Latest News

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that we haven’t resumed development or posted any news in quite some time. The truth is, we experienced some uenxpected financial difficulties at the end of last year, and while we expected to have them solved quickly, this did not happen. In fact, as it stands right now we do not have the money to continue developing Dawntide.

We’re still working on finding new investors, but this will take time. In the meanwhile, we have officially stopped all development. We hope to be able to resume it in the not too distant future, but as of right now we cannot say when that will be or whether it indeed happen at all.

The website will remain online and we will update it should our financial status change. I apologize for taking so long to post this announcement, but up until now we were genuinely expecting development to resume in February.

Just a notice to say that we at the development team are still alive and still sorting through some internal issues. We expect to resume development within the next couple of weeks.

The Beta server has now been closed down as we begin work on the redesign of the Dawntide game world as announced in this news post. Servers are expected to remain down for a period of 1 to 2 months, and we will be posting weekly news and screenshots from the world redesign in the meanwhile.

We hope to see you all when the servers come back up again.

UPDATE: A few technical difficulties is currently holding back the new terrain, so we’ll start posting previews after those are solved.

For a while now, we’ve been working on a planned world redesign, intended to replace the current mostly empty game world with a new more interesting, detailed and visually appealing world. Thanks to a number of improvements on the shader and terrain design parts of our engine, we’re now ready to move ahead with this project. Starting December 19th, we will be shutting down and wiping the Dawntide Beta Server, after which it will remain down for a period of 1-2 months during which we will be constructing and populating the new world. During the downtime we’ll be posting teaser shots of the new world and the visual improvements in the works, so stay tuned to the website.

For the time up until the wipe, we’ve implemented a few temporary changes to let players relax, let loose and have some fun with their characters before they get wiped. As of today, the following changes are currently in effect to the server:

• PVP is now enabled in all areas except the immediate area around the starting town.
• All items now stay with you when you die.
• Skill EXP is gained 5x faster and turns into skill 5x faster.

These changes are only for the duration up until the wipe, and will not remain after servers come back up in January/February. Have fun!

We’ve applied a patch that will download a new .exe to your Dawntide folder called dtgame_new_renderer. This is a beta of a major rework of the graphics engine to speed up performance. It currently breaks a lot of basic functionality, so it’s not recommended for regular play, but we’d appreciate it if all testers could try it out and compare the performance of the dtgame_player.exe to the new dtgame_new_renderer.exe, then post the comparison in FPS to this thread.

We’ll be working to bring our world server back up soon. We apologize for the temporary down-time this weekend.

UPDATE: Server is back up!

We are currently experiencing some issues with the patch server, so patcher will be down until these problems are resolved. We hope to have it back up and running within the hour.

UPDATE: As it turned out, our patch server was completely dead and is now having its operating system reinstalled. Once we finish with this patcher will come back up.

A few important changes were made to the way the patcher updates itself in order to avoid the fake antivirus warnings. Unfortunately we cannot automatically apply this update and everybody will have to grab a copy of the new Dawntide executable and place it in your Dawntide folder, overwriting your old exe.

I’m sure all of you have noticed the lack of updates, the delayed launch and other signs of inactivity from the team. I thought I’d take a moment and tell everyone what’s been going on. In August, as we were preparing for the launch, we unexpectedly lost our source of funding, resulting in work on Dawntide grinding to a halt. This week, we finally secured a new source of funding and the team has reassembled to resume development. We expect to have a new patch out on Oct 17th, and a new release date to be announced before the end of the month.

To all our fans: thanks for sticking with us through the rough times, and we still intend to release the best sandbox MMO out there.