If at first....

Greetings all :)

Well, what a year.. I got TGE about a year ago and started playing. For anyone that remembers those early posts.. enthusiasm, determination, slightly jaded view of the world etc etc and to cap it all, I was going to make an MMORPG (yeah right I know :) ) To make it even better, I knew nothing of programming, or scripting or art... so lets see, on a first count 0 out of 10 skills required.

I found an excellent artist and comissioned some work and I am really pleased to see that Andrew is currently doing what he loves... making games and building an excellent reputation.. Congrats Andrew.

Then I found out I was Ill... one of those life moment I guess but Hell, I was enjoying myself (PS they think I am better now.. mostly)

Then possibly the worst thing.... I discovered that in my naivety that all the work I had done on my game was useless, because although working great in single player mode.. on a dedicated server with more than one player it all fell apart in a heap. With the way I was feeling at the time, this led to the whole project being shelved whilst I recovered.

So anyway, when I looked at the GG site again. 2 main things were happening.. one was that GG was about to release 1.5 and Arcane-FX was getting into final Beta status.

So I sat back and thought.. what the hell now, and did the only thing I could do... I deleted everything I had done and started from scratch, deliberately building and testing on a dedicated server set up.

My programming skills and artwork skills are still rubbish, BUT and heres the huge BUT.. there are so many resources and snippets and so much information on the forums and in the actual samples, that everything I needed as examples is readilly available to examine and copy. The only proviso is that it will take me three days to finally do what an experienced programmer will probably do in 5 minutes:)

I bought every pack I could, and also subscribed to the MMOKit by Dreamer.

I didn't use the Kit, I wanted.. no I needed to learn how to do it, so I used it as a huge resource for examples.

I tought myself to use Quark and did some basic buildings and I hacked, carved and fought my way through and today I am happy to announce I reached my milestone 1 in my development.

So what is in Milestone 1 :)

Heres the list.....

All features currently have 1 item in as proof of concept and functionality

Basic Zone and Zoneing ability between multiple zones / servers
Totally persistant database driven system with databases only on the server.
Log In and Character Select
Mob AI and attack
Full implementation of Arcane-FX
Basic Mellee combat
Skill based development system for characters
Harvesting and Resource gathering
Looting
Tradeskilling
Lock Chest Drops and experience to character who creates most damage on MOB
Doors that can have objects as keys
RPG Dialog implementation
Radar and location finding
Buying and Selling
Full Inventory
Recepie Scribing and Implementation
PVP or Not based on server switch settings
FULL MULTI-PLAYER ability ................................(yeah woot)

OK before what's next some pics... (SHOW ME THE PICS>>>>>>>>>>>)


General View




Spell Casting



Crafting





Looting






Okay so what's next.....

Well.. Milestone 2 really.....

A lot of my database code needs optimising.. theres some real bottlenecks which although not currently apparent will be soon, so I need a real programmer to help and guide at some point.

More Art... if Andrew is not to busy and is still prepared to work with someone who went silent for 3 months (for good reason) I have some more ideas to work through :)

Take all the basic single implementations and multiply them through.. add tradeskills, other crafting stations etc etc

Start building the story line into the NPC dialogs and events.

Generally more of what's already there.


To finish I guess... believe in yourself, believe in what you want to do... its a long lonely road, and it takes time but it can be done, with no background skills, just know you can do it and believe ... believe in the content packs, the wonderful people at GG and the fact that you will get help and find people, once you have proved that you are serious and understand what it takes to go from a - b with a view of eventually winding up at z :)

Regards to all and happy game development holidays :)

Graham