScales to use them on Digo Market. If you want a 10 dollar portrait space, you can use 5 Golden DragonScales and five dollars cash. Just want to make that clear.
Felorin: Sorcy asks why Kiwis don't have portrait art or specitags?
Felorin: Well, the kiwis were put in back in 1999, partly preparing for an eventual April Fool's joke (which we did a few years later). We just decided to sell them this 10th anniversary month on a whim, a week ago. (I think it was my idea!) They don't even have the official "correct" Furcadia outline color. That's part of why we're just doing this for a month, they weren't really made to be an "official" avatar.
Emerald|Flame: No it wasn't! I was my idea ;p
Felorin: Ooops, sorry Emmie!
Felorin: Arctic Wish asks if there will be a way to trade dreams for DragonScales safely in the update.
Felorin: This is another good question. There's always a problem of potential risk when you trade Digos or DragonScales for something that's not a built-in Furcadia item with clear ownership. From dreams (easily copyable, unlike wings) to services (someone drawing something for you, running an event, etc.) to stuff from other online games (Neopets and Gaia items are popular trades here). We want to solve this problem in an innovative way...
Felorin: While it's not going to be in this update, sometime in 2007 I want to roll out an Escrow program. This is something that exists in the real world, where a trustworthy third party holds goods or payments for one or both sides until a deal is completed (or given up on). Then they give the money and/or items either to the person being paid, or back to the original person if things didn't work out.
Felorin: I think this is an immensely powerful idea, and it's needed for places like Ebay and a lot of others as well as Furcadia. I would LOVE it if people come to use Furcadia as a place to safely escrow a lot of deals for stuff outside of Furcadia too. We need to work out whether to use a reputation system, or have Dragon's Eye certify individuals, or what, and add some programming to support it. But I'm very excited about the idea of doing this.
Felorin: Simseth asks whether the friends list in our pager will let you see what dream they're in. Good question!
Felorin: Our pager will let you see what dream someone is in IF they have themselves set to allow that, and if the owner of the dream they're in hasn't disabled that feature. We want to protect people's ability to have privacy if they wish, while providing information about people who don't mind.
Felorin: My eventual plan for our pager is that it doesn't just list people, but also dreams and chat channels as "stuff you have lists of on there". So you could also look at favorite dreams you add to your pager and see how many people are there, and maybe even a list of names (if the dream owner allows it).
Talzhemir: (re: escrow, Normally it can only used for straightforward exchanges, and not if there's a value judgment involved, such as "the art/dream must be finished/good enough".)
Felorin: Puk asks if we might keep the Kiwi avatar as a subscription item, or even a one year item.
Felorin: We don't have any plans to sell the kiwi again after this month. Though if people really like them a lot, maybe we'd consider it!
Felorin: Alex Layne asks if there'll be a log of this meeting posted later. Yes, we always put Town Meeting logs up at http://forums.furcadia.com so tell your friends that missed it!
Felorin: Risembool Rangers asks if the kitterwings and kiwis will be available on our Free Digo Day on our 10th birthday.
Felorin: Well, the kitterwings are in the next update, so no on those. As for the kiwis - I guess we'll have to decide that pretty soon, don't know yet!
Talzhemir: Thank you!
Felorin: Lauren Bassnium asks if there'll be a higher limit on DS lines for non-sponsors in the next update, since there are more commands to use.
Felorin: Well, the idea of adding more to a language like DragonSpeak is that it can let you do the same amount of stuff with less lines needed. Or let you do MORE stuff with the same number of lines. So we don't have any plans to right now, 10,000 is a lot for most folks! Someday if a lot of people are needing more we might increase it though, prices of RAM and bandwidth have come down constantly over these 10 years, which is part of why we're going to allow bigger than 200x200 dreams for group packages now.
Felorin: Emmie reminds me we're at 8,000 now, not 10,000. My mistake.
Felorin: Kusika wants to know if the old Message Center from Furcadia's first few years will ever come back!
