This week, the Untold Dawn staff team had a very productive meeting to determine some of the key functionality that we need for our pre-alpha. We're hoping that by having such meetings often, we will be able to course the game to an enjoyable pre-alpha for all. While the road is long, it's important to attempt to look at our own game from an objective "what will really make the game better?" view.

With that said, this week we've had a bunch of other updates!

Wearables & Anatomy

We have been working on wearable items, such as clothing and the like.

This includes an easy staff command to set and clear the information on it.

You can wear items that you hold in your hands with the wear command.

You can remove items that you have worn with the remove command, which returns them to any hand you have free.

When worn, the inventory system will show you your worn items (the previous screenshots are outdated in that regard):

This plays hand in hand with an anatomy system which lets you customize how your character's various bodyparts look.

And here is an screenshot of the description of the above character, showing both their anatomic customizations and their clothes worn. Keep in mind each wearable gets a worn description. This idea is quite identical to the nakeds found in games like Sindome or Cybersphere.

Wish Command

We implemented a wish / xhelp command which will let players communicate with staff in case they need assistance.

Idle Timers

Idle timers have several purposes; avoiding bots that are port scanning us in the home-page, avoiding inflating our playerbase numbers with people that are not actively playing, avoiding unwanted consequences for players who fell asleep.

We have implemented a way to track idle time and two idle timers: 60 seconds for people who have not logged in or registered, and 60 minutes for people who have logged in.

Kernel Machine Help For Newbies

We added an OOC note on all kernels that helps you to the right syntax.

IDs in Staff Alerts

We have been updating some staff alerts to include IDs so that we can monitor things more closely.

Here is an example of one such staff alert, which gives us the ID of a new character created. No doubt these will keep getting improved.

What's Next?

The most immediate update will be an expansion of the inventory system to allow for you to have items on yourself, simulating pockets for now. The resulting system will mean that you have hands which you can use to hold items and interact with them, but you can stash these items in your pockets.

After that, we have a machine we want to work on which will be a measure to introduce items to the game that have no way of being created. Then, we plan to make a polish pass on doors.