Today we have a small concept art update, with a few new beautiful concepts done by Joe and our newest artist, Jon Hoffman. Keep up the good work, guys! You can see the concepts here. BTW, im agp1183, so far sort of the head of the art department here. This is my first news post, I hope to keep you guys informed about all the Genecys art, as well as Garbled. So expect more frequent updates in the near future! Feel free to contact me or Garbled with any questions, comments or if you would like to help out!

Lots of progress on the server over the last two weeks. The last few weeks I've been working on making combat functional in the game. I've written a barehanded combat system, as well as enchanced the weapon-based combat system. Using the new treaure system that was recently completed, I am now able to automatically assign skills to both new players, and monsters. This allows the orcs to fight back finally, once I started swinging at them.

Additionally, I've begun a little more work on the skill engine. I have the basics of an EXP system working, you now recieve EXP for combat, and killing. I've also written the framework for item crafting skills. Hopefully next week I can get basic item crafting skills working.

With the holidays, I have been a bit behind in updating the site. However, I have been making progress. I completed work today on a treasure system for the game, which allows us to automatically assign treasure and skills to any game object, like monsters for example. This finally makes it possible for orcs to load into the game, armed with weapons, and the skills to use them.

In addition, I've updated the concept art gallery. Go check it out!

Not much to report on the coding front, have just been fiddling with some ideas in the engine and testing a few things. However, this has been a big week for artwork. We now have 4 concept artists rapidly plugging away with ideas for monsters, scenery, and objects for the game. This is a very exciting time for us in the project, and I reccomend you check out the concept art gallery right away. (Use the link on the right side of the page under "Resources").

Additionally, I have added a forum to the site. This is a place where we can discuss various aspects of the project, and use as a general meeting ground to hash out ideas.

Did some minor work on the engine and client this week. Mostly hunting down a few bugs in the client, and a few tiny memory leaks. Not too much to speak of this week on the coding end.

However, we do have a new concept artist on the team. He has provided a bunch of concept art for bipedal races in the game. You can go check out some of his work on the Concept Art Page. His name is George Dabrowski, check out some of his excellent work!

As of today, the Genecys Project uses ODE http://www.ode.org for it's physics and collision engine. This change provides a marked improvement in the overall functionality of the physics. ODE solves a number of problems that the built-in physics engine couldn't handle well, such as objects rolling down hills, objects bumping into eachother, and players being able to walk on top of objects.

This week showed some excellent progress on the physics engine. Have basic character movement and collision with field and moving objects pretty much working as well as, and in some cases better than the old FreeSOLID stuff. At this point all that is left is reworking a bit of the map loading stuff, so objects are transitioned from map to map as they cross map boundaries. In addition, I have finally implemented dynamic loading of maps, and put in the framework for dynamic unloading of them, allowing the game to swap them in and out as needed.

I'm a little bit behind on getting the engine fully functional with ODE. Right now I'm working on getting a nice, fluid character control working again. The old engine, while clunky, made it much easier to move the character around. Unfortunately the old engine made it unreasonably difficult to do things like walking on top of another object. ODE makes that easy, but at the price of being more difficult to get character control running smooth. However, progress is being made, and currently I have the character mostly walking correctly, though it currently cannot strafe or walk backwards.

This past week has been spent testing and integrating ODE. I spent the first few days seeing if ODE was the correct solution for Genecys. As it turns out, it's pretty much ideal for what I was tring to do before by hand. I could have saved alot of time if I had known about ODE sooner.

Most of the rest of the week was spent converting the server to use ODE rather than FreeSOLID and the builtin physics stuff. At this point static models are about 80% functional under ODE. I plan to work on special cases and animated models (PC's and NPC's) next week.

Once the server is reasonably funtional with ODE, I will commit the vast body of work. I estimate 2 more weeks for that.

While admittedly these updates have been less than weekly, I'm still trying to do them as much as I can.

The past few weeks I've been working on generating a realistic sky for the client. This involves making the sun/moon revolve around the earth properly, and transmitting that data, as well as the time of day to the client. The client now generates a decent approximation of night/day. I'll include a small example screenshot, though there are still a few minor bugs to work out, and the textures used for night/day/clouds/celestial objects could be made better. I simply whipped them out in the gimp really quickly to test the code.

It's taken me awhile because I've been under the weather alot lately. First I got a nasty flu, and this week I had my wisdom teeth out.. so for about 2 weeks no coding took place.

Next week I intend to take a stab at revamping the physics engine and collision, which have both been a thorn in my side. Someone pointed me at ODE http://www.ode.org I think this might be promising, and I'll spend the next week or two fiddling with it.