I figure it's time for a little progress update as a few people have asked how things are going ;).

Artwork is still flowing, but a lack of concept art has made me hesitant to suggest new models until we have some more solid guides for interior styles and such. These concepts are in the pipeline, but there's a few other things to finish first. Maaatt has continued his work on house doodads (windows, doors and furniture) and Joe is working on the Paladin armour set.

Audio sound tracks and effects are well ahead of our targets for this stage of development, so as with artwork these are on the back burner until we start finding more track/effect requirements. The vast majority of work at the moment is going into the Client and Server, and here's what we have been doing:

We are rapidly ticking off the various core functionality required in the server based on a firm technical specification we have developed for the Tearsol Service as a whole. It documents the interaction of login, asset and gameplay services which must work harmoniously to take the user from server / character selection or building, right into the game where they are streamed the required media as they play. We are confident that this three pronged service solution is both elegant and highly expandable to allow for some of the cool player interactions we have planned.

On a more immediate level, Stratboy has made a number of BIG additions to the gameplay service since we last had the team tests a few month ago. Perhaps most immediately noticeable will be the implementation of velocity based predictive movement using UDP, which will eliminate the lag experienced in the previous tests. The server is also hooked up to the database and data cache system, allowing extremely fast access of information and a persistent world. Along with the database system comes some nice functionality, like buddy lists and such.

For the client: I think Alan has more or less finished the building editor, I'll let him talk about the functionality and magical data sizes of the buildings in his own journal entry on export-games.com.

While we have done stacks, there is a lot of stuff still to do before we are ready for another team test which includes the script engine, login service front end and asset service implementation. I hope this stuff will fall into place in quite short order and when it's all in, it will represent the complete Tearsol service, which will be an incredible achievement!

I'll leave ya with a little concept for some paladin armor... Cheers!