We're making our plans to take us to First Age. Our guess is that we'll get there in about 6 months, if we can keep on plan. That would mean the release would be sometime in the beginning of the summer.

This will still be pretty light, unfortunately. We'll probably have something on the order of 100 spells, but the number of combat maneuvers will remain very low at the beginning of First Age, we will only support humans at the beginning of FA, etc.

We will support armor, quests, lots and lots of crafting, armor, clothing, constructing buildings, dungeons, and in-game writing.

After that, judging by what I'm seeing during the beta, you'll see 3 significant new features a month, until we can get at least one developer and one artist working full time on it. (So tell your friends to sign up so we can get there more quickly!) After we can get people working full time on the game, you should see an average of about 10 significant new features every month, and one of those should be a doozy (e.g. full support for player governments).

We will be charging for subscriptions at the beginning of First Age. I'm guessing our rate will be about half that of the average MMORPG, $5-8 per month. There will be no charge for the client if you download it, or you can pay shipping and handling to get a CD mailed to you. The game runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, and is playable in English and French.

With our next release I hope to bring another ten or twenty people into the beta. We are one to two weeks away from the next release.

With the very first beta of Magicosm upon us, we've put together a few new screenshots that show off where we are at this phase of the project. In these screenshots, take note of the new GUI, spell effects and foliage. We're all really excited about this new phase of Magicosm. Its been a really long and difficult endeavor but its all starting to pay off. So, here are the new screehots:

Visit the new magicosm store to purchase Magicosm apparel and accessories. All proceeds go towards supporting the ongoing development of the Magicosm world.

We've created a new mailing list for Magicosm. This mailing list will only be used for big announcements like beta testing, the start of First Age, the start of Second Age, etc. Sign up if you want to stay notified of all important developments!

Be sure to check out all the various ways to stay informed and talk with development team by checking out the Discuss Magicosm page.

What is exciting

You will have the opportunity to become a legend in the world of Magicosm. You will build towns and kingdoms that will shape the future of the world of Magicosm. Your deeds will go down in the histories that will define Magicosm. A lore you inscribe may become the most sought after ancient relic in the Second Age of Magicosm. Don't miss out on this chance to be part of the ancient times that will forge the world of Magicosm forever.

The First Age of Magicosm will be wild and unbalanced. It is a chaotic time as the the world is being forged while good and evil are striving for their place. Due to this chaotic nature, you will be endowed with powers that you will normally not find in a game like this.

Opportunities

There are a number of opportunities which can come your way as a character in the first age. These are unique in that they will not be available to players which do not participate in the building of the world.

• Your surname will be locked forever, leaving an unbroken lineage which your future decendants in the Second Age can inherit. This means that your family name can carry the rich history associated with it forever.
• At the end of the First Age there will be a Cataclysm which will destroy much, but not all, that is built by your characters. Many of the buildings, items, cities and spells will carry on in the Second Age as dungeons, artifacts, ruins and wild magic. Just think, that wizard's tower you build deep in the remotest region could become a future hidden place of power! The city you help build will be probably be destroyed, but the broken foundations and decaying walls will be there in the future, full of mystery and history to be found and discovered by a new generation.
• Some of the spells and lore discovered will be changed to be named after the characters in the first age. Imagine that invisibility spell you discover being forever named after you.
• Some rare plants which are used for hueing metal and dyeing cloth will all but disappear in the future. Only you and your family line will know the secrets to finding and harvesting these plants in the future, leaving your descendants with the unique ability to use these colors forever.

Caution!

We must point out that this is not a final release of the game by any means. Features will be added and bugs will be fixed at a rapid pace throughout the First Age. What you will be able to obtain, with a very small subscription fee, is not only the ability to be the first to play the game and to shape the structures, towns and legends for thousands of players in the future, but the ability to have an impact on the game mechanics themselves, as we will be extremely open to what features you would like in the game.

When?

We are planning to have a free beta for the First Age of Magicosm ready by November 15, 2003.

The bigger picture

Magicosm, First Age is your opportunity to play in the historical period of Magicosm. Play will be for a limited time, and after that your characters will fade into legend. Because play is for a limited time, less attention will be paid to balance and we will allow some abilities we couldn't allow in a continuing, persistent world. But, since we will still be developing Magicosm, many features will be missing at the beginning of First Age.

