I have made some great improvements over the last month, Including finishing up most of the guild system and starting on a profession system.  In addition I have reworked the controls of the game to allow the use of hotkeys.  More on that later. 

The guild system is largely finished.  Players can create and disband there own guilds, invite people, change player's ranks within the guild, invite, kick, chat, and talk with officers. Guilds are purchasable anywhere and anytime, though they will have a large cost in creds (in the thousands) and the requirement that you are currently not in a guild.  For testing purposes the cost of guilds will be negligible until the stable release.  The only thing left to implement is to include the officer commands (kicking, inviting, etc.) into the Guild GUI.

The profession system I am setting up will be quite ambitious.   Players will be able to choose two professions on character creation.  These professions will be a mix of gathering and crafting professions that allow a player to collect and create equipment and items on his or hers adventures.  Each profession will have a level, and you will need a certain level to collect and/or craft things relating the the profession.  The coding is only partially complete, and when finished will need plenty of bug testing.  If anyone would like to have input on what should go into the profession system, please let me know.

Finally we move on to the new control system.  players can customize the keys "1" through "0" to any skill they currently know.  "i" opens the inventory, "g" opens the guilds (guild purchasing for those not in a guild), "k" opens the skills list, and "t" opens the stats page.  Players can use w,a,s,d to move, however the is a small bug that causes these buttons to stutter initially.  I've found out why it is happening, but have not yet found a fix for it.  In order for all these changes to take effect, it is necessary to now press the enter button any time you wish to type out commands or text.  Otherwise the game could not register when you wanted to type, and when you wanted to use a hotkey.

That about wraps up the major updates, just keep checking back to know when the public testing will begin!

I had gotten the parts for my new server computer last week and had hoped to have an alpha server up during last weekend, but sadly that was not the case. The motherboard shipped to me was DoA and I am awaiting a replacement as I type this. I should see a new board sometime next week and hopefully have something running the following weekend.

In other news I have been working on redoing the GUI of the client and adding scrolling maps. It's been very difficult however, and I'm not sure how to proceed. I am working closely with Robin and Perfekt, two very good programming friends of mine who are working on their own games, but have graciously taken the time to help me with my rusty DirectX skills. Hopefully I will have a new client to show people when the server goes up, otherwise I'll have to use what I currently have.

That's all the news I have for now, stay tuned for more updates!