Hi, sorry for no activity for last month, but as always after vacations some of us returned to universities and you know how it is for those first couple weeks. Both moomoo and me are relocating to new flats, which means some time will pass till the internet will be available for us at home.

On the coding side, we're in the alpha - we've started introducing some alpha features, while some preprod features that were non-blocking are not done yet. Will have to re-work the roadmap. Lately we've been receiving coding and net design help from a friend of mine, Age of Conan developer. His expertise is invaluable and got us to redesign some portions of the engine so that Ekaiyo can be more than silly attempt at MMORPG making. Thanks Joe!

5 comments

So, with two weeks to the end of preprod phase all af us are yearning for more time, but know that it's hopeless. I haven't had good night sleep since my vacations, damn it :P

Anyways, I was kinda too lazy to update the roadmap, so here you are, list of all things that are left to code for preprod:

Animation of characters, to be implemented by ManTis
Fuzzy low-poly grass (impostor based), ManTis
Movement prediction (dead reckoning) for smoother action, ManTis
Standardizing shaders (we currently use two shaders that have inversed normals), ManTis not applicable any more
Adding better looking water, ManTis
Movement (and not only) physics, ManTis
Rotating/Moving/Deleting objects in level editor, ManTis
Public/Whisper chat, Theorem
Level exporter/importer in level editor, Theorem done
More objects support in level editor, Theorem done
Undo function in level editor, Theorem done
Roaming pokemon AI, TopYoash
GUI, TopYoash

and maybe battle engine used in-game, but that's only if we'll really have time.

As you can see yours truly will be swamped with work for next couple days. Maybe I'll offload some of it to Theorem :P. Anyways, if all will be as planned, we'll start coding on closed Alpha with the start of next month. We will also pick our testers, like promised, based on how much did they helped us develop this game. I think that's only fair, as opposed to picking up people who PM me with 'pick me for testing' or, even better, leave a comment 'mail me when this game is ready and I'll test for you: idiot@somany.isps.com'.

With this optimistic accent I'd like to end todays rant. Our next show will include moomoo juggling flaming chainsaws and babies.

7 comments

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm grateful for all the praise - I don't really think it's deserved, as the things I'm really proud of in preprod state - networking, physics, scripting and battle mechanics aren't visible in the picture I uploaded. Still, it feels nice.

I will add some eyecandies for Preprod, couple roaming pokemon and we'll move on to working on Alpha (unless Theorem will add something in the meantime, while I'm working on that ;)).

Oh yeah, did I mention that couple new models made their way into the Ekaiyo Pokedex?

2 comments

The vacations were amazing. Since I was out of range of any mobile phone, I was offline. And it was good.

But I'm back and time to work. Preprod is more or less functional, and we're adding final stuff to it. Guess I should update the roadmap once I'm back home. Theo is working on ABE so we prolly will have ABE functionality in some form within the game engine (as opposed to console only text-based battles). Swarming AI are developed for the pokemon and I'm taking all things that others don't have time to wrap their heads around and implementing it (gaming-specific code that I have background with, and other programmers may not).

I'm in two minds about showing our current progress. The map is just a heightmap crudely textured and there are no models other than players and some pokemon. There is no real GUI, as etix mysteriously disappeared again and the console looks ugly. Ugly things tend to scare people off. The reason we're not going public with preprod is because if people see 'omg, Pokemon MMORPG!', download it and see glitchy 3D-chatroom-game they tend to go away and never look back. OTOH, it does show some progress. Also it shows that we care about you guys and that there IS some code working. I'll ask the team how they feel about it. Tell me what you think as well - do you want ugly pictures couple times a week showing off what we're currently working on or rather bunch of pictures displaying polished features once a month or so. TIA.

8 comments