Xenocell

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It's been 8 months

It's been 8 months, but development has never stopped. This is just a sampling of the many things that were developed during this time. Find a video and a long post inside.

It's been 8 months since I last came out with some news. The website was neglected, I admit, but development was far from coming to a halt. The very opposite.

The graphics engine of the game has recently leveled up as we have moved to the much more advanced and up-to-date Torque3D. We've also came up with a method for realistic material accumulation (or at least some kind of trick that looks like it) which through the weeks made it into a separate package available for developers to be able to quickly prototype cliffs with covers - this will soon be available at our company website. Here's a promotional video that we made:



The AI has developed significantly. since we are developing a game with possibly several thousands of players, AI optimization was a key to achieve responsive and clever NPCs within the game - be that wandering animals, server controlled enemy players or NPC allies. This still needs some tweaking, but it's already ready for beta.

Of course, through these months, the original design has been refined - it has changed a lot! The world map was finalized. It has more than 40 regions for solo RPG (story) play, and 5 huge PVP resource sites. The above is the main continent of the planet Ibelis, where the game takes place.

With some experience in handling huge internet traffic, we have built up the networking architecture of the entire game to be able to take an extreme number of players, but more importantly, to be able to self-balance itself - much like TCP/IP works. This means, that whenever a region within the game is becoming crowded, the game will take measures to reserve additional resources for that specific region. The nice thing about it is that we can just dump in new hardware, and it will just work with the rest of the system from the start.

As soon as we are done porting the game to Torque3D, a closed alpha will begin, where we will be stress-testing the networking layer, possible memory leaks, the game updater, basic account services such as login and registration. This will take about 2 weeks. After this, a closed beta will follow with only a handful of people to test game-specific features. Lastly, the testing process will enter open beta. We expect this to happen 6-8 weeks from now.

Until then, I'll do my best to post new screenshots every few days. Thanks for reading through.