Today is the day! Ertha Beta v0.6 is planned to launch at around 11:00am UTC, with our usual broadcast starting an hour before that. Read on to see the full list of changes and what we expect going forward.
What’s New
Ertha Beta v0.6 introduces the ability to access your own HEXs (Hooray, landowners! As mentioned before, this will be done in rounds:
First, we’re starting with the massive oceans of the globe (Over 200,000 Water HEXs!). For a HEX to qualify as a “Water HEX”, it needs to be displayed as 100% Water.
Second, we’re going to open the first countries. The countries to be opened will be determined by the community through a voting process, so stay active in those international chats and rally up your troops!
Third, we’re going to be repeating this process, and opening countries by our own judgement until most of the globe is accessible, prioritizing the countries with the most active landowners.
Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle
Those who’ve been active this past week know that we’ve just had one of the biggest airdrops in Ertha’s history — nearly 1000 landowners got free pieces of the Atlantic Ocean.
Consider it a small bonus from us, meanwhile ensuring that all active landowners can test out v0.6 from Day 1.
The eagle-eyed of you have noticed that most of them are grouped closely together, not-so-coincidentaly near or inside the Bermuda Triangle.
Even though it’s only an urban legend in the real world, who knows what mysteries are hiding here?
Without further ado, here’s the full list of additions, changes, fixes and improvements in Ertha Beta v0.6!
Ertha Beta v0.6.0 Patch Notes
FEATURES
- Imported Terrain data for the entire globe, each HEX should reflect the terrain in that region in the real world. This includes painting the terrain and placing trees.
- Increased Terrain size. It is now 4,194,304m³ up from 262,144m³, 16x larger.
- Improved Demo City (Now called Tutorial Island), it is much larger and has many more vehicles. Removed the demo section of terrain editing. Terrain editing and building will now be fully done on Landowner HEXs.
- Added new HD male & female character models. This will force existing characters to be re-rolled, users will get a prompt when they log in to re-generate their character.
- Added new HD terrain.
- Added new HD water.
- Added new buildings.Some new buildings have animated billboards!
- Added 3D Grid building, you can now build on any height (still being improved!)
- Added player owned HEXs, you can visit the HEX and if you’re the owner, you can terraform and build on it (Currently free and test-only).
- Added the traffic system to roads that are created by the player. You can now build a city that comes to life!
- Added two new vehicles to the game — Aeon S20 and Paragon X750.
- Added swimming. Players can now walk into water to start swimming.
- Added new swimming animations for male and female character models (Animations are still being improved)
- Added filters to Globe scene to filter for owned hexes or minted hexes, etc.
- Added functionality to inspect individual hexes in the globe scene with new popup.
- Added new items in character creator.
- Added color customization for characters.
- Added the Sun and MOON (Yes, that one :) )into the Globe scene.
- Added new grass assets.
- Added more sounds, such as getting in and out of vehicles and pressing buttons.
- Added more music along with a dynamic soundtrack system.
- Added an information popup for all the buildings in the Demo City.
- Added compass to vehicle and first person cameras.
- Added dynamic tooltips to the loading screens.
- Added new popups prompting users to create their character for accounts with old data or no data.
- Added new avatars system in the character creator and characte menu! This comes with 5 default free avatars, with exclusive avatars coming soon.
IMPROVEMENTS
- Increased performance across many different elements such as loading scenes and loading menus.
- Updated Login Screen to include animated globe.
- Updated loading to have fewer loading screens and improve loading times.
- Updated player database, hopefully returning items back to players who had their items go missing.
- Updated Character Creator scene to include new assets in the background.
- Updated gravity and falling animations to look more realistic.
- Updated error logging to include more details and access to users’ runtime history. This will help debug issues users report.
- Updated the icons and UI used in the City Builder.
- Added a caps lock warning for login and registration text fields.
- Disabled interiors for every building except Bybit and Avocado (This is a work in progress).
- Updated Globe GUI (left and ride side) to match the intended design and added functionality to the right side panel. The game fetches which HEXs the account owns and displays them.
- Removed Terrain Generation button that previously allowed users to randomly generate their terrain. Terrain is now being generated based on real-world heightmaps and terrainmaps.
- Improved traffic system, allows vehicles to make tighter turns and use all the roads properly
FIXES
- Fixed terraforming actions performed by roads and buildings and zones, should be cleaner now.
- Fixed issue where player was able to honk horn and change camera while menu is open.
- Fixed various issues with inventory involving displaying items.
- Fixed a variety of issues related to camera in top down, clicking on buildings and scrolling and rotating.
- Fixed a variety of issues with cars spawning into scenes. They will behave much more normally when spawning and driving.
- Fixed display issues in character creator in the disadvantage section.
- Fixed player orientation when spawning into a building’s interior
- Fixed sounds being played on wrong channels and in wrong contexts for cars, quiz, etc.
- Fixed colliders for roads placed in City Builder, we don’t rely on the terrain under roads for collision anymore.
- Fixed Third Person Camera to improve walking around inside buildings.
Known Issues
- Slight texture rendering issue with City Builder terrain deformation.
- In Globe view, clicking “Enter” on a HEX display window while the globe camera is moving will not let you enter. The camera must be still to enter.
- Animation transitions are not smooth yet.
- Possible to sink instead of swim when entering the water under specific circumstances.
- Missing inventory icons for some items.
- Traffic jams and car accidents happen occasionally.
Ertha is an MMO 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game with extensive opportunities to satisfy one’s need for curiosity, competitiveness, and social recognition through roleplaying in a vast geopolitical map.
With three distinct characters to select from and endless possibilities to alter them, players themselves will be the creators of their own narrative and wealth both in virtual and real worlds.
Welcome to Ertha