Felorin: I'd like to do that someday. If we don't, I at least want to put the "sticker" features and stuff into the web. But I like building stuff into clients, with the web you tend to click and wait a second or two. The way I program things, you click and something happens immediately. I think that's better. Plus I loved the sound effects we put in to go with the stickers Talz made!
Felorin: Turquoise asks how much it will cost to do an officially registered account transfer.
Felorin: We're thinking probably 5 or 10 dollars. More likely just 5.
Felorin: Tiasha asks, will there be more fur, marking, cape etc. colors in this update? No, but the next update will be our 24 bit engine, and it WILL have more colors for those!
Felorin: Pwnz asks if their true love Drake Osiris will marry them and be theirs forever. Again, I'm gonna have to let Drake answer this one. (Good luck, Pwnz!)
Felorin: Kaisame wants to know if we'll sell the ability to make a custom avatar, like you can make a custom portrait space now.
Talzhemir: It's possible, in future but we don't have plans for it. Like Dreams, it means downloading by others, and potential delays if a bunch of custom avatar bearers show up at once.
Talzhemir: (There are also some roleplay and Continuity issues to consider-- as demonstrated by when a horde of kiwis shows up in a place where they are not so appropriate, and there isn't DS to specifically block them.)
Felorin: Maybe someday, though there's bandwidth issues there. Only clickers need the art for your portrait, everyone nearby needs every avatar. But what I'm thinking of doing is a different compromise. Artists could make custom avatars they want to sell, and submit them to us. If we approve an avatar, it goes on Digo Market, and the person who drew it gets a royalty in DragonScales for each one sold. That'd let players make custom ones, but there wouldn't be a bajillion downloading to your computer every time you wandered around Allegria!
Felorin: Miss Lightning asks how much Gold Sponsorship will cost?
Felorin: It'll be $10 a month. (And yes, we'd be delighted if you want to put up a Furcadia poster in your home town. We always want more people to know about Furcadia!)
Felorin: There are 8 1/2 by 11 mini-posters at www.furcadia.com/flyers by the way.
Felorin: Alabaster Sea asks, if you get a verified 18+ tag, and you're wearing our special new portrait type that's only viewable by other people with the tag, will they be able to see it everywhere in Furcadia, or only when you're in an R-rated area?
Felorin: Right now my thinking is we'd let people see that wherever, since only adults will see it. For people who don't want to see questionable material, we might give verified adults an option to say "I don't WANT to see people's adults-only portraits, don't display them to me". That would be easy enough to do.
Felorin: Daegan asks if there'll be a major price change for the old Digos, since the new ones are coming out.
Felorin: No, we're planning to keep the prices we have now, except for our seasonal sales. Our main new change is the subscription options on butterfly and batwings, and the "everything" subscriptions we tested in our last sale. If those go well expect us to continue adding the one-month options to more of our Digo items. We'll see.
Felorin: Fusbun asks, why doesn't Cironir love me? I don't know the answer to this one. Maybe you didn't send him enough roses?
Felorin: Fawkiia asks, where are these prime wings we've been hearing about?
Felorin: Oops, I told you there was way more about the update than I had time to mention. Yes, we've made a set of wings similar to those that're on the Prime characters you see wandering around in some of our festivals. They'll be available to buy in the next update, the art's pretty much done already. They're big and fluffy and feathery, and Emerald is going to have a sneak peak at them up on the Silver Sponsor forums sometime soon!
Felorin: Foxicity asks if any of the editors will be updated in this update?
Felorin: There might be some small adjustments - I want to get in a way to put the X,Y coordinates in the editor into your Windows clipboard, so you can easily paste them into the DragonSpeak editor. But when we do the next update after, the 24 bit one, we'll be working on the editors a bunch. They need to be modified anyway to work with 24 bit patches, so we're going to improve and integrate more then.
Cironir: Oh, why do I not love Fusbun -- well, actually! I don't know him or her, but that can be probably arranged. He or she also has the wonderful option of ... buying me ... *cringes!* at the auction in a few days!
