2022 Q4 Update

9/7/2022

You've probably noticed some changes happening around the channel. Time to explain what's going on.

Envoy updates

The current 0.11-288 prerelease will be the last in the 0.11 series. The next prerelease will be 0.12, and after a small testing phase we're intending to move directly into production with it. This is all thanks to some phenomenal efforts by Rob, and great feedback from everyone from the last prerelease. We are so excited for you all to get your hands on this new version! Not only is it faster, but the UX has levelled up too.

Along with moving 0.12 into production, we're taking this opportunity to change Envoy's name to Orynt3D. We went through a lot of ideas and iterations, and settled on a made-up word. This should make searching for it a little easier. There's no such thing as a perfect name, but we're really happy that this marks another strong iteration on the journey of helping people organise their stuff!

With the name change comes a new website. It's not ready yet, but this means a documentation refresh, and some up to date screenshots. Expect more darkmode shots!

We're hoping to get something out in the next week or two for actual playing with, apologies it's been a while since last release.

Company updates

At a company level, there have been some other things happening in the background.

Hyperrational is becoming Playable Prints! Actually Hyperrational is still going to exist, but Steve and I have started Playable Prints Limited as well. Why would we do that, you ask? Well ...

... Playable Prints has taken ownership of minihoarder.com and wargaming3d.com! We've been working with the their owner, Jon, for a while on ways to help each other out, but a couple of months ago a confluence of events arrived to make this the right thing to do.

You can read the official annoucement we made on MiniHoarder and Wargaming3D

As a consequence, you may find some new faces arriving in the Discord in the coming weeks. I look forward to welcoming new friends and I hope you will too!

We have started to make some plans, but our experience is that the universe laughs in the face of our plans, so we'll be putting out more surveys and looking to the results to inform our exact next steps. If you're already a MH or WG3D customer or artist, there will be some more announcements about what this exactly means for you (short story: we aim to continue as they are in the short term, and make improvements in the long term), but if you've got any questions at all, happy to field them in public or private.

We'll keep moving forward with Orynt3D but now we get to think about it in the context of a larger ecosystem. We're looking forward to bringing new tools to the marketplaces for artists and customers, as well as thinking about the Hoarder service from Minihoarder, that provides online backup and organisation for your models.

It's such a huge compliment from Jon to entrust his hard work to our care, and we're so excited about the opportunity to serve the community: both artists and customers alike.

Originally posted in the Hyperrational/Playable Prints Discord server. The words have been lightly edited for better readability as a news post.