I apologize for the delay, we spent some time *** sure the video file was of a reasonable size and suitable quality. Enjoy!
Overview
Relatively speaking, the month of May was a fairly slow one for the team. Real life concerns (such as family matters, work, and final exams) took their toll on progress, so this update will be a little less robust than past ones. Regardless, there was progress made and it is my pleasure to give you a brief update on what we have been up to over the past four weeks.
Mob Placement
Mob placement continues to consume most of the design team's time. Because very few mobs camps were populated by recording data it will take the design team a considerable amount of time to complete this daunting task. A large number of zones have already been completed, including the majority of newbie island. We have included several screenshots of these camps for your viewing pleasure.
Development Team
The developers have been hard at work, as usual, though several had real life commitments they needed to attend to. Regardless, work on the new client is well underway and there were several major advances in terms of server development. Perhaps one of the most exciting recent breakthroughs is the work on banking by Eighty, who was able to get banking and vault use working. You can see a screenshot of the bank in action here. Most other work by the development team has been in the area of server architecture and organization.
Working on powers is still the next major step, one that Rich will be hard at work on over the next month. Once this development has been completed we will be able to give a better timeframe on the public preview, as functioning powers are key to what we have in mind.
Finally, last month we provided a screenshot of melee combat for you to look at, showcasing recent advances in development. This month we thought we'd offer a little more, so Daymar was kind enough to put together a short video of basic melee combat in action!
Video Link (About 18 MB in size)
Testing Team
The testing team continues to look for bugs in the game world, though they have been quite thorough and work in this area has slowed. More recently they assisted in testing a new method for hosting the server which will enable us to ensure maximum uptime and stability. This new method was implemented after some testing and will help speed the development process, particularly for the design team whose ability to work is limited by any downtime.
Public Preview
While we are still unable to give a specific date for the public preview, for reasons discussed above, we can tell you that we intend for this preview to include PvP combat. Powers are central to this, without them it would be rather bland, so we are waiting until work on powers has been completed. As soon as we know when this will be additional information about the preview will be made available. We want to make this public preview the best experience of PvP combat it can be at this stage, and will invest the time necessary to achieve this.
Contests
As you're all probably aware, we have been holding a series of contests over the past few weeks with closed beta spots as awards. Thus far there have been two winners for the character template contest, Debo and Allik, with the third round ending this Friday. Soulein is still judging the lore writing contest, which closed this Monday, and will announce the winner once he has a chance to read all of the submissions. We would like to congratulate the winners thus far and thank all of you for your submissions!
Discussion Thread
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