Hello internet! Billy here.  For those of you in the Loudcrowd alpha we wanted to give the lowdown on what’s been updated recently. We are constantly adding cool new music to keep things fresh, but it’s probably worth a blog post when we add self-esteem restoring options, like freeing your internet persona from being forced to be hipster-rail thin. Cause hiptsers come in all shapes and sizes! Anyways, if this sort of blog post is useful, let me know through our new Support page (I’ll explain what that is below) or just leave a comment and I’ll make sure there are plenty more updates in the future.

Performance Tweaks

We’ve received some really great feedback from all you alpha Loudcrowdians (Loudcrowders? Loudies? Peoplewithexcellenttasteinwebsites?) and a frequent issue has been running the site smoothly on some machines. We’re doing some really cool stuff like 3D rendering in Flash, which isn’t particularly well suited to handling memory. In this last update we fixed a bunch of memory leaks and added some tricky stuff to increase your overall client performance.  We definitely have some more work to do in this area, but things should run a lot better now.

Character Customization

Everyone wants to express their creativity, so of course we get plenty of feedback on being able to customize your character. We have a whole lot planned for this, but in this last update we gave you a sneak peak at what’s to come by adding support for various body build types.  Don’t worry, no matter what size you choose, you’ll still look sweet in your super tight jeans. Check it out by loggining in and navigating to My Profile -> Edit Character and messing around with the “Build” buttons.  On this same page we also added a link for those of you that ended up with a character of the wrong sex.  We no longer force you to stay as a man/woman, but be careful: if you switch genders you’ll lose all your sweet loot!

Support/Feedback

We knew we wanted to start a dialog with you all early to get feedback, ideas, and hear about issues you are running into. But forums are too chaotic for that purpose and a blog-box email form isn’t our style. So we’ve rolled out a support area powered by GetSatisfaction. It’s a good place for everyone to get together and ask questions, report problems and/or start discussions about Loudcrowd.  What’s really great about this all is that every interaction is out in the public and auto-organized, so everyone get’s to benefit from any discussions / troubleshooting that goes on. Check it out by clicking the Support link from the Alpha Loudcrowd page.  Create an account, login, and you’re ready to go. We’re not particularly happy with the strange re-registering you have to do the first time you log in, but we’re working with GS to try and get something nice and smooth.

Keep the ideas and emails coming and we’ll continue cranking away over here with much more to come.