News

Everyone with customs born (according to their page) after the 10th of September but before Onyx's latest news post has received their refund. Messages were sent along with the refund, so you will have received one per valid custom created. :)

If you believe you should have received a message / beads but didn't, please message me.

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The purebred chrysalids have been dropped to 15 beads and the hybrid chrysalids have dropped to 30 beads. Enjoy! I believe Nasire is still working on the bead refunds list.

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The main page of the forums has been given a facelift, and there are now links at the top of the page to the latest posts on the forums, your own most recent posts, and your own most recent threads! The issue with the first post on a new page not showing the new page until a second post has been added should also be fixed.

There is a bit of lag when accessing the main forums page. Some time in the near future the forums code will be getting an update that should eliminate this.

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Just to let you know, Aluriya alpha accounts will close on the 21st of October. If you want to join long enough to participate in the raffle for two free Forever Upgrades, you must join on or before the 18th because the raffle will take place some time on October 19. Forever Upgrades will no longer be sold after midnight on the 21st.

The original colors of the Hsulan and Arabi will also be switched out on the 21st of the month or thereabouts :) Hsulans and Arabis will only be available during alpha, and while the breeds may come back some day, they are also the only breeds that will have 3 poses available. The pose 1 Hsulans and Arabis will never return to the site as aethers.

All alpha members will receive a profile trophy, receive free alpha-only items, have free upgraded status through the end of alpha, and be eligible to participate in free raffles for custom pets and more.

All customs created during alpha will also receive a trophy on their profile!

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I feel the need to post some clarification again, because I think people are getting the wrong idea.

I previously stated that part of the reason that we want to switch to a new system is that it makes buying new poses cheaper and also makes the programming more streamlined/less heavy on the site.

Some people took this to mean that we are doing this so we can spend less time and money developing the site, and nothing could be farther from the truth.

What this will do, is make *individual* poses cheaper to produce in the long run. The initial costs to produce this conversion are not small at all. There are twenty eight poses that need to be drawn from scratch, PLUS all the existing bases will need to be tweaked and condensed into single files per pose. PLUS hundreds of new markings will need to be drawn, PLUS we need to figure out how equippables are going to work, and many of those will also need to be redrawn for the new bases.

This is going to put us WELL beyond the usual art budget and that means that Nasire and I both will be paying to have much of this new art made out of what would normally be our paychecks. Not to mention all the additional coding that will be needed to switch to the new system and the fact that we're scrapping a system that took a lot of time and effort to build in the first place.

Why do it then? Because once this new system is in place, we will be able to get MORE art done out of the same art budget. We will NOT be spending less on the site; instead we will be able to add MORE poses and other art to the site for the same amount of money. If we had kept to the old system, every new hybrid pose was going to cost in the neighborhood of $300, not including markings. That would mean long delays between getting all the hybrids for a new breed onto the site, long delays (I'm talking years) between being able to add new breeds, and we would not have been able to add the alternate poses that I think will make breeding much more challenging and fun.

With the new system, each pose can be completed for $100 or less, not including markings. That means that we'll get 3x the value from dollars spent on art. Even so, it's going to take a while to even break even with the money spent on creating these first new poses, but this is the decision that is the best for the site over the long haul.

Added to this, is that the old bases were very difficult to work with. Front and back halves had to be matched up pixel for pixel on every single breed. This was a nightmare for the artists and thus no one wanted to actually work on the khimeras. Hibbary in particular didn't want anything to do with any further work on the khimeras because it was so draining and from an artist's perspective, unrewarding. When you have artists who don't want to touch your pet bases with a ten foot pole, the time has come to say "OK, we tried this system and it's not working out. It's time to try something new."

This is also the reason that Khimeros is still a beta site. We are still changing and growing. We have never promised that anything on the site would remain the same during alpha and beta, and that is still the case. There will, no doubt, be more changes coming this year, but they will be changes made to benefit the site as a whole over the long haul, not changes made so that we can spend less time working on the site and/or spend less money on development.

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