Felorin: Mauser asks if we're going to have a more secure version of secure trade, and/or add more information to it.
Felorin: We are going to make a graphic version of it, instead of the simple all-text one we have now. We will try to make the needed information displayed clearly and completely for you, we also think it'll be easier to use (and more fun).
Felorin: I don't know what update that'll be in, but it's a priority for 2007. We're trying to build an economy in DragonScales and stuff here for everyone.
Felorin: E'lexan asked basically who what when how where which and why about the pets! And loves Furcadia. (Thanks E'lexan!)
Felorin: The pets will follow you around, they'll eat cookies, people will be able to script them with DragonSpeak so they can do all sorts of interesting stuff we didn't even imagine yet. And we'll keep adding more stuff to them in future updates. They'll hatch out of a big egg when you get them, and you'll see which color pet you got. Some colors may be rarer than others, and you can trade 'em. Yes, they will cost money, but you pay a little once and you own it permanently. We wouldn't take your pet away!
Felorin: Teno asks why we won't let Silver Sponsors see the new stuff.
Felorin: Well, we DO let everybody see it all. But the Sponsors get to see it first, when it's newest! That's to thank them for supporting us, and to encourage people to do so. Furcadia isn't a hobby, it's our full time jobs. Most people don't pay for it, and that's fine, but we do need some people to buy stuff here so we can afford to keep the server going, and pay ourselves money to live on. (Thanks again, all Sponsors, and buyers of Dragons, Phoenixes, and Wings! You let us do what we love for a living, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!)
Felorin: Stinkini asks how they can get hugs from Felorin, Talz, Cironir and Emerald Flame. Well, I think chocolates from daskalides.com are a good start. (They didn't pay me to say that, I just love 'em!) But if you ask us nicely when we're in a good mood that can work too.
Felorin: I'm sorry, that's multiple questions. I'll answer the last one. You could try, but don't forget his last name is "Lunarfang". He's a nice guy though, I don't THINK he'd bite.
Felorin: Kenshin Fell from Grace asks why when you reload the game it doesn't tell you if your dream has been unloaded from the main map?
Felorin: The idea of "temporary dreams" was meant to be a placeholder until we worked out how we were going to implement permanent or semi-permanent dreams. (We've decided on "semi-permanent".) Maintenance of your dream shouldn't require you to be around 24 hours a day or have a "bot" program. We're hoping to have a system where you pay "mana" (our attention currency system) to produe some extra "duration" for your dream. If you had put in enough to make it last 4 more days, you'll know you wouldn't need to check in on it before then.
Felorin: Daiktana asks if we'll have variables that can store words or names in the next update. I'd love to do that, but it's a lot of work and I don't think I'll be able to have it in this update.
Felorin: Isadora asks if Alby who she loves dearly will marry her. Well, if this is what people are getting Silver Sponsorship to talk about, far be it from me to deny them. Whaddya say, Alby?
Felorin: McDonald's On Furcadia asks what are the estimated prices for a kitterwing?
Felorin: I'd say the Kitterwing prices would be somewhere between the price of a Double Cheeseburger per month and the price of a Big Mac Value Meal per month. Seriously, it'll be somewhere in the range of our other avatars, don't know exactly yet.
Felorin: Icy Midwinter asks if there'll be any new objects, floors and walls in the new update. There aren't any plans for those right now, no.
Felorin: We're going to have to be redoing our artwork to take advantage of the 24 bit update, so we probably won't be adding things like that until that one's out. Then we'll have a bunch of auto-animating objects too, which will be cool.
Felorin: Aybella (and others) have asked how do you get a job at Dragon's Eye Productions. Well there's just half a dozen of us and we're trying to get this update out so we can keep all of us paid! When we do grow, often we hire people that've done a lot of good volunteer work for us in the past. There's no guarantee, obviously there's thousands of volunteers and only a few staff here. But that's not a bad way to start, as long as you make plans for some other career if we don't hire ya.
