Short update from our visual department. Enjoy!

Want more animations?

Then check out a huge improvement to the looks of Unknown Horizons: Animated status icons that notify you whenever something could need your attention (and also show you a lot of other stuff)! Daniel Stephens contributed a batch of those icons this week. The images speak for themselves, even though these uploads are of poor quality.

Disclaimer: the in-game positioning current works for only one of four rotations. We are working on it.

Will this pavilion be in range of that tent?

We know you asked this question several times per game of Unknown Horizons. We were aware that something needs to happen, otherwise players will simply get confused and not enjoy playing UH. Thus, since last week we finally display green outlines if your to-be-constructed building is in range of other buildings. Most notably, this will tell you where to place farm fields and service providers for your inhabitants. After assembling this picture, we decided to also color the whole building in green for the effect to be more obvious.

Some more development updates

We also implemented the build menu features announced in our last posting. When hovering a building, you now see its required construction material right away and don't need to click every time. If a building lacks some of those resources, it will be displayed less prominently than those you can build. The button is still active though, so you can choose a suitable position and wait for the resources to appear.

In further news, we reduced blurriness of the distillery a bit and plan to add a few new buildings next week.
Praise Daniel in our comments and also leave all other kinds of feedback!

Stay tuned for an update on our editor soon. So long,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Hey everyone,
we are back with a couple of updates. Enjoy!

RPM Packages

We can proudly present new packages for all major RPM-based linux distributions created by Nelson Marques (nmarques). He does it to popularize Unknown Horizons and the FIFEngine to the community. The next step is to include these packages in the offical repositories.
You'll find the packages in our Linux Download Section!

New Graphics (Fish!)

We got some great new graphics by lmg this week. Most importantly he reworked our fish swarm to look a lot more natural. Check them out below:

He also designed a great wallpaper and polished the pirate ship model on the way:

Unknown Horizons on RockPaperShotgun.com

Unknown Horizons was reviewed on RockPaperShotgun.com recently. This totally skyrocketed our visitor numbers for a few days, but the server endured it! Check out the great article here:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/23/anno-where-im-going-unknown-horizons/

Interview with Nihathrael on OSArena.net

Nihathrael gave an interview about Unknown Horizons and his work on the project at the  Greek website osarena.net. The English version can be found at the bottom of the post here:
http://osarena.net/english-writings/sinentefxi-me-ton-thomas-kinnen-tou-unknown-horizons.html

General Status

Work on Unknown Horizons is progressing nicely and we are getting a bunch of commits to the repository every day. Stay tuned for a more detailed update on this matter.

Cheers,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Just 3 days after the release of 2011.3, we have received the first video presenting the additions and improvements. Check it out:

All props for this great presentation go to --> qubodup <--, who created it for an article at the freegamer blog.

We're looking forward to seeing you in action; show us footage of you playing Unknown Horizons! Post your videos on our forums.

So long,
Your team of Unknown Horizons

Heya!

Figured a small update post would be great to have, so here we go. During the last weeks, we ironed out several critical issues on our way to 2011.3 and it looks like even out tileset branch can finally be merged into master! In detail, we're happy to announce the following:

• Support for internationalized voices (right now available: de, en, fr)
• New settler buildings
• Bugfixes and gameplay changes

Support for internationalized voices

This feature initially was not planned for 2011.3 at all, but mtfk recently joined our team, highly motivated to implement such a system, and sent out a pull request after discussing his code structure in detail shortly after. We already had German and English voice files in our repository, to be played at map creation time, and now seblabel and his wife contributed some French ones. The files you will hear depend on your language settings (as e.g. our scenarios do, too).

Because having more voices always is a great thing, please check below for how to contribute speech to Unknown Horizons!

New buildings

orakeldel finished his work on our great new settler buildings: Salt ponds, the tobacco production line and the butchery. Make sure to also check out the assets we didn't include as image (linked with their names)! Of course feedback is highly appreciated, you can share your thoughts through IRC, our forums or just as comment to this posting.

Bugfixes and Gameplay

Almost all tickets blocking our road towards 2011.3 are fixed by now. This includes improvements to how we handle player settings (should finally be stable), an overhauled inhabitant happiness and taxing system, polishing our boat builder GUI and also cleaning up interface strings so that our translators now might start final work over at pootle.

How You Can Help

We hope you look forward to release 2011.3 of Unknown Horizons as much as we do!
Should you be interested in hearing your voice at more in-game events in more languages, don't hesitate to contact us on IRC, the forums or via e-mail (team@unknown-horizons.org)! We (Feldegast in particular) can also clean recordings to a certain degree, so highly professional and expensive equipment is not required.

Your team of Unknown Horizons

Yeah, lot of progress here recently, so we'll again show two cool pics.

We today constructed a new in-game pause menu that hopefully is easier to work with (and distinguish from our main menu) than before. Additionally, wentam works hard on a new ship class for Unknown Horizons, so we present his current frigate WIP. Enjoy!

Heya!

just decided to throw in some of the most recent contributions by wentam since they're too cool to keep almost secret :-)

The most impressive one is our animated wooden tower equipped with cannons, but there also  is a new upgrade of our storage tent and a wooden pier that will help with trading. As usual, feedback and ideas highly appreciated. Have fun!

Heya!

Ever looked for an easy way to contribute, but just couldn't find how? Let's change that!

