Caves and Sewers Released and more updates!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 03:17:27 AM

Hey Architechs!

After we cleared up all the backlog that we had since the Townbuilder was never intended as such a large project, we were finally ready to model the first new set!

Caves & Sewers is now available!

We sent out activation emails to everyone who is eligible to the set, namely all Journeyman and Master Tier backers.

If you have not received an email with an activation code, please enter your Kickstarter Email on our RECOVERY PAGE

Be sure to share your coolest builds to the community library and show us your work on social media and on our Discord Server!

Updates and WIP

Modeling

In terms of modeling, we will of course continue updating old models whenever errors come up, but for the most part we will move on to the next set: Steampunk! Expect WIP images and such stuff in the near future.

Website

In terms of coding, the entire website infrastructure is basically done. There are only small improvements to the general UI and workflows (add a button here, change some sizes there).

We are also working on our own Merchant portal, which will be used for the monthly distribution of merchant licenses.

The last big thing we are thinking about in terms of the website is the user-added content library. We know that people want this, but we will need to find out how many people are actually interested in creating assets for the Townbuilder, both to sell or just share for free. This will probably be something we will use the new polling system for!

Townbuilder

The Signbuilder is in an early state of functionality but has been like this for the better part of two months. There just have been other more important things again and again. But since everything seems to be running smoothly now on my side, I will make it ready for release ASAP. We will launch it with medieval assets fitting with the basic sets and maybe already with the dragon head trophies, but no promises on that one. My personal guess would be... three weeks or so.

The Render Studio is working perfectly. If you are an admin and if you can ignore the horrible user interface and you have a 1-hour call with me to understand in which order you have to press buttons to not crash the website.

So this would be the alpha version, which currently has all functionality but really bad usability. Furthermore, most things are hardcoded instead of user-decided, such as the background of the images that get exported.

We will work on that after the Signbuilder as we think more people will benefit from signs than from nice renders, as those are also doable via 3rd party tools and are more of a "nice to have".

We currently use the render studio to create our thumbnails by the way :D

And then lastly: thinner walls and floors. People have been asking for this being an alternative to the OpenLOCK compatible walls that we have created to solve a lot of our system's issues. I understand people's need for them, as thin walls allow them to save loads of material and print time and if you don't want to split the building all the time, but would rather glue parts together and have it permanently you don't get anything out of the OL compatibility. Therefore I have started playing around with implementing this... and as expected it breaks A LOT of things in the TB. But the idea itself works, at least for Straight and Angled pieces (we will see if we get curved to work as well) and this is my third priority after the Signbuilder and the Render Studio.

Their cores will be about 4mm thick, which still allows for our peg system to be used for them which is a must-have in my opinion. So 4mm+ textures on either side will come pretty close to the 7mm we had before the Kickstarter!

All in all it is pretty clear, that we will finish the coding part of this project before we have everything modeled and inserted into the Townbuilder. This means that in a couple of months when Tom and I are done and only need to tune in to fix bugs or make some things more pretty, we will be able to begin coding the next project. This might become the offline Townbuilder or an entirely different project, either way, it will be a cool tool for the community and we will keep you guys up to date!

Cheers, 

Christopher and the Townsmith Team

Servers were burning, things are looking brighter now!
over 5 years ago – Sun, Aug 02, 2020 at 09:08:13 PM

Hey Architechs...

As many of you might have noticed... Our servers weren't in the best of condition over the last day or so. For some of you, this was noticeable as slight delays when saving or loading buildings, sometimes increased loading times when loading individual models.

For others this was a complete denial of any service for hours. We want to apologize for this inconvenience, and I need to admit, that I kind of regret my premature celebration of the launch schedule in my last post.

What happened?

A quick, not super techy rundown on what was going on:

We made the announcement that all emails have been sent. This caused hundreds if not thousands of people to use the recovery page and or create accounts. Our servers couldn't handle the load. We underestimated the number of people coming in, simple as that. We are sorry for that, and it was caused by our inexperience.

Yesterday evening when the denial of service peaked in about 80% of requests having to wait a considerable amount of time or being denied completely, we knew that this wouldn't just "wash over" and we had to react and not just wait out the first wave and do customer support.

So until 2 am German time, Tom was up and working, increasing the capacity of our servers. Sadly this needed to be done ASAP and in a very tired condition. This lead to some errors being able to sneak themselves into the new servers. These new servers perfectly served all users, but in many instances they would just not do what was expected. So now you would get service, but more often than not in the form of errors. Even now, we are still patching out errors that have snuck in.

Consequences

For most users this just meant a small inconvenience, maybe waiting another day or two to get into the Townbuilder.