Felorin: Cruncher asks if there'll be right-click options in the update, or if he has to buy sanctimonious at the Celebrity Auction and make him add those to Dogproxy?
Talzhemir: For art, we sometimes need artists trained in specific programs; this Forum post explains a little more where I also look: http://forums.furcadia.com?showtopic=31393/
Felorin: In our next update, you'll be able to right-click on a furre's name to add them to buddy list, ignore, share, etc. That's already programmed. And you'll have a menu of dream related options if you right-click on the dream portal. In the update after that, you'll be able to right-click on a furre's avatar too.
Felorin: DJ Mike asks Felorin (that's me) why I picked the colors I did.
Felorin: Well, purple has always been my favorite color. I was mostly purple until we released butterfly wings, then I switched some purples for red, blue and green to make the wings look prettier and more dramatic. It seemed a shame to have them all purple when they were drawn to be able to be multicolored!
Felorin: Dopple asks if you'll be able to turn off whisper windows. Yes, you'll have the option to have some, all, or none of your whispers going to the main Furcadia text window just like they work now. Up to you. Or you can have them appear in both.
Felorin: Drughaig asks if there will ever be an official Macintosh client for Furcadia, directly from Dragon's Eye.
Felorin: We'd like to have an official Mac client, we may see about building a codebase that can compile on either platform eventually, so that updates would be easy to keep going on the Mac too. Not sure when we'll have the time to make that, though.
Felorin: Linux we're not as motivated for, since generally it runs on PCs, and we provide a way for PCs to play already. Some Linux users even dual boot to play games, others run the Windows emulator WINE, which Furc works under.
Felorin: Aeon Lorus asks if we'll change the classic wings in the 24 bit engine, and if not, will there be a similar but higher quality version?
Felorin: Our philosophy is you don't change or remove stuff in an online game, because any old thing you made someone uses, loves, and has other stuff dependent on it probably. For 24 bits, we're going to make better looking versions of our old art, but it will try to be pretty faithful to that art but with things like better shading and texture, etc. We will also keep all the old 8 bit versions around somewhere for anyone who wants it, to match the colors in their own patches or for whatever other reasons.
Felorin: Our new Prime Wings, by the way, are essentially a bigger, better, more detailed and attractive version of our Classic Wings, in a lot of ways. You'll see 'em, hope you will like them!
Felorin: A Barefoot Paradise Bar asks about Silver Sponsors getting a discount on getting Group Packages.
Felorin: Sponsorship and Group Packages are really two different things, it's not an "upgrade". You can have either or both, there won't be any discount there. We are thinking about possibly having the very top level group package include a free silver or gold sponsorship for the Rah and maybe one for a Taneest, though.
Talzhemir: (In a way, Silver Sponsors get a discount to anything they want, in the form of the DragonScales they regularly receive.)
Felorin: Shy'tala Ly'tana n'ha Kyr asks if furres with Share will be able to use the Banish command, or will that just be for people with group packages?
Felorin: I just wanted to see if I could type that name. Seriously, we're going to build a system where you can create multiple categories of furres, name them, and define what each of them can and can't do - emitloud, eject, banish, etc. Don't know yet when we'll have this, and whether it'll require a group package for some or all of it. I do want to give some more free control, like letting the dream owner know who did an eject, for one thing!
Felorin: Turquoise asks what Beekin Day will consist of. Emmie?
Emerald|Flame: Beekin Appreciation Day is mainly about the community and DEP saying a big "Thanks" for all the wonderful volunteer work you give your online community! I will also give a talk on the history of the Beekins and we can all celebrate the Beekins in the 10th Anniversary Celebration dream!
Felorin: Puk asks if we might ever make a Naga avatar?
Felorin: We've thought about it a little, but we don't have any current plans to do one. Of course you never know what mythical creature we might add in eventually. Nagas, manticores, ki-rin, who knows? I've seen Talzhemir sketching snake people before, but I don't know if we'll ever have any in Furcadia. Time will tell.
