Milestones

I figured it was about time for another Neoastra Science Fantasy Game update....

If you are not familiar with the project you can find out all the gory details at www.neoastra.com ;D

We now have an internet project management system in place (Overlord), and I have been ramping up production. While Trac seems a more robust management system, I feel Overlord to be adequate for managing our team.

A couple of new folks have expressed an interest in helping out with the Neoastra game project. That's always nice to have, less for Ben and I to do! (new developers welcome, email me if you have an interest).

I've set our first milestone - NeoMile01 at November 23rd. I hope to have at least some sort of zone built with custom characters and a Neoastra specific interface that folks can run around in and see what it's going to be like. I'm not planning to make this a fully public release, but something that in-house developers and friends can check out. I'll take lots of screenies to be sure!

I've decided to start with Saurokova Citadel as the first zone to be developed. Saurokova is to be the home world of the lizard race of humanoids. We decided to make the world more visually stunning by making it volcanic with seas and lakes of lava. This was for purely visual reasons and not in any way a tribute to Star Wars! The Citadel itself is build around a lava lake. I think it's going to be a really cool zone to run around in.

So far, I have the terrain for the zone built and textured to my satisfaction. You can see it in many recent screen shots, it should be easy to identify. Still needs some nice emitters to cinch the scene though I think .

I have created new body meshes for the player avatars and fit them to a stock skeleton. The next process will involve attaching them to the animation skeleton so that they will become animated. (I'll probably start on that today) In the interest of time, we are using the TMMO Kit and it's stock animations.

I have a number of Saurokovian structures made already. I have only recently decided on a texture motif for them. My short term goal is to ramp up structure production over the next week or two and get Saurokova to the point where it has some substantial content that will wow visitors and they will want to explore.

I may have to push the milestone back as there is some coding required that is probably beyond my skill to do personally. This puts me at the mercy of my team mates schedule. So if they can't get to critical aspects the date will be moved back as needed. I thought it would be nice to shoot for having at least something up by the Thanksgiving weekend though!

I have had a bit of trouble with forum bots as well. We will be upgrading our php version at some point but it's not a priority. For the moment I have new forum accts set to approve, so new folks might not be able to get in right away.

That's news, stop by www.neoastra.com and check it out!