When First Age ends, after a brief period in which we will 'age' the Magicosm world, we will start back up in Magicosm, Second Age. The Second Age will be the Magicosm that persists, but characters, cities, and the laws defined in First Age will live on as history and groundwork for the Second Age.

Magicosm has just gained another team member! Piotr Blasiak has joined the team as a texture artist, which was a position we desperately needed to fill. Welcome aboard Piotr!

Also, we've decided on our list of current UserStories to be worked on during this iteration (a user story is basically a "feature"):

• UserStorySupportOneHundredUsers
• UserStorySimpleMobCombat
• UserStoryUseDagger
• UserStoryMakeBasicBlacksmithItems
• UserStoryCreateCharacter
• UserStoryCursorMovementAndPreviousLineEditingInChatWindow
• UserStoryBasicChat
• UserStoryCreateFemaleModel

Our iteration cycles usually run about 6 weeks so we expect to have most of these completed by the end of July.

Hello again! Its been a while since any new news has been posted. Well, it definitely isn't because things haven't been moving along! I have a lot to report on so sit back and enjoy.

First, the website has been totally rewritten. You shouldn't notice anything different as my goal was to keep it identical to the original. The rewrite was for ease of maintenance more than anything else. This new site allows us more flexibility with what we can post. However, if you come across any broken links or other problems, please email me and I'll take care of it.

Second, in the last news posting I mentioned our new member Toby. He's been hard at work and has already produced two sample sound tracks to be used as ambient sound. You can download them both. One is a desert theme and the other is a village band. They are in MP3 format so if you need a player, I recommend WinAmp.

Third, The Magicosm FAQ has been updated with tons of new information, be sure to check it out.

Fourth (I told you there was a lot going on!), one of our artists, Eugene, has produced a really nice piece of concept art for the Magicosm title screen:

Finally, game development progress. We've finished up our previous iteration, getting most of the things planned finished. We've just put together our task list for the next iteration that should be completed in six weeks. Some of the things added in the previous iteration were: character persistance, some basic combat, basic mob AI, updated character creation screen, a new deer model with animation, and a new male avatar with texture.

Remember to stop by our forums and say hello! We also have an IRC channel on Stratics and you are welcome to come in and ask the devs questions. The IRC server is irc.stratics.com and the room is #magicosm.

Hello everyone. We`re still moving along here, making good progress. We`ve started a weekly internal testing session to allow the team to pull all of our work together and test it out in game. Last week was the first week of our test session and we spent some time crafting, killing and just general running around.

There are a couple recent changes to our team. First, I`d like to welcome Toby Stephens aboard as our music and sound FX guy. Toby will be handling all things sound related ranging from music, ambient sounds to sound effects. You can get a sneak listen of some of Toby`s work for Magicosm here. (insert link). In addition to the addition of Toby, Josh Laase has taken over the role of Project Leader and Zachary Wells has taken over the Art Director position. Head over to our team's bio page to read about the team!

Finally, if you`re interested in joining the Magicosm team, check out the recruitment page to see what positions are open.

Remember to stop by our forums and say hello! We also have an IRC channel on Stratics and you are welcome to come in and ask the devs questions. The IRC server is irc.stratics.com and the room is #magicosm.

Things are moving along well and even picking up steam. The new developers that we've added to the team have worked very hard and gotten themselves up to speed with the code base. They're now feverishly working on new features for Magicosm. We expect to have an internal release within the next two weeks that will add some key features like looting, mob spawning, basic combat and rudimentary crafting. We also expect to have some new screenshots to post shortly that will show our player avatar model as well as some basic mobs.

We've also updated the bio page with all of the current team members. Head on over to read about the team!

Remember to stop by our forums and say hello! We also have an IRC channel on Stratics and you are welcome to come in and ask the devs questions. The IRC server is irc.stratics.com and the room is #magicosm.

It has been a very busy new year for the team. On January 5th we held a focus group conference call with people picked from the forums and invited by the team from other locations. The result was a prioritized list of game features which have to be finished to bring the Magicosm closed beta. Initial estimates show that the closed beta will begin in August. This is an exciting time for the developement of Magicosm now that the core engines are complete and we can proceed with the implementation of game mechanics.