Talzhemir: In the official material, there are two reptilian races officially listed: the Serp and the Nagafurre (which is also a "mythical", like the Dragons, Phoenixes, and Gryffes). http://www.thegenieslamp.com/Fur/bestiary/serp.htm http://www.thegenieslamp.com/Fur/bestiary/evilnagafurre.htm I think it's possible that we'll eventually see both of them.
Felorin: Hexi asks what are the possibilities of adding more beekin groups in the future?
Emerald|Flame: I talk about that a bit on some forum posts. We can add more right now due to resource issues, but for the future we are wanting to add Roleplay, Event, Sound/Mucic and FluFF (Furcadia Friend Finder) Beekins!
Felorin: Kagaromroo0 asks why Digo owners other than silver sponsors can't see all the sneak previews too.
Felorin: Well, that's one of the "fun features we sell" in Digo Market. We can't put every feature into every item or package we sell, or people would only buy stuff from us once!
Felorin: Tsukasa T. Tiger asks whether furres with higher end systems will get support for higher resolution, lighting/shadowing, or some form of client modding.
Felorin: Our philosophy has always been that any computer has enough "oomph" to create a substance Talzhemir and I know as "fun" - and we should know, we produced fun on computers that ran at 1MHz (that's a thousandth of a GHz!) with just 64K or RAM (again, a K is 1/1000th of a meg). When Talzhemir and I were presented with these amazingly powerful PCs in the 90s, we decided to make games that would run on 97% of them, not the lastest 20% purchased in the last year, like some flashy game companies. But...
Felorin: I also know secret voodoo ninja pirate kung-fu for squeezing every last drop of performance out of computer graphics. You had to in the early days, or your games would do very little! So we can support higher resolutions and translucency effects even on computers that are a few years old. Sanctimonious is good at this too, you'll see how good in our 24 bit update.
Felorin: We may have to put in some options to turn some of those things off, in case your computer isn't just 3 years old, but more like 6 or 8 years old, or you "Need Moar RAM". I imagine your flashy brand new computer will run thme faster and smoother, too.
Felorin: But we're committed to keeping Furcadia gorgeous for everyone, hopefully! As for plug-in architectures... I think that's a very cool idea, but it would probably be years off before we might get to that point. Though we may do Dragon's Eggs before that. (Aren't they mysterious?)
Talzhemir: Indeed they are...
Felorin: Mauser asks how we'll feel about alt trading once the update comes out?
Felorin: We won't feel any differently about it, we have mixed feelings about the whole thing. In any case, it will cost $5 or $10 (probably $5) to officially transfer a character to a different account. We hope that'll make it so people that are serious about really wanting to give (or sell) someone their character a way to make it safe and reliable to give it to them, while discouraging the people who just want to grab 100 names hoping they can trade them in for free stuff.
Felorin: Any transfers made without paying the fee will not be considered official by us, and the character will just go back to whoever had it, as if it was a stolen password case.
Felorin: Customer service is the top expense of most online games, and we have a small overworked staff of one and a half people, and people trading/stealing/scamming with characters and passwords is one of our top things that eats up too much time (and slows down responses to other people's customer service questions too).
Felorin: The Masked Elf asks if I love The Muskrat. Yes, but only because they interviewed me! http://www.themuskrat.org/thetwentyfourth.htm
Felorin: Kotzen asks if alts that have had a portait space put on them and then left idle for years when the creatore leaves Furcadia might ever be made available for new players to get the name once again?
Felorin: Well, one of the things we tell people when they give us their ten bucks (or ten dragonscales, or five bucks if they got the six for the price of three deal) is "We will keep your character name for you forever if you pay for this and put it on your character". I don't think it would be right to go back on our promise to a person who paid us money for something we told them we'd do. It'd be like expiring a set of wings for life. So no, we don't do that.
Felorin: We have had over a million characters created since Furcadia started. Maybe two million or even more, I'd have to ask sanctimonious. Of those, only a tiny, tiny fraction have Digo items. Let them keep 'em, plenty of other names out there.