For some users though, the super speedy but faulty servers caused severe, unfixable issues. One example would be people activating their codes, but their accounts never got the unlocks registered. So the codes have been marked as used, and they can't recover them. Please contact us if anything along those lines happened to you, we will make sure every single one of you will receive their goodies by hand!

For our merchants, this means that some of them could not even test the Townbuilder properly (maybe even at all) before the Patreon and with it the very attractive Early Bird Special launches. I personally wouldn't want to commit 30 Euros if the only interaction with the service was an error page. This is why we decided to extend the Early Bird Offer of the Merchant Patreon to the first 3 Days. And if the servers continue to misbehave we will extend the period further until there is a reasonable timeframe available to get familiar with the Townbuilder and decide if you want to get a Merchant License for it.

Finally, I want to again say, that we are very sorry for this. We tried our best to prevent this launch chaos that even experienced companies suffer from and failed miserably. Thank you all for sticking with us and showing understanding in the many emails we received about users being unable to register and redeem their codes.

Cheers,

Christopher and his Fire Extinguishers

All Activation Emails have been sent, Druidic Concept Art, Merchant Patreon Launches
over 5 years ago – Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 04:22:47 AM

Hey Architechs!

Launch Completed

It is finished, it is done. The Townbuilder launched. We have just sent out the very last emails (apart from late backers that came in, like today, we can't keep up with those every day :D).

"But Christopher, I haven't received an email, you guys are scammers!" Do not worry, we got you angered backer! It happens quite a bit, that emails get lost, filtered into the spam or something goes wrong during the delivery. This is why we prepared an ACTIVATION CODE RECOVERY PAGE.

If you have not received an activation email or lost it, you can trigger a resend of the activation email on the page above.

I don't want to pet myself on the back too hard, but the slow rollout was a very good idea. Even after all our testing, there were still some super-duper nasty bugs that we were able to fix before too many people had encountered them and at the same time we were able to slowly ramp up the capabilities of our servers without the users experience suffering from too slow response time.

We will keep up the "Early Access"-Mode for some more time, because we got quite a bit of feedback on two things in particular: The Peg Placement Mode and the Perfectionist Controls. We will rework both of them completely and with that, there might be coming some more bugs into the system, and the Early Access brings a welcomed excuse for those. Once we finish that we will put up the normal loading screen again, just for your information.

Druidic Concept Art

If you follow our Instagram you might have already seen this, but we of course also want to show it to all, you other Backers!

This is the concept art for our Druidic Set, I hope you like it!

Merchant Patreon

To all 3D print shop owners, it is finally time.

With everyone on the platform now, we are ready to give out merchant licenses as well. Most of you have probably already seen the Email we sent out, but in case you are not subscribed to our Merchant Email list... You should do so right now!

 Merchant Email List

On August 1st we will send out Emails with a link to the Patreon, from then on you will have 24 hours to get yourself a spot in the Early Bird Merchant tier, with which you will save 5€ each month for as long as you stay with us (30€ instead of 35€ per month), so be sure to check your emails on the 1st!

For starters, we will not have a perfect license for software usage, since we are still working on that with our lawyer. We will just throw something very simple up, much like other Patreons do it, a simple agreement that allows you to sell and distribute physical prints of models that were created using the Townbuilder. Later on (1 or 2 months from now) we will create a more professional contract which will guarantee both parties more safety in this deal.

The idea of the agreement will stay the same (as I explained above), it will just be a change of the formalities of the agreement.

The Future

Now I should also quickly talk about what development has been going on in the last month! On the model front, we are getting really close to a real pipeline, with weekly meetings and all that kind of stuff. We are making large steps towards getting a first version of the Caves and Sewers Set, so expect a showcase for that relatively soon! At the same time, we are working on building up a baseline for the Signbuilder so the development on that can continue, and lastly, Alexandru has now switched from concept art to 3D modeling as well and he is currently working on the castle set (Monika already called dips on the steampunk set :D)

On the programming side of things, everything has been a bit slow lately. Tom and I were renovating the office and moved lots and lots of furniture while fixing all bugs and working on a big internal change. The Assembler now runs in the same programming language as the front end which is an enormous thing for me specifically. This speeds up all future features I will implement by at least 40%. And I am now working on the rework of the perfectionist controls, making them closer to classical 3D software, i.e. allowing users to pose and position models using a girl (the 3 colored Arrows you see in most slicers). Oh yeah and Tom has been implementing our store which will also launch soon, and allow you to upgrade from Unlimited (Apprentice and Journeyman included) to Infinite (Master included) as well as allow new users to buy into the Townbuilder.

Everything is now ready for the future, and I am very positive about it! Let's see how far we get until the end of the year!

Cheers,

Christopher and the Townsmith Team

Townbuilder Early Access Launch Today! READ CAREFULLY!
almost 6 years ago – Thu, Jul 02, 2020 at 10:44:10 PM

Hey Architechs,

the time has come! The Townbuilder just launched in Early Access!

