Gnostaria

Progress on Gnostaria has been moving along despite the lack of public updates. One major milestone of significant importance is the completion of the massive animation project. Over 400 character animations, including movement, attacks, defenses, emotes, opening doors / picking up items / dropping items, death, swimming, sitting and standing and more have been completed and are ready for the game. Both the male and female character models have full support for all animation sequences, and each model has UNIQUE gender-specific animations based on anatomically correct bone structure.

Another major enhancement to our engine technology has been the implementation of "stateful commands". These are commands that can take place in multiple parts; waiting for various other conditions to be completed before a full command is completed. This is especially important due to the physical separation of the game logic processing server (aka the "sim engine") and the physical / public-facing network interface server (the "game server"). This technology has been taken advantage of to support range-based messaging in conjunction with propagating character animations (one example of this is with emotes -- any player that can see another player will see an emote animation play, but only players within a certain radius of the emoting player will receive a text message expressing the action [for example, "Zeruel waves."]).

A significant amount of content has also been added to the game, including highly detailed trees that respond to wind (thrashing violently in heavy wind storms, or swaying gently from calm breezes), high quality rocks, ferns, foliage, shrubs and other ambient details. With these new additions a new demo level is being created which should be available by next month.

Aside from all of the visual content and back-end server technology, this month will mark the beginning of the implementation of various core game features. Player stats are being integrated into the database and a new character screen will be available in the game client to view your current stats. Player skills are also being implemented (primarily combat-based for now, although swimming will likely be integrated as a skill in the near future as well) and skill and stat gain have plans for implementation this month. The final piece of all of this is the highly advanced and customizable inventory system which will allow for nearly unlimited dynamic modifications of items. With these features combined the major elements of character customization and advancement will be established.

Right now progress is also being made on completing the modeling, texturing and animation work for various creatures to inhabit Gnostaria, and work on creatures spawning, NPCs and the systems associated with them (AI, conversations) will be underway.

The calm over the past month has not marked a lack of progress. If all goes as according to plan Gnostaria may be ready for a PUBLIC beta by sometime in July or August!