We have also added a new team bio page which we will populate more fully over the coming days. You can read the bios [here]

Remember to stop by our forums and say hello! We also have an IRC channel on Stratics and you are welcome to come in and ask the devs questions. The IRC server is irc.stratics.com and the room is #magicosm.

I hope all of you are enjoying a wonderful Fall. Progress here on the Magicosm project is enjoying its usual leisurely pace with a new internal release due out this Tuesday. Among other things we have an enhanced client with new terrain and weed system online. In addition we have added a skill screen and crafting gui. The AI monster server has been ported to run with tighter integration with the world server which should allow us to increase the number of AI driven creatures in the world. The server has had a lot of new functionality added including a very sophistocated system which allows for object modifying effects to be stacked on any object in the world.

Here are some new screenshots of Magicosm:

With the summer drawing to an end the Magicosm development team is ramping up its efforts to make some internal deadlines for the fall. Progress has been made to the terrain engine, worldbuilder, particle system editor, lore system and grapevine system. We are in the process of pulling it all together for a new internal alpha release. Here are some screenshots of the nighttime in Magciosm.

We want to welcome Michael Schenck as a new programmer on the Magicosm team. Michael is a seasoned Java programmer and has already contributed a new particle system editor to the project. Welcome Michael!

Follow the journey of the mages Tenneson and Braddock as they wrestle with a mysterious enemy from another dimension. Read it here.

We have added a number of pages describing different aspects of Magicosm. Make sure you check out the experience, melee and lore pages for more information.

We have have some new screenshots in our gallery here.

We have have some new screenshots in our gallery here. The artificial intelligence system is coming along very well and we are pleased with the results. We had an internal release a few days ago adding, among other things, inventory and equipment control, improved performance and better looking terrain.

The Magicosm project is starting to throw off our self-imposed anonymity and are welcoming the public to come and learn more about this project and what we are trying to do. We are hanging out on IRC at the stratics reflector (server is irc.stratics.com 6667, channel is #magicosm). Feel free to stop by and chat anytime!

We would also like to welcome to members to our development staff. Eugene "Nightshade" Rokhlin joins us as an animator and has already knocked off some very impressive animations. Amer Dhanoa joins us as a modeller and texture artist. We already have incorporated some of his models into the game and are excited about working with him. Michael "Nevarre" Brand has joined as administrator for the Magicosm Wiki. He has already moved us to TWiki and moved the project design pages into the new format. Welcome Michael!

We are looking for experienced Java programmers, modellers and texture artists. If you are interested in joining the Magicosm team then please take a look at page and send us an e-mail!

The Magicosm team went to the Game Developer Conference this last week. Read all about it here.

We have also put up a screenshot gallery to see here.

The name of Cosm has been changed to Magicosm because of a trademark conflict. Magicosm is now a trademark of NavTools.com, Inc. All the pages on this site have been updated to show this at the bottom of each page. We are very happy with the new name and we hope you will be also.

We have released version 0.62 of the Xith 3d client and 0.9 of the Magicosm server to our alpha test team. Among other things we have radically smoothed the movement of observed remote avatars. Before this release abrupt changes in direction or velocity would cause your avatar to be observed to pop around in the game. We have also added a new system icon panel and a hot-key activated control panel.

We ran some multi user tests today. We were quite pleased with how smoothly everything went. We were in the game for an hour killing and healing each other with some test spells. The avatars and magic effects are test ones and do not reflect the quality we are striving for. We have sound up and working and it really makes the world come alive.

We have started making some improvements in our vegetation system. Here are some screenshots of a tree which shows the type of quality we are shooting for. The tree is rendered with 2 different textures with fairly low polycount (2000).The combination of textures and polygons makes it look like a much higher resolution tree.

More enhancements to the house builder as seen in today`s snapshot. A first stab at roofs yields this rather unimpressive attempt, but we should be adding roof thickness over the next week, as well as a variety of other capabilities.

The Magicosm team has gone into overdrive in preparation for the Game Developer Conference in March. We have a large list of deliverables in the next 2 months and are very excited about our progress so far.