Since Unknown Horizons now allows to build a lot of own ships, we would love to see more variety in their names. This holds for settlements, too. We hope that interesting names enhance fun while playing UH.

To achieve this, everybody and especially you may suggest several names to be added to the game. We will then review for obvious copyright problems and add to our database as many of them as possible.

Available categories are:

• player_settlement
• player_ship
• fisher_ship
• free_trader_ship
• pirate_settlement
• pirate_ship

Please group your suggestions so that they fit in at least one of these categories!

A dump of our names so far and more information is found in our forums.
Have fun trying to come up with cool stuff, either via comment here or in the forum topic linked above!
Please note that our forums are moderated, so as new user you need a staff member to approve your posting. If this did not happen within reasonable time, you might always visit us on IRC and ask us to do so :)

Hey Folks,

maybe some of you already realized it, but let's still start with good news again: We replaced all of our non-free content in the master branch! :)

Many non-free graphics were substituted by even prettier assets, for a few units we are using placeholders right now. Replacing our whole unit base is not to be measured in days ;-)

Since our sounds partially were sampled using tracks originating in freesound, we had to replace most of them as well. You will notice e.g. a new bell for this reason. The sounds used for the lumberjack were kindly relicensed by hazure.

So the great work of inken and manthus over the last months finally paid off - our release will not contain anything in conflict with DFSG licenses. This especially means that we can use any help with packaging you are able to offer! If you are interested in building an official package for your favorite distribution: visit us on IRC, drop a message on our mailing list or post at our forums. We will get back to you!

Additionally, you are now able to listen to three brand new and awesome music tracks by novatlan ingame as well as on our media page. Make sure to check them out!

Your team of Unknown Horizons

Heya,

few days later we can proudly present manthus' current mountain assets. No need to spam you with text, here they are:

Now we again need your help, and this time there is no excuses (-;

• How do you like them at all?
• What could be improved, what do you want to be kept?
• If you had to choose one (brown or grey), which one would you use and why?

Our forums are open for comments (even without registration) as well as we are happy if you visit us on IRC!

If you now decide that you want to help us creating more graphics, working together with such a great artist, the previous news entry still tells you how to do so :)

Your team of Unknown Horizons

Heya,

I'd love to tell you that nobody applied for writing an update post because we are so busy improving Unknown Horizons. Well, that's true to a certain degree: The part with busy holds true.
Besides all the stress we felt recently, there still was and is some progress though and we decided that is it about time to tell you (-,

Code improvements

Most importantly, we are implementing a new tile set structure that will allow us to provide a working island and map editor soon. In the meantime, if you are running our git source, only random maps will work on branch development.

Another not-so-visible improvement has been made to our folders. Cleaning up the structure that in most parts was more than two years old hopefully eases navigation through our code- and contentbase. There also have been new scenario conditions added in master, but you'll need to wait for our new maps before excessive testing and usage of these.

New game content

On to stuff you see and like to see: content, content, even more content. We have added a whole third increment to the game! You can now help and watch your inhabitants progressing to the 'settler' level. The main goal there currently is to produce tools. 
For that, you need a toolmaker.
For that, you need charcoal and iron ingots.
For that, you need a charcoal burning and lots of lumber as well as a smeltery.
For that, you need more charcoal and iron ore.
For that, you need iron ore deposits.
… you need … so much … wait.
Yep, we even have implemented the natural form of iron ore deposits: mountains!*

Shortage on graphic artists

As you see in the above list, there is a lot of parts you need to assemble a working production chain. Sadly, we have not enough graphics artists to produce high-quality assets that can go straight into Unknown Horizons. manthus has provided great pieces of work with the charcoal burning, the toolmaker and several (graphical) building upgrades you will find in the pioneer increment, but some buildings still only exist as placeholders. They are found under the component 'Graphics' in our trac and have a high priority. The smeltery for instance likes to get replaced for sure. Another task is creating a housing for our settlers, right now they reside in pioneer log huts. Help! They want half-timbered quality standards!

If you are interested in contributing and are able to put your work under a CC or GPL license, give it a try! We'll honestly not reject you, visit us on IRC, post on the forums or in our bugtracker.
* Or a first step towards having mountains at least. You'll see what I mean

here in this new picture!

Maybe we'll also show two of them.

All improvements are of course welcome, the mountain graphics are likely to be replaced if we have better ones available.

More new content

That said, let's sum up what other upgrades I talk about. We also added a field with sugar cane (P) and a distillery (P) for liquor. A tavern (P) uses this alcohol to produce another kind of get-together-and-meet-pals resource which increases tax income. These (P)-buildings lack proper graphics right now, too. New pioneer versions got added for the pavilion and the signal fire, more to come. If you help :)

We further populated the sea with a fish resource. This means that the fisher can only work properly if there is a school of fish in range now.
Still work to be done, of course, the animation e.g. looks odd and is synchronized all over our archipelago, but that's a huge step in the right direction already.
Later, you will be able to build boats at the boat builder and assign them to a certain fisher. A fisher without boat will only be able to hang around fishing with a rod, that is not the most effective way for sure.

To wrap up this huge text: We are moving forward, there is progress, but it could be better. With exactly your support. Not only are graphic artists needed, even playtesting users, evolving into professional bug hunters, are of invaluable help.

Help wanted:

• 3D-modelling, urgent need ;-)
• playtesting and balancing, can be done by everybody
• animation

Kind Regards
Your team of Unknown Horizons

There is also a high quality ogv version avaliable at our media-section.