April 23 updates

quoted from Xsyon updates thread

April 23 2011

Hello everyone!

I haven’t posted much on these forums for a while as I’ve been extremely busy behind the scenes. A lot is going so it’s about time to catch everyone up.

First of all I’d like to introduce two new members of the development team, ‘Dezgard’ and ‘Danathur’. You have probably already seen them either on the forums, in IRC, or in game.

Dezgard runs our new test team and Danathur joins us a game designer and programmer. Both will be interacting with the community to solicit feedback on current, planned and desired features and game balance.

I’m also glad to introduce two new programmers, ‘Sergant’ and ‘Alexx’, who have joined the team this past month. They both have jumped in head first, quickly getting acquainted with code and optimizing the server and the client. Now that they are settled in Sergant will be focusing on creatures, combat and client optimizations, while Alexx will prepare our server clusterfor future expansion.

We’ve also added a few terrain artists to the team and we have new areas to the east and northwest which are almost ready to be cleared of the green mist.

Our Guides will continue to run events in game to provide some daily excitement and activity.

I will be in Russia for the first half of May, meeting the new team members and making preparations for the future!
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Here are our development plans from now through mid summer.

Overall plan:

We are going to evolve Xsyon to include farming, contested expansion totems and revamped combat. The goal is to provide more daily activities to tend to and something to fight over. While we progress towards this goal we will wrap up many things that are almost ready and continue to balance and improve current features based on feedback.

Immediate goals:

We are currently finishing up a revised patcher that uses compressed files and we are preparing the server for a tree planting and agriculture system. Once these are ready, we will be able to patch out smaller features and improvements on a more regular basis.

Our new creature growth and breeding system is complete and being tested along with further improvements to creature AI.

As we progress towards our overall goal we will wrap up many things that have been sitting almost finished for a while. This includes:

– Object decay and tool tips turned back on.
– All wild creatures in game.
– Animal growth and breeding.
– Female only armor sets.
– Full themed architecture sets, including floors, roofs and stairs for multiple story construction.
– Functioning gates.
– Cooking system.
– Quest system improvements
– Death penalties added.
– Town improvements, including currency, town friends and foes, and binding to friendly totems.
– Crafting improvements including material bonuses, repair and dismantling.
– Fire building improvements including fire fueling and tending.
– Undead creatures.
– Improved guide commands for running special events.

All of these will be introduced while we work towards adding agriculture, expansion totems and a completely revamped combat system.

Over the past six weeks we’ve been dealing with one emergency after another and have made vast improvements to the server to handleour player base and optimized the client to improve frame rates.

I know our efforts don’t make much of a public impact, but they were necessary and will prepare us for the future.

Once we finish the launcher improvements we are ready to roll out regular updates focused on improved and new features.

I thank you all for your patience with the rough launch. I’ve been taking in all of your suggestions from emails and from forum reports gathered and sent to me. Please feel free to approach Dezgard and Danathur with your suggestions and general feedback.

Enjoy!