Felorin: Sirum Hest asks why we're going to have official character transferring, and won't it just make people register tons of names hoping someone will want to buy one of them.
Felorin: Well, people already do that NOW. And while we can't ever totally stop that, knowing that anybody who wants to buy your character name for a patch or some Gaia gold or wings or whatever will now have to pay you that PLUS a $5 cash fee... That should make the actual trades happen less, since people who want something for nothing won't put up any cash.
Felorin: And we do have to have an official way to move stuff around for people who're quitting Furcadia but giving their stuff to a family member, we need to register somehow when people change email providers, etc. Also this stuff floods our customer service staff, charging a small fee not only pays for their time, but hopefully will reduce the number of cases involving this that they deal with per day, freeing up time for other kinds of player help!
Felorin: Season's End asks what will happen to old dreams when we go to 24 bit? Will they have to be rebuilt?
Felorin: As Emmie pointed out, you can still upload dreams that were made in Furcadia's first year - even the first week! And they'll still work. When the 24 bit update comes out, ALL old dreams, patches, etc. will still work. They just won't show you any of the new colors, you'll still see the 256 colors it was drawn in, just the way it looked before. If you want the new colors you'll have to draw them in. (Except on your furres and portraits, you can pick new color ranges even in old dreams!)
Felorin: Disproportionableness asks what programming languages are used on the Furcadian webpage. Our website mainly uses PHP. The Furcadia game server and the Furcadia client you run on your PC are made in C and C++, if you were wondering. We also use some SQL on the server, and a few shell scripts and things. (I promise you, this all makes sense to programmers.)
Felorin: And I'm glad I only had to type that last name, not try to pronounce it.
Felorin: Oh, Emmie informs me there's a lot of javascript on the website too. I mainly do the client and server coding, though I'm going to start doing some PHP soon.
Felorin: E'lexan asks if there will be any avian avatars in future updates?
Talzhemir: Over the years we've had a lot of requests for this or that avatar. They do not go unheeded, and, they are posted on the Suggestions Forum. "Byrddes" are on the list of eventual species to add. (and by the way... please, if you have question that's a suggestion in disguise, we strongly appreciate you speaking out at the Forum rather than at the town meeting. We really do listen to Suggestions and take them VERY seriously-- more seriously than we can take a question right here and now! ^-^
Talzhemir: It's a "pinned" post by the by. http://forums.furcadia.com?showforum=17
Felorin: Hexi asks if Kedessa will be his heartbond, and if Emmie will perform the ceremony.
Felorin: I can't speak for Kedessa, but I know Emerald Flame is going to be in our Celebrity Auctions next friday, and Heartbonding is one of the services she's offering! Check http://www.furcadia.com/tenth/auction.html for the info.
Felorin: Drake Osiris asks if it would be possible for the Furcadia mouse cursors to be patchable.
Emerald|Flame: You even get my special heartbond desctag if you win the bid!
Felorin: Yes, it's possible. We've considered that in the past, and will probably make a way to do it someday. Maybe as part of a skin.
Felorin: Linda asks if Sivirus will allow her to have his children, while on a honeymoon in Alaska, without any shoes on, for some odd reason, with penguins involved somehow, "because they're awesome".
Felorin: According to modern science, the answer would be approximately maybe. Next question!
Felorin: Lobsel Vith asks if there'll ever be portraits to go with the winged avatars, the way there's standard portraits for the unwinged versions. Good question.
Talzhemir: (We're back! Thank you for your patience.)
Felorin: We hadn't really thought about that. We might consider it someday, it could help wings sales - but for a dragon, we only have to draw three portraits. For a set of wings, we'd have to draw three winged horses, three winged cats, three winged rodents, etc. etc. What we are almost certain to do someday is put a way in you can make your digos automatically turn on a certain portrait space. Then you could associate one with your triwings, one with your dragon, etc.
Felorin: We're sorry our Town|Meeting character lost its internet connection. It's back on ready to take a few more questions if you want to whisper some in.