We have a new revision of the house builder. The screenshot above shows one of the houses that was built using our exclusive house builder system. The builder takes floor plans and building materials and assembles the houses to spec. The vast majority of buildings in Magicosm will be built using this system. This is the same technology that will be available to players when they go to build their own houses. The idea is to have players puchase plans from venders, purchase materials and hire carpenters to build the house over a number of days.

A lot of things are coming together pretty quickly in the Magicosm world. Hopefully by the time the GDC comes in March we will be demoing a portion of the world, a small town, crafting, avatar interaction and combat, both magical and melee.

Hello everyone and Happy Holidays! This month marks the 18 month anniversary of theMagicosm project and we are happy to announce continued progress on all fronts. We have addeda new set of pages on the website where you can track the project at a finer level of detail. You can get to these pages using the "progress" link to the left or click . We have also added the concept art page which you can get to by clicking here.

We have added a new game designer to our team. Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz joined the Magicosm team in October and has already managed to rack up an impressive 66 *long* posts on our internal e-mail list. He brings many excellent thoughts on crafting, economy and community building. Welcome Phin!

We have a new example of Magicosm life on our Examples page. Read about the life of a hunter here.

I have been working on are user interface system. Expect some new screenshots in the near future showing our new and improved used interface. Bobby has nailed down many of the issues in the Magicosm communication system and has moved on to resource management, starting with mining.

For those of you outside the Magicosm core team, it may interest you to know we have a phone bridge call every week on Sunday where we discuss various gameplay issues. These discussions have proven to be extremely fruitful in nailing down some of the more difficult gameplay concepts and goals which drives our development. Maybe someday we will post the minutes from the discussions so everyone can follow our train of thought during this critical phase of development.

The Magicosm team hopes that all of you have a very happy holiday!

The Magicosm team continues to make progress along a number of fronts. Bobby has completed support for our skill system and has also written a skill editor which the development team will use to manage the complex relationships in the skill trees. Melee combat has been changed to use the skill system and is in testing now.

We want to welcome Tom Szemro to the Magicosm team. Tom is a native of France and will be heading up in-game languages as well as internationalization of Magicosm. Tom is also managing our new bug and feature tracking website which has already proven to be a huge help to the development team. Welcome Tom!

I have been working on our AI system which should be flexible enough to support everything from merchants to combat mobs. We expect to have simple PvE combat within a few weeks. In addition we have expanded our animation support so that the server now controls all animation moving forward. Stand, walk, swing, run and die animations are now supported and being tested.

Hello everyone! The Magicosm Development Team wants to congratulate Bobby Martin, our project manager, on the birth of his son Freddy, born on July 7th, 2001 at 1:48 pm. Way to go Dad!

On some miscellaneous news we released a new internal version v0.55 last weekend. This version has a number of enhancements including expansion of the 3rd person view. You can now adjust the camera around your avatar to meet your own needs. In addition, we now have look up and down in first person view.

Sun Microsystems received a copy of this release and got it running on their internal systems. They also went and ran it on Solaris for grins. Its a credit to the Java technology that an application as complex as Magicosm can run unmodifed on such different systems!

On a sad note, it has come to our attention that the name of our world `Magicosm` is in fact already a trademarked name by another company. So for now we are considering Magicosm to be a working name and are thinking of a new name for the game. If you have suggestions then please drop by our message board with your thoughts.

Just wanted to post an interesting picture. The avatar shown here is using skin andbones animation and his staff has a particle system attached to it. The figure is lit properly taking into account the position of the sun. You can see the moon rising in the background.

On an unrelated note, Sun Microsystems will be using Magicosm as one of the applications they test against when releasing new version of the Java3d kernal. We are putting a release together for them this week.

We are very close to a new internal release. It will be in the next day or two! We are very excited at the ongoing progress. We have an entirely new sky system with full and accurate support for the sun and moons. Check out the picture of the sunset to the right. The sky system has over 50 parameters controlling all aspects of sky colors, multiple layers of clouds, colorful sunrise and sunsets and directional lighting as the sun moves across the sky. For the first time Magicosm saw day and night cycles and it really enhances the feel of the world.

