Alpha 2, GC2008, Concept Art and more
Major developments have been under way in the world of Gnostaria. The past two months have been a whirlwind of activity in preparation for presentations at GC2008. One of our partners, 3DGDA, travelled to GC2008 in Leipzig, Germany over the past week to pitch their services as well as present Gnostaria to several interested parties. The response so far has been positive and many future deals, discussions and demos are being worked on by the Gnostaria team and our partners.
Just prior to GC2008 we also initiated our Phase 2 Alpha and accepted a record number of testers. This release is significant because dramatic enhancements have been made to our back-end server technology. We now utilize a true n-tier Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which provides for an extremely robust, reliable and responsive server infrastructure. We also utilize an extremely powerful persistence technology that was at first only a theoretical concept but that we now fully employ to great effect. Our server reliability even at these early stages is beyond our expectations. The future will only see more improvements.
With Alpha 2 we also implemented a significant amount of new content. Skeletons featuring an array of weapons, armor and powers will roam the cursed regions of the land. Sheep and rams of all shapes and sizes will graze in the lush fields (which, using the new "ground cover" foliage system provided by our latest game engine upgrade, are VERY lush!). New animations, new environment work, new 3D models and an ever-increasing list of features defines the Alpha 2 with many exciting developments planned for the next two months.
Finally more development has been made on the Gnostaria.com website with the first step being cleanup of the previous "Screenshots" section. The Screenshots button has been renamed to Image Gallery and many different screenshot galleries are presented. The current galleries divide screenshots into different groups based on the phase of development they are from: Pre-Alpha (the oldest prototype screenshots), Alpha 1 (screenshots from the last alpha phase ), Alpha 2 (current screenshots) and the new Concept Art gallery. The Concept Art gallery features all new artwork of upcoming content in Gnostaria and gives us a chance to work out highly stylized designs before putting them into production.