Felorin: Tsukasa T. Tiger wants to know if there could be an avatar just for Gold Sponsors, or if they could have custom avatars.
Felorin: I think we'd consider those two separate features, to be sold independently. Not something we'd likely combine together that way.
Felorin: BlaqPhyr asks if prime wings are replacing the classic wings. Nope, they're two different wings, and will stay that way.
Felorin: Demikkusu asks if the new account transferring system is going to cause everything that's been done in the past to be undone, causing havoc in the streets, earth quakes, stock market panics, tidal waves, forest fires, and general calamity. The answer is no.
Felorin: When someone says "Thank God", is it in poor taste for me to say "You're welcome?"
Felorin: Astar Jakyr asks if the fee on transferring digos will still allow gifting. There is no fee on transferring digos! Just if you want to transfer your character name. You can still give people wings, dragons, etc. for free.
Felorin: Xelenas Gothis asks if non-silver sponsors will be able to change avatars in-game without logging off and back on, because some people RP shapeshifters.
Felorin: I'm sorry, but we had to draw some lines somewhere in Furcadia between what's free (98% of what you can do here), and what's not (so we can pay the bills). Once we've defined something as a pay-for option, we're not likely to change it. It would make the people who paid for it last year (or last week) feel bad that everybody ELSE gets it for free. You can get this a little cheaper for your characters once Gold Sponsorship comes out, since that will cover all the alts on one account, up to 20 or more.
Felorin: ChooPaKaToo asks if there'll be more digo market items like roses that can go in your desc, possibly suitable for giving as gifts (like grapes or cheese - maybe ChooPaKaToo is hungry tonight? )
Felorin: We're going to make the new desctags (and maybe some of the ones already in the file) available to buy right in Furcadia, for Golden DragonScales, without even having to go to our Digo Market webpage. We hope to put a Dr. Cat NPC in the game finally (that's my pen name as a computer game designer, and my character in Ultima 5 & 6). He'll change DragonScales between denominations for you, and sell you the desctag items, and maybe say funny stuff.
Felorin: We'll have him in the new Digo Market dream when it's ready, where you can try on Digos to see how they look on you and stuff. That's a while off yet. But if you put the Dr. Cat NPC object in your dream, you'll be able to buy and sell and make change there. I'm everywhere, muahahaha!
Felorin: Amfortas asks, since we're currently in Alpha, what would a Furcadia Beta consist of, and in a game that constantly evolves how do we make the disctinction between the stages?
Felorin: Well, ya caught me. It's true, those terms are all just made up and someday you start calling it "Beta". My idea was "when it seems pretty darn good", which used to be decided by me and Talzhemir sitting around working on something until one day we think "Hey, this is pretty darn good". Now Emmie and timo work with us so it's harder to tell when we think we might be ready for a new title. But we still all spontaneously jump up and dance during the workday sometimes. (Except maybe timo, people in Finland are more reserved. We're corrupting him though!0
Emerald|Flame: Gar made this informative and funny timeline that talks of the Beta too! http://www.furcadia.com/tenth/timeline.html
Felorin: Kingdom Key asks if people will ever be able to have more than 10 characters per email address (account). Yes, Gold Sponsors get to have 20! Also any character with a Digo Market item doesn't count towards your limit.
Felorin: Sky's Sea asks if the update will increase the musical ability of dreams, or a future one will.
Felorin: Not this update, but I really want to encourage music (and sound effects/ambience/design) the way we encourage art, writing, dreamweaving, RPing, etc. It's something we neglect compared to other kinds of creativity. I want to make a sound effect editing tool/toy where you take a source sound, and connect "black boxes" with knobs that do filtering effects and echoes and stuff. I want to have a cool music editor too, also a set of sounds built in for DS scripting that are every note of a musical scale, maybe two octaves. THAT I could maybe squeeze in this update!
Felorin: Tag McIt asks if we'll consider making bigger portrait spaces?
Talzhemir: The portrait size is standardized for other uses besides the one it's at now. So, it's conceivably possible but there's alot of reasons not to do that. One reason not to, is that all the portraits we've got, and there are thousands, are one size already.
