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I waited on a true warmblood BC until I felt like I could really do it justice. I am so glad we did because I feel like this one is a true knockout. It's got to be my new favorite BC.

The DW is now available for you to unlock and is included for those with a BC subscription.



Something of note is that the foal's hind legs are quite spread apart. That means for now the far side hind leg is going to have some errors. We know about that and it will get fixed but we have to do a bunch of reprogramming the image generator to work for 4 legs instead of 2. It's the same for all BCs. It's already on our list.

Personal Updates

I wanted to give you all some updates on how the move is going. Yesterday we spent hours with our lawyer at notaries and the immigration office. It was worth it though because as of yesterday I am officially a legal EU resident and have started my process towards permanent residency. Haystack also applied for his residency today and will have his in a few weeks.

Immigrating to the EU with a child is very complicated. Yesterday we applied for the family reunification process for our daughter. Once that is approved Haystack has to fly with her back to the United States. They will have to stay there for an unspecified number of weeks (Most of August probably) until she has a visa and is allowed to fly back to the EU. Only then can she apply for her residency.

Yes, it's a really stupid and expensive process. It's also very disruptive. We appreciate your patience while we are doing all this flying back and forth dealing with immigration offices. It's very hard to run a company while dealing with this. It's a lot and it's overwhelming.

All that said, we are loving it here. It's an easy and gentle way of life. The food quality is so nice, it's incredibly safe, everyone is less stressed and has time to enjoy life. We just got to get through the last bit of this moving process.

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State of the Game

2 more breed characteristics coming this year
We have already put out 5 new BCs this year (Irish Draught, Thoroughbred, Dutch Warmblood, PonPon and Seapony.) We are planning to put 2 more in 2024. A fantasy one for Halloween and a real breed for December. We have not locked down what those will be yet.

Instead of doing an eighth BC this year we are going to go back to some of those early attempts and look at fixing up the shading and some of the details. We have learned a lot about how to make the horses look good and think we can do can improve upon our early efforts now.

We will make sure and put the old versions and the new versions to a vote by the members who use that BC before we switch things over. If you’ve invested in these BC’s we want you to have a voice. The Saddlebred and Friesian are first on our glow-up list.

We also plan to use this extra time to work on converting our 333-pixel high backgrounds to 500 and phasing out the old shorter backgrounds.

Image Generator Queue Status
I would love to be able to give you a holistic explanation of what is going on with the image generator queue. I can’t because understanding why we had issues requires so much technical knowledge that any explanation I can give would be meaningless to you. What I can tell you is that we had a problem where the generator queue was getting stuck in a loop and other issues where our server farm was using old information. This happened while Haystack was traveling internationally. As soon as he could dedicate a large amount of work hours, he got things stabilized. He is actively working on changing how our generator handles the queue to make our system more robust and improve our operating costs.


Back in January we turned off automatic image generation in the the background (that means pasture foals, aging up, etc) for everyone except premium accounts. Meaning if you did not have a premium you have to open the page of your horse to see an updated image. We did this as a cost-cutting measure to slow the game's hemorrhaging of money. You can read about it in the thread “Unfortunate news about image generation - big change for non-premium accounts”

At this time we still do not have an ETA to get it running for non-premium accounts yet. This month is going to be a MASSIVE server bill because of all the times our generator got clogged up. I am hopeful that the new queue system will get our costs to a more reasonable amount and we restore this functionality for those with basic upgrades soon. We will keep you posted when we have more news.

The image generation system is a massive hydra with tons of heads we have to keep talking to one another (and all the heads are orange cats). The queue is just one of these. It takes deep focus and tons of hours to make improvements to it. Clear focus and long stretches of free work hours are not something we have had in spades while dealing with an incredibly expensive and stressful move in the middle of an economic downturn. We are on the downslope at this point though. The worst is past us and we are all looking forward to getting this beast tamed.

Skin Generation Status
Did you know that our image generator creates skins for your horses just like a video game? This is another head on the hydra that needs work. The skin system was built to only handle the near side legs. The new BCs have far-side legs showing as well. We did some bandaid fixes to prevent the worst of the visual errors from that but the system needs some serious work to get everything showing correctly. We really want to get this work done but the move and server stability issues have been screaming for our attention. I just wanted to make it clear that we know there are issues there and we can’t wait to fix them for you.

Same with the overdue improvements to the Advanced Tack editor like mane swapping, moving brands etc. Those changes are on our list. We are so excited to get to them. We just have to muck out the barn of all the gross unfun background poop first.