Just wanted to let everyone know that I am in the middle of a major relocation right now. I'm moving back to the United States from Germany within the next 45 days and starting a new job. So I am going to be pretty tied up for the next several weeks while I move my family.
Not too much to report on the shard right now. Things have been slow over the summer months. I've been off doing Army stuff, and now I'm pretty tied up with my relocation and new job in the States.
The good news is that once I am settled in I will be on the same time schedule as most of you, give or take a few hours. If you live in the central part of the U.S. I am planning to move the server from the west coast to either Texas or Virginia. Its a pretty good connection regardless, so you shouldn't notice much of a change, but those of you in the central or eastern part of the U.S. might see some slight improvement in your ping times. It will be awhile before I move the server so I will announce something before it happens.
Please join me in welcoming Marox to the Shattered Sosaria development team!
Marox is a skilled C# programmer and an avid roleplayer. He comes to us with a great deal of experience as a developer on other roleplay oriented UO shards. I'm really looking forward to having him on board, we have a very solid programming team working on the shard right now!
First of all, a warm welcome back to Cymidei, who will be re-joining the Shattered Sosaria staff as a Seer. Cymidei comes to us with a solid roleplaying background. She is one of the founders of the Dark Tower on Baja, one of that shard's oldest and enduring roleplaying institutions. She is also a former (and now once again current) shard reporter for Stratics. Cymidei was a Seer from our last pre-alpha test quite awhile back, and whipped up some inventive and exciting quests for our alpha testers, so I'm very happy she will be staying with us now that development on the shard has been picking up. Welcome back, Cymidei!
Lots of work added to the server over the weekend. The racial language system is mostly completed. Race selection now functions, with monster animations and custom paperdolls for the Orc, Centaur, Lizardfolk, Ratfolk, and Gargoyle races. Nimari has been coding like a daemon, and has developed the framework for our class and feats system, as well as started on a custom poisoning system that will add new dimensions to poisons on our shard.
Galdar is working on putting together our custom map, which will be over twice the size of Britannia. Braise has been working on custom areas that can easily be inserted into the map once it is assembled.
Finally, I'm also working on some enhancements and improvements for the Shattered Sosaria web page. It's a side project I am plugging away at, and hopefully you'll see some exciting new changes to the web page soon.
So, all in all, development on the shard is moving forward at a brisk and steady pace, MUCH faster than it has ever done now that we have such an excellent development team on board. It should accelerate even more once Joeku is finished with his finals in a few weeks. I'm still not sure when we can get the alpha server online. I want to have the race/class/feats/xp system more or less functional before going online. Classes and feats in particular will require a lot of coding. But the end result is going to be fantastic, so hang in there.
In the meantime, if you have friends who are interested in a roleplay server done in an "Ultima Meets AD&D" vein, with a lot of custom systems and artwork - tell them to look no further. We'd love to have them as part of our growing community. And by all means, use the forums, they are here for you guys.
We're planning to have a custom map that is over twice the size of the standard Britannia map in Ultima Online.
The first image attachment shows the projected layout of the map. The second image attachment shows a comparison of the size of the Britannia map to the Shattered Sosaria map - the white area is the size of Britannia.
Now that's one large map! And that doesn't include the dungeons! Our dungeons will be on a separate map so that the surface world will be truly seemless.
I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Galdar, who is joining the Shattered Sosaria development team. Galdar joins us as an experienced World Builder. He has developed maps for many other shards and is a frequent contributer to the Ryandor.com world building site. Galdar will be working with Briase to develop the custom map for our shard! Welcome aboard, Galdar!
I am waiting to hear from some of the Seers from the previous alpha build of Shattered Sosaria, so we may have other Seers joining the team - announcement to come!
I'm always looking for experienced programmers and 2D artists to help out with the shard. I am also looking for someone who is proficient in ArteGordon's XMLSpawner system to build in-game quests. If interested, respond here or drop me a PM.