Early Access? What does it mean?

This is our first product launch and we want to play it save. That is why we will not launch for all almost 7000 backers at once. If anything breaks, all of you would have a bad experience and we would go crazy trying to fix it. Instead, we will let people onto the platform in smaller badges, always making sure that the User Experience is guaranteed. This hopefully will prevent downtime and 'game-breaking' bugs.

Today, we sent out 500 activation emails, check your inboxes, you might be in the first batch! Over the course of July, we will steadily send out more batches, slowly increasing the number of users.

This is the Early Access Phase and it will end before the beginning of August when we expect to have all users onboard and our shop and Merchant Patreon ready for day-to-day business.

I did not receive an activation Email! Why?

Don't worry, chances are you are in a later batch of activation Emails. As stated above we will slowly send these Emails out over the course of July. If you haven't received one until August, then you should get in contact with us.

What is included? What is not?

To prevent me from going crazy, we are keeping an active list of available and unavailable features on the website. Whenever we patch something, we will update this list.

A short summary of what is available:

Features. All basic features and quite a couple of stretch goal features (OpenLOCK, Pegs&Magnets, Perfectionist Controls (kind of)). 

Models. The basic sets in straight, angled and curved

Walkthrough Video

As the launch neared, we realized that so much had changed since the first Tutorial we made, that we had to create a new one.

I just sat down and filmed myself while clicking through all different features of the Townbuilder. We will go more in-depth on different steps in future tutorials, but for day one this is what we got.

Townbuilder Feature Walkthrough

What is coming up next?

With the launch progressing over the coming month, we will finally get to start the normal modeling and programming pipeline. The foundation is well set now and we are ready to expand! The Caves&Sewers Set is already well in the works and the concept art and design for the druidic set is being created as I type this.

In terms of programming, we will tackle the premium features next, starting with the Signbuilder.

As I have mentioned before, we want to reach a quota of 1 Set/Month from concept art to finished models. We can't expect to get to this speed right away but I wouldn't see it as impossible to get to this speed before the end of the year.

So I will keep you all informed whenever we are ready to release a new Set, a new concept art piece is done, or a new feature is released!

Cheers and have fun building,

Christopher and the Townsmith Team!

BackerKit Surveys lock tomorrow! Castle Set concept art
almost 6 years ago – Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 10:24:34 PM

Hey Architechs,

Release

And now lastly, I want to talk about the release!

We put the June release in the Kickstarter with the thought of this Kickstarter having like 100 backers at most and us unlocking maybe 1 or 2 stretch goals. Well... here we are. 

Stretch goals like the OpenLOCK compatibility and the Pegs and Magnets brought an entire rework of all our models and most of our code with them. Within the last month, we basically rebuilt everything we did within the last 6 months.

We have been growing with the expectations and responsibility placed on our shoulders, and we have been incredibly hard at work to make the launch happen as soon as possible.

As it stands right now, we will actually be able to let the first users onto the Townbuilder within June. Our first batch of beta print testers is currently printing models and apart from Simplify3D not wanting to slice any of our models, everything is going very nicely.

When is the Townbuilder available?

The plan is as follows: At the end of the month, the beta will end. The website will go dark for a couple of days while we prepare everything for the initial launch. At the beginning of July, we will send out the first couple hundred activation emails. In them, you will receive links/codes with which you can redeem your pledge's content to a Townbuilder account.

Over the course of July, we will send out more and more activation emails with the goal of having all Backers using the Townbuilder by August.

What will be included on launch?

Here our initial plan still stands. We will launch with all basic functionality + OpenLOCK and with the basic sets.

When will x be available?

We will go through everything chronologically. This means that the two Premium Sets are up first and they are already in development. We want to reach a speed of 1 set per month before the end of the year, but we are still very much in the Teambuilding phase so initially the development of a set will take more than a month.

In terms of features we are already pretty far beyond the basic functionality. We already added the perfectionist controls and OpenLOCK, currently we are working on Pegs and Magnets and the Signbuilder. We will most likely have all features implemented before the end of the year.

BackerKit Surveys

just a quick reminder that we sent the BackerKit surveys and will lock your orders tomorrow. So if you haven't completed yours, make sure to do so!

You can recover your survey here:  BackerKit survey

Castle Set

And then secondly, I am very excited to share with you the concept art for the castle set!

Our new artist Alexandru has been working on the concept art for our stretch goal sets and this is the first one I want to show to you all! In the second picture, you can see how we will split up some of the stuff. Of course, all of this is modular and you can expand your castle to fit any size and form. These are only the straight models, but as we unlocked it, we will also add curved and angled models for this set.

I hope you enjoyed this information-rich update :D

Cheers, Christopher and the Townsmith Team