Sorry it's been so long since the last update guys. Really appreciate the folks reaching out with offers to help and support. I generally try and ensure when I post an update there is some awesome content improvements to show but.. there always seems to be "just one more thing" I want to do before a major update. My bad, my bad.
A lot of the development over the last 6 months has been sub-system level stuff. Not something most people get all excited about but critical to base gameplay. Here are some items:
- Major chat re-write and tabbed chat / chat channel improvements
- Network layer changes for performance improvements and some bug fixes
- Hardening the authentication and server side code to prepare for release "in the wild"
Doesn't sound like much to some possibly but the chat re-write alone was over 100 hours. Anyhow, enough whining about the work, where are we at today?
We have clothing!!
I know right! 
I took a lot of good-natured ribbing for letting the UMA characters run around nekid for so long. Hey the truth is it wasn't a priority but.. the long lived nudist movement in Aakrana has been put to the chopping block and we now have well clothed ladies and gentlemen. Our current UMA and recipe integration is pretty light to say the least. Not going to invest too crazily into it until we have some stronger skill-sets on the modelling side working on the project. There is a plan for the current phase 3 milestones to add in additional base recipes for the various armor types.
We have mounts!!
Ya this one surprised me to. Was deferring this to alpha but the stars aligned and while fixing up some UMA issues we were able to get the player models correctly mounted on the critters. It looks pretty cool and gives us a great starting point for mount itemization down the road. Mounted combat is not currently functional and is something that will be looked at in a (distant) future update to mounts.
We have our adventuring class!!
This is the current approach to "classes" in game. There are none! I appreciate there are some people who will like this style of game and some that will be less inclined to it but give us a chance to flesh it out and see what you think. The goal was to let players find their own skills and styles that they want to make their character into without being pigeonholed into a "meta" class. The new base class meant that we had to make skills class agnostic and simply change over to skill checks. The Skills re-write is still very much in progress but we have now got the foundations for a true sandbox player class.
We have tabbed chat!!
I don't know if this is as exciting to anyone else as it was to me (and wow what a gawd awful amount of work) but having a much more traditional chat system with tabs and chat filters was something I really consider foundational to a great player experience. There is still definitely work to be done here regarding customization of chat channels and channel filters but the core code for "real" MMO style chat systems is in play. To answer the question about voice chat, at this time that is an additional bandwidth cost and coding cost I am not ready to absorb. There are so many great and free third party chat systems that for an independent studio to take on unnecessary work and cost just to say we have integrated voice chat seems a waste right now. Not saying it wont happen, just not for the foreseeable future.
I want to thank all of the indie development community and especially the great minds in the Unity MMO development space who have shared their skills and advice so generously. Absolutely amazing time to be doing indie game development and get to collaborate with such strong talent in so many different disciplines. Thanks for reading folks and your continued interest and support. I am hoping to do a video soon of some in-game footage highlighting the initial game play and some basic skills, questing, harvesting and crafting.
Talk soon but until then, keep your stick on the ice.