We continue our work on the skin and bones animation system. The picture the left is taken as the skeleton ran. The staff moves smoothly in synchronization with the animation. As usual screenshots do not do a 3D world any justice, because to see it move is much more exciting than a still shot. The model does not represent the quality we will be using in Magicosm, but makes for a nice test.

We want to take a momement and welcome a new member of the team. Borne "Setep Sa" Mace has joined the team as a server/network programmer. Borne has many years of Java experience and are very happy to have him on the Magicosm team!

It has been another busy month of development for the Magicosm team. I want to thank all of you who have written to indicate interest in joining the group! It is great to see so many people with a similar vision and interest in creating our new world.

We want to extend a hearty welcome to David "Tzan" Burke, the newest addition to the Magicosm development team. David is a modeller and graphic artist with many years of experience and we are proud to have him on our team. His contributions to the project have already started rolling in and hopefully we will have some screenshots showcasing his work shortly.

Huge progress has been made in our animation system. We now have a very flexible skin and bones system which will provide the necessary support for the nifty things we want to do in the Magicosm engine. You can read the dev notes for our design here.

Updates have been made to our website in the following areas: Mission Statement, Examples and Stories.

Hello everyone! I can`t believe it has almost been a month since the last news update. Bobby has been relocating for the last couple of weeks and should be back into Magicosmdevelopment soon. Peter has produced an extremely nice castle which you can see by clicking on the thumbnails. I have been working on a variety of things, including some brand new terrain texturing code. The terrain textures which you can see in these screenshots are generated with the new code and are completely procedurally generated. The texture brushes will allow the world builders to define and merge multiple layers of textures to create unique landscape over every square meter of the Magicosm world.

Please feel free to drop by the message boards and contribute to the ongoing conversations there. Once Bobby is back in the swing of things you can expect some more information on gameplay to be posted to the site.

We added our first animations this week to Magicosm. Our test avatar can now look around and run using a frame based morphing technique. This more of an experiment because we are still uncertain how we will proceed with figure animation. The memory overhead of what we are doing now is 3mb per figure, which obviously is unacceptable. We will start experimenting with true skin and bones shortly.

Since the last site update we have also added polygon walking, which allows figures to walk on floors, stairs, bridges, etc. You can still walk through walls, but we should have collision detection done soon. We also completed our first round of testing on the new multi-UDP message streaming system Bobby has been working on. It looks really good so far. We still have a time-synchronization problem which is causing client side prediction to miscalculate and warp people around, but looks like Bobby may have a fix for that today.

As a last note I would like to welcome Jeff Waller to the team as a client programmer. Welcome Jeff!

Progress continues to mount on the Magicosm client. Today we merged in our new particle system into the engine. This will be used for magic effects, fire, weather effects and lots of other places in the world of Magicosm. The particle system is very flexible and will be improved and extended to meet the needs of the various sub-systems as necessary.

We had a very exciting multi-user test 2 days ago and I am very happy to report that Bobby`s new netcode is amazing. Lag is virtually non-existant now and bandwidth per second has dropped considerably.

We did some experimentation on laying paths and roads down on terrain this week. To the right is a screenshot which shows the result. Brick and stone paths can be laid down in an arbitrary curved path which uses guiding nodes to calculate the flow. Note how the texture flows along the path. We plan to also support dirt paths and roads which are baked into the terrian textures themselves. The only time we need to use secondary geometry to show a path is when the density of the texture needs to be at a higher resolution than the terrain textures (like brick and stone).

The development team completed its design of how the skill web will be constructed and we have an initial implementation which should be available for testing shortly. We are working on the character creation process and prototype screens. It won`t be long until we can start experimenting with new races, attributes and skills.

An internal release is available for immediate download. The auto-updator will updateyour current version to the latest codebase. The client version has been moved to v0.4and supports 3rd person perspective, rough inventory and melee combat. There have been a number of bug fixes and all of you should see improved performance. Those with 16-bit zbuffers should also see an improvement in the sky. Those with older graphics cards should also notice that the black borders on terrain cells have been removed. The server code continues to improve at a quick pace with the inventory and combat additions. Please forward your comments to the development team as soon as you can.

This has been a busy week for the Magicosm team. Bobby has been making huge strides in improving the efficiency of the network code and is currently testing an innovative multi-stream UDP system. We all look forward to seeing it in action in the next release.

