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Survivors of Ragnarök is a city-building-management-survival game inspired by Dwarf Fortress. Manage, create, and survive through dynamic and deadly worlds. Losing is a fundamental core aspect of design.

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Why we switched to OpenGL and why you should care!

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As many of you fine dashing gentlemen(and ladies) know, in our last content update we converted our entire graphics library from some very obscure not so awesome library to everyone's favorite type of GL; open of course.

It has been a long grueling process process in the short term; even now we are still trying to convert a lot of our code to reap the benefits of OpenGL. However The long term benefits are invaluable not only for us as your narcissistic developers, but also to our fantastic and incredible community.


So before we talk about the awesome benefits that OpenGL offers you guys, let's talk about how awesome this is for us. Many of the features OpenGL offers serves to streamline our work flow. No longer will recoloring dwarfs require a right AND left animation set. This effectively cuts redundant and repetitive work time by half, and that's the kind of work time you want to cut down. Which leaves for more shenanigan work time; the type of work time you want to increase.

We also have the ability to do a lot more with our engine visually. Effects that were complex on our old library has become substantially easier such as day/night cycles and parallax layers. A wide breathe of effects we probably will never use like per pixel lighting and depth of field are available not only to us but to you guys as well. Which is a fantastic segue to why this will benefit our community.


The ability to mod the game and add user created content will be MUCH easier for you guys. Not only will we be gradually adding more and more mod support throughout development but our fantastic community has tools that we may never use. We want to empower our community not only with the ability to create fantastic and out of this world new creatures and items, but also wanted to give the ability to allow our community to create new and interesting game modes and worlds.


Of course Rome wasn't built in a day and Survivors of Ragnarok is no exception. We want our community to be as active in development as we are. From the very start of the project we have shared each and every new build with our community; bugs and all. These are as internal as builds get without developing a game yourself. Everything we have we've shared with our community, and that's our development philosophy moving forward.

Although to be fair our single-player campaign we will be keeping fairly secret until we get closer to release. That's mostly cause it would litterally blow your your mind away (Seriously, we legally are required to have everyone agree to a small EULA where we take no responsibility for the spontaneous combustion of your cranium).


Public Service Announcement:

Millions of pigs each year are battered, beaten, abused, eaten, and killed each year due to swine related violence. Nine out of ten people know someone what has been affected by domestic pig violence, and one out of every three children will be never own a pig.


Help fight against mistreated pigs and piggy abuse by adopting a pig today. There are plenty of pigs that still need a loving home. More importantly there are plenty of children that need a pig to love. Adopt a pig today.

Desura Digital Distribution

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The Kitchen

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Theon
Theon - - 713 comments

I love the tentacle :D

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Kamikazi[Uk]
Kamikazi[Uk] - - 1,412 comments

Good news :D, open gl is a great libary i had no problems with it at all when i have been using it. What libary were you guys using before Open GL i was just curious :D.

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Tastyrice Author
Tastyrice - - 255 comments

We were using AWT and Swing and having to do some dirty things to the code to make the game act the way we wanted it to. Naturally there were TONS of bugs when we switched over to OpenGL.

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Kamikazi[Uk]
Kamikazi[Uk] - - 1,412 comments

Ah ok :P never even heard of them lol. Hope you find Open GL better :D. Game is deffinitly getting better and better :D.

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EpicChicken
EpicChicken - - 7 comments

omg taaty rice epic posh chicken its just sooooooooooooooooo epic

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Hell_Diguner
Hell_Diguner - - 3,645 comments

Right, now to make a gif that alternates between picture 4 and 5

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EpicChicken
EpicChicken - - 7 comments

id adopt a chicken but pigs... there evil its just how they stare into your soul

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Fib
Fib - - 381 comments

Good choice migrating to OpenGL since it's such a flexible library. I'm sure your work flow will improve exponentially because of it.

It would be nice to see some shader techniques with all this beautiful pixel art. Blurring, simple spot lighting, and depth of field would look so amazing.

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Leafhouse
Leafhouse - - 19 comments

As always, brilliant!

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Jpmerida
Jpmerida - - 203 comments

When opening this page, I scrolled down... When I see the Headless Pig..
I say "OMG! Dwarf's are so classy."

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SolidFake
SolidFake - - 1,200 comments

gentlechickens?

(preordered btw)

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Ouren
Ouren - - 176 comments

GL HF

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