New news everyone 

http://www.citadelofsorcery.com/news/index.php

Progress report for August
12 August 2008

• We’re waiting on the latest update on the Trident3D engine. While we wait, we have been working on many other areas, including refining the game design. Design changes have gone into many areas, including monster races, world history, how horses work, bargaining with evil, death penalties, character abilities and more.
  
  One area of the game design that we changed has a large impact on the game world. This involved the lands under Citadel control in the war against Morphael. We decided that it was too peaceful. With only some untamed areas, and occasional forays by Morphael’s war parties, it was just too sedate. The answer… anarchy. We changed the story so that all the lands that the Citadel now claims are in various states of anarchy. There are small feudal kingdoms, areas held by strange cults, wild areas ruled by bandit gangs, all kinds of political, religious, criminal and just plain untamed areas. Meanwhile the Citadel is attempting to bring order to chaos before these lands are overwhelmed by the more organized forces of Morphael. We’ve spent a lot of time working out this new wrinkle to the game, and we have found that the Citadel lands are now ripe for almost any kind of quest and adventure. Everywhere you will go is different and danger hides around every corner. Design work is ongoing to develop this new concept of the world situation.
  
  In art we continue to develop models getting ready for the expansion of the Reflected Worlds terrain. This will take quite some time as it is the largest piece of work left in technology. Many areas we have already modeled have a lot of ground that is placeholder, and a lot of textures are temporary while we wait for this critical piece of the engine to be finished.
  
  Meanwhile, we are preparing assets for the launch of Enact, phase 1, our world editor. Up until now we have been using the original editor that came with the Trident3D engine, but it will not suffice for the quest system we designed. Programming on Enact goes on, but we don’t have a completion date yet. We’re looking forward to Enact as it has the fundamental difference from the original editor in that it works inside the live game rather than outside requiring a compile phase. Enact allows us to edit a quest in real time, while the game world runs. This allows for much faster work and instant testing of quests , missions, adventures, and more.
  
  Our Level Design Interns have now been with us for several months and are starting to grasp what it takes to design one of our quests. They are learning how a single original story written in the correct format can be fed into the game system and become many different adventures for players. This extremely specialized style of writing is difficult to learn, but they are doing an admirable job so far. Four of the original Interns will be continuing on to the next session. We may take on a few new interns who are committed and crazy enough to take on learning this very difficult system of quest writing.
  
  Another area that has seen recent progress is the user interface design and art prototyping. We’re starting to get a good idea of what the main interface to players will be like. We may post some screenshots of that soon so that we can get some feedback from players.
  
  There hasn’t been any time to work on a new website yet, it’s just not a high priority. We need to advance the game long before we worry about pretty web site graphics.
  
  Well, that’s the state of the game… for now. We’ll post more news as things progress.

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Nice to know everything is going well over at MMO Magic.  A question of curiosity, just to make sure I read correctly, will those screenshots be what the finished art revamp will look like?

-Mike

No Mike, as I've stated before it will be many months before we show a major art update as that is dependent on the terrain technology being finished.  It mentions that in the news article...

"In art we continue to develop models getting ready for the expansion of the Reflected Worlds terrain. This will take quite some time as it is the largest piece of work left in technology. Many areas we have already modeled have a lot of ground that is placeholder, and a lot of textures are temporary while we wait for this critical piece of the engine to be finished."

Nice update.. sounds like the Intern's are having fun.  

Originally posted by Jatar

No Mike, as I've stated before it will be many months before we show a major art update as that is dependent on the terrain technology being finished.  It mentions that in the news article...

"In art we continue to develop models getting ready for the expansion of the Reflected Worlds terrain. This will take quite some time as it is the largest piece of work left in technology. Many areas we have already modeled have a lot of ground that is placeholder, and a lot of textures are temporary while we wait for this critical piece of the engine to be finished."

Oh, I must have gotten that mixed up with the art prototyping.

My mistake.

Originally posted by TdogSkal

Nice update.. sounds like the Intern's are having fun.  

hehe.

Sounds like development's coming along just fine.  Keep up the good work MMO Magic!

Bravo..it sounds great.

I like how you have your priorities straight in this stage of development on game mechanics, rather than a flashy webiste.

The concepts of this game are extreemely intriguing. It would be a very impressive project if pulled off.

Originally posted by Dreamstrider

The concepts of this game are extreemely intriguing. It would be a very impressive project if pulled off.

Its not IF, its WHEN.  Thank You

cool but one question, What is with that character they have in there screen shots???  The world looks fantastic but that horrid excuse of a character model ruins everything lol.

You are SO correct about that character model, if you can call it that.  The 'so called' character you see in those shots (that we didn't put on this site, someone else fetched them) is what is known in the industry as a place holder.  When we first put the test world up we needed a body to move around, so someone made that cheap character in about a day.  You think that looks bad?  You should see her animations, they are  terrible.  Fortunately, we have been busy getting motion capture animation and building new characters, not to mention a new pipeline to process them into the game.  Still has some tweaks needed though, so we're stuck with the placeholder still.

Our entire animation system has been revamped and we're working on the some real characters to replace that... well, ugly thing.

So, ignore the placeholder girl, we'll have new characters in the game soon.  I feel like the Wizard of Oz, "Ignore the man behind the curtain!"  :)

This is what you get when you show a game this early in development, which is something most companies don't do for this very reason.   You have to take the good with the bad, you get to know things early and get to add your suggestions, but you have to look at some place holder art.  Some people can see past it, some can't.  I hope you guys can be the former.

Don't get me wrong, I like really nice graphics with beautiful vistas and cities as much as anyone.  However, I would much rather have the game mechanics be perfect.  I can look right past that model because I am staying focussed on the wonderful ideas the developers have for this game.

I can't wait for more updates!

i cant wait for another update either.

but i also have a queston. will it reqiure skill as well as stratagy to stay alive.

the reason i ask is cause there is a really sort of pointless game on Kongregate called Amourophos+ or somthing like that, and well its reqiures both skill and stratagy just to stay alive for like a minute. it has really bad graphics and has no plot. 

what im trying to say is that even if a game has bad graphics or no plot it can still be an amazing game thats why i ask.