What's that, Furcadia?

In an attempt to get closer to the community, Emerald Flame’s Daughter, (and current Intern at DEP) announced a few months ago that she was working on a DEP Sekrit Projekt that would be announced closer to the end of the summer.
With about 27 days left to go, (see the timer to the right,) Felorin dropped some information today about what that particular project is going to be.
In an attempt to draw the community in a bit more, creating some closer ties amongst people, Pouncer Kitty is currently working on creating a Furcadia Social Networking Ring.
This ‘Ring’ will include popular Social Networking Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, deviantART, and YouTube. There’re rumours flying around that there will be contests involved that will allow you to possibly win prizes if you help them promote the game on these sites, but there’s no final word on that at this point.
What is clear is that DEP is trying desperately to get some more information out to the public in places where it won’t have a direct, negative impact on the community. Bickering and infighting are becoming more and more prevalent on the forums and people are starting to avoid them because of the negative attitudes of a few people who constantly seem interested only in bickering and harassing the DEP camp.
These are the same people who would follow DEP Twitter Accounts, YouTube Accounts, and other media outlets to vent their ‘frustration’ at other players and-or at the company itself.
While this is not a primary focus of these new social media outlets, it is an undeniable consequence of such actions. Whether this will help improve the community by taking away the initial brunt of angry users from the forums, or cast a shadow over their marketing is anyone’s guess at this point.
As a marketing aspect, this is a fantastic move for the company. Facebook, Myspace, deviantART and other Social Networking Sites are great exposure for small companies and it should show huge returns for Furcadia, coupled with the release of the iPhone App, hopefully released before the end of the summer. As of yet, there are no specific release dates given or even information about when the ‘final product’ will ship to Apple.

Entwined Studios updated its website recently with Twitter Feeds for the Furnarchy project and Damadar’s Twitter feed. You can find information about that at the main site.

Also updated is the look of this site, with a countdown timer to the right. A SEKRIT DEP Project has been started. That countdown timer was the rough estimation given until the project might be completed.

This has nothing to do with that popular handheld client everyone’s so excited about. It’s something different, being spearheaded by a college student.

More info later in the summer. Thanks for reading.

Furcadia’s updating soon.

Silver Sponsors will be soon testing the test build of the client. This is a stress test for the client to make sure there are no catastrophic bugs still in the system, and also to make sure all the new DS is going off without a hitch.

Lets get the big stuff out of the way, first. This is from the update page, which will be linked at the bottom of the article. (For those who want to skip ahead; cheaters!)

Rabben Ferian

The newest Ferian to hop into Furcadia is this bouncy bunny avatar. Portraits were made by Talzhemir with additional work by Youlanda.

Noble Equine

A Spirited Purebred horse avatar and the next in the ‘Noble’ series. Avatar by Tiggerbaby with portraits by Aries.

Woolie Seasonal

A Fluffy Sheep avatar flocking to Furcadia for Easter! Avatar by Tiponya with additional work by Tiggerbaby and Gar, Portraits by Tiponya and Kittrel (Available Now!)

Toytle Seasonal

Slowly but steadily getting to Furcadia is this Toytle. Its portraits were made by Kaelin’yFiae. Additional animation by Emerald Flame and Gar. (Available May)

Tusker Seasonal

Certainly not a boring avatar, this perfect piggy was made, portraits and all, by Kaelin’yFiae (Available June)

Those’re the new avatars.

Some of the cool new features, (perhaps previews later)

New Icons – All of Furcadia’s Icons have been re-worked for 32bit colors. You can see them in the Furcadia folder after it’s installed to check out how they look.

New DS – More on this a little further down.

Tab Functionality – The Tab feature for showing names is getting an overhaul. Not only will you be able to set it and forget it to leave names on all the time now, but you’re also going to be able to see who is afk, which ties into another new feature…

Furcadia Pounce – A proprietary, first party Friends List and Whisper center that has been a staple of proxies for ages. This feature, (surprisingly? Not really) works much like the Dogproxy feature. I wonder if it’ll look and act like the Dogproxy feature…

Cookie Economy – A precursor to the Attention Economy and one that has been touted for years, this has finally made it into the client. You can read more about the Cookie Economy Here.

The New DS that made it into the update Focuses on a few core areas:

Cookies – The New DS focuses a lot on cookies because DEP is trying to get the Cookie Economy to hit big with the community. As a result, you can buy additional cookies on the Digo Market for a dollar.

The iPhone – There’s an iPhone Client on the Horizon. DEP is now making a publicly official statement by putting the DS in for the iPhone. This is DS that will only affect iPhone Clients, so only use this for features you want iPhone users to see. (Maybe soon we’ll see “Windows” “Linux” and “Mac” DS too? I hope not; that seems like it would cause problems.)

Arrays – Not often used by most dream owners, (because each portion of an array takes up an additional variable slot.) DEP is trying to add increased functionality to these long-forgotten brethren of the standard Variable. Basically, they’re trying to give more power to the Arrays so they will seem more attractive and lucrative to dream owners and dreamweavers in general.

Avatar – New DS focusing on Avatar location and Avatar Animation. Some of this seems cool and looks like it might be useful for patchers and dragonspeakers alike.

So, that’s the update in a nutshell. Pre-order your new avatars on the Digo Market and check out the update page for more in-depth info here.

As several people have become aware, the Heroin Puppy website is currently down. It is our understanding that this is going to continue for the foreseeable future. When asked about this, Cluracan basically said that he was done with Furcadia and Furnarchy, as well as his not-as-well known project “DreamNova”.

For those of you who don’t know, Furnarchy is a modular proxy that imbeds itself into the Furcadia client. It is one of the older Furcadia Proxies, (over the past few years several new proxies have sprung up out of the woodworks.)

Furnarchy was completely open sourced, and some people have, over the past few days, been wondering what was going to happen to it.

Damadar of Entwined Studios, and Lothus Marque of Mercenary Enclave Productions are currently developing the proxy together. You can read more about the announcement here.