State of the Bane 05MAY2010

[RedOctober]

Ladies, gentlemen, and comrades! It's time for a brief update on the status of SBEmu and the progress that has been made over the past month.

Testing Team Progress
It's been nearly two weeks since the Internal Testing Team began work, and already they have made incredible progress. So far they have been concentrating on reviewing zones and object placement, helping us recreate the world of Shadowbane as accurately as possible. The work they are doing will have (and already has had) a noticeable positive impact on the final state of SBEmu, ensuring the world is of the highest quality when released.

Design Progress
The Design Team has spent the past month working on finishing building placement, and we're proud to announce that nearly 99% of buildings are placed on the map at the time of this announcement. With zones mostly complete, the next major task for the Design Team is to begin populating them with mobs. Like buildings, some mobs will be automatically placed from recording data thanks to community contributions and the Developers, but a substantial portion will need to be placed manually as well. It's never too late to submit your recordings, feel free to give the team a hand and submit them here!

Server Development Progress
This past month has been particularly productive for the Development Team, and a laundry list of new features have been implemented! They have implemented basic combat, death, looting, character skills, flight, and a large number of game formulas. Additionally, a substantial amount of time was spent improving movement sync, something which should alleviate melee sync problems and make them less of an issue than they were on the Shadowbane Live servers.

Finally, significant effort was put into strengthening dupe prevention and equipment tracking. Because of the negative consequences of wide spread duping in Shadowbane Live, dupe prevention is something that the Development team takes very seriously and has invested a large amount of time into.

What's Next for Server Development?
Well, the next major task for the Development Team is to work on implementing powers. Rich and the others will be starting on this shortly, and it will be a major milestone in server development. While the Development Team is always working a variety of different things, this will be the focus of their efforts in the immediate future.

Client Development
Last month we were proud to announce the creation of a Client Development Group and our intentions to create a new Shadowbane client. Shortly thereafter the group got to work and some important decisions have been made about development of the new client. We won't be releasing any solid details at this time, because the project is at such an early stage, but will keep you updated as things progress.

Upcoming Public Preview
Finally, I am pleased to announce that we will indeed be holding another Public Preview of SBEmu in the near future. Currently we do not have a date to announce, as exactly when this takes place is contingent on development progress. Additional announcements will be forthcoming, we have something exciting planned for this event!

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