The client code has added a number of interesting features. The portalling code has been written and tested, allowing the engine to switch to a swirling tunnel when the user is being moved great distances. Portal entrances have also been completed as is shown in the screenshot to the right.

We have also finished the projectile code. This supports arrows, spears, magic ranged weapons and every other type of projectile needed for Magicosm. The system is flexible enough that we should be able to use it for catapults and other more esoteric needs.

Its been a busy week here in Magicosm land. I have been working on thearchitecture builder and wanted to show you guys how it is going.The screenshot to the right are the beginnings of an Inn and attachedstables. These were built with a `wizard` that takes a layout and builds adefinition in our new geometry engine. The wizard analyzes the plans andconstructs BuildingNodes in a hierarchy. The geometry engine takes the nodedefinitions and builds an optimal 3d geometry to represent the nodes,applying Brushes to Surfaces. It may interest some of you that the housewas crunched down to 6 geometry arrays of triangles, from a total of 300building nodes. This is so efficient that my frame rate does not drop whenviewing the scene. Coplanar surfaces are automatically merged and hiddengeometries are removed completely. The wizard can handle multiple levelsand can built quite complex structures, as long as they are built ofstraight planes. I call this a wizard, because the future Magicosm level editorwill work with much more complex structures, and would be able to edit theBuildingNodes produced by the BuildingWizard. There eventually be a seriesof Wizards specialized in building different types of things, from dungeons,cities and walls.

This also makes it possible to use this to build player housing to theirspecification, although of course we would have an in-game floor-planswhich have a more user-friendly interface. Also note that the buildings aremade of materials like worked stone, brushed plaster, aged oak andrefined cedar planks. This will allow us to work into the economy theability to secure the resources you need to have your house built, plus addto the trades skills to produce them.

Over the last few weeks, Julie and I have been working on a PC female. So youcan get an idea of how things are coming along, I've dressed her up in heavygermanic armor, ready to kick arse on any presumptious Orc, or whatever elsemight stand in the path of this armored beauty.

The basic Model is some 908 polygons at the moment, with the gear takinganother estimated 400 or so polygons, creeping into the 1300 range.

The add-on armor (helmet, spaulders, at the moment) is fully animatable(though I'm still looking for CS to get her moving for real, its hard toestimate a hypothetical deformation along axes). Visor can be shut/opened,the spaulders should follow the movements of the arms without looking weird

We have a new release ready for the Xith client and the Magicosm server. Thenew release includes an autoupdate routine, so hopefully you won''t ever haveto do anything special to get a new release again.

Alpha testers will receive an e-mail with an update.zip file. This is a small program which will synchronize your client install with the latest changes. If you already have axithdemo release, you should have a xithdemo directory. If not, create one somewhere that you would like the demo to be. Unzip the contents of update.zip into thexithdemo directory.

After you have retrieved the new release, you should remove your oldxith.props if you have one. Then just double click xith.bat to run the newclient.

I would very much like to see everyone or almost everyone try the client inthe next week or so. After this, getting new releases will be much easier,and they should come more frequently and with cooler stuff.

Let me know if you have any questions! Congratulate Dave on the keenlooking client, too :)

Bobby

Well, a new client with all of Dave''s bells and whistles (and very pretty whistles they are) and with the new server is available.

You won''t see any difference from us using the new server, the benefit is that it''s not junky demo code and I can add features. Expect to see items that you can pickup and drop soon, as well as some very basic combat.

You really should download this one and look at it, the terrain looks remarkably better than the old one, and the old one looked pretty darn good. You should take a look at xith_readme.txt, too, there are some new commands that you can use in the client. By the way, there's a house and a fu dude at 1500,1500. (See the new /loc command.)

You''ll get double echoes back of everything you say; currently the client echoes it back to you and the server does, too. I''ll remove the server echo later.

You should be able to log in with other people and see each other floating around as big boulders.

Please notify us of bugs you find. Currently known bugs are:

1. Some machines show straight black lines along the texture boundaries.
2. Sometimes when you log in you don''t get messages from or see the other folks logged in.

Have a great week, and a Merry Christmas.

Bobby