Felorin: We may consider that at some point. The problem is, while we want to let dream owners have a lot of controls over the sizes at which things appear, they can make their skin, patch, dream map window size, etc. all work together. Your portrait goes with you in and out of every dream with every kind of layout, so if we supported a larger size we'd probably at least need an option to make it auto-shrink to fit in 95*95. It's conceivable.
Felorin: Ba asks what we will do when Morgus takes over the world, so that we won't be crushed and shot with laser beams.
Felorin: Probably I'll keep folding origami dragons, and Talzhemir will start herding alpacas for their lovely wool. Given who's running most of the nations on earth these days, I don't know if it would cause us to be any worse off if someone else took over.
Talzhemir: A better question is what will Morgus do now that we have unleashed all the kiwis. For no one shall stand against them!
Felorin: DJ Mike asks if we know what the Prime Wings look like.
Felorin: The Prime Wings will be previewed on the Silver Sponorship forum soon. Yes, they're drawn, we know what they look like and soon you will too.
Felorin: Shadowkat1011123 asks if the Furcadia t-shirts will ever be sold by themselves, without needing to get a Digo item with them.
Felorin: We have done that in the past as a holiday special occasionally, but we need to have the cash free to order a whole lot of shirts in advance to do that. When we go to furry conventions and get a dealer's table, we usually sell shirts by themselves there, look for us at one of those. Or check back in a year or two, we might sell them mail order again.
Felorin: Just a Furre asks what is Phoenixspeak and how does it work?
Talzhemir: This web page has information about Phoenixspeak at the bottom; the answer is a bit involved. http://www.thegenieslamp.com/rp/
Felorin: Phoenixspeak was original Talzhemir's concept, to be useful for things like letting groups of people who RP in a dream to store character sheets, update and access them, even have die roll results depend on stats stored about your character. Of course it will be usable for a ton of things other than that.
Felorin: Personally, I envision it as being sort of like "DragonSpeak for SQL". As DragonSpeak is to "programming" (which is too hard for 99.9% of people to do), PhoenixSpeak is to databases, or "storing a bunch of info about stuff". DragonSpeak can remember a few numbers, but it forgets them all when your dream is unloaded. PhoenixSpeak will remember info forever.
Felorin: I'm going to try to make it useful for everything Talzhemir wants it to accomplish. But my core paradigm (there's that word paradigm again) is database or "saved storage".
Felorin: Cinder Bear asks if we'll have bear avatars in Furcadia.
Felorin: We were going to have bears in this update, but they were taking longer to get done than the minotarus and kitterwings, so we decided to put them off till later and work on Olde Town and the new Furrabian Nights. We will have them hopefully in the not too distant future.
Felorin: krazykiller26204 asks who would be more dangerous in Kiwi form? Fel or Talz?
Felorin: Definitely Talz. Talz is always more dangerous than Felorin in every form. Felorin has a Mad Scientist's license, and can think up any form of Evil Scheme, but he's too softhearted to carry them out. Talzhemir knows martial arts from several different continents, and has the ability to actually carry out evil schemes. When they work together, they're REALLY dangerous!
Talzhemir: Then again... I make faces all day; he saves the world.
Felorin: Last question for the night will come from Gar, just because!
Felorin: Gar asks, "Felorin, is the real reason the update is late because you're way too busy... being delicious?"
Felorin: Well actually... Some people have to work at it. But for me, being delicious just comes naturally! With that, and the Power Of My Mutant Brain, I am able to do at least 3 things at once and sometimes 12. So we'll get this thing finished eventually.
Felorin: With that, this Town Meeting has officially become Too Silly, Much Too Silly Indeed. Goodnight everyone!
Talzhemir: goodnight! Thank you for being with us a DECADE! (And if you haven't, I truly hope you SHALL.) The best is yet to come.
Felorin: (And thanks to Judge Fudge, the X-Men, and Monty Python for those last three obscure popular culture references!)