It's been awhile since the last announcement, and news on 2.0 in general has been scarce lately. I wanted to post a status report here to assure you all that the 2.0 development project, while it has been dormant for a few months, is still in progress. There are lots of factors influencing the speed at which 2.0 progresses and I'm not going to try to go into them all here. Instead, I'm going to show you what is done and what remains to be done, and commit to keeping you all updated on the status going forward. Without further ado...
What's Done
The following features of Toril 2.0 are complete, although all of them have yet to go through final testing and balancing. I think all of these areas have been gone over pretty thoroughly already, but if you have any questions please feel free to ask them.
- New race system
- New class system
- New experience system
- New combat engine
- New spell and spell preparation system
- New character roller
- New skill system
- New restat system
- Area conversion
- Feats
- Spells
- Domains
- Deities
- Combat Maneuvers
- Weapon Enchantments
- Spell/Feat helpfiles
- All classes and class abilities except those listed below
- Tons of small features
What Remains to be Done
The following things remain to be finished. I'll go into a little more detail about these, as some of them are very close to being finished and others need a lot of work still. In no particular order:
- Bard songs: I've finished the new "performance engine" for Bards, and written some of the songs. All that remains now is to create the remaining songs, which is much easier with the new engine.
- Illithids/Psionicists: We're completely revamping Illithids/Psionicists and while the basic psionic engine is complete, we're still working on adding the individual powers here.
- Liches: Their spells and racial template have been complete for some time, but we're still working out details around their balancing. There's not a lot of code to do here, we just need to make some decisions and finalize them.
- Polymorph/Wildshape: The new race system makes it much easier for us to accomodate racial polymorphing for things like the druid wildshape ability, and I'm currently working on finishing this up. It's pretty close, and when it's finished it will allow for both Wildshaping and several new spells (enemies of Lloth priests, watch out...).
- Wizard specialist feats: The special abilities that wizard spcialists receive have not yet been finalized. I was originally looking at the PHB 2 for ideas here, but I'm liking some of the Pathfinder RPG abilities instead. This needs both evaluation and coding.
- Turn/Rebuke Undead: For some reason, this keeps getting put off. I think it's the last class abilitiy, after wildshape, that remains.
- Trophy system: This would be nice for 2.0's initial release, but isn't required per se. It may fall off intio the next release after 2.0.
- Skill hooks: Though we've added a new skill system and revamped the skills, we still need to go throughout the code and add skill checks for some of the passive skills. Sneak/Hide and their interaction with NPCs are a good example of this. This isn't terribly code intensive, but it's a significant amount of work nonetheless. An announcement detailing the skill system is forthcoming.
- Domain feats: While the domains and the spells that go with them are complete, some of them are still missing their domain feats.
- Weapon poison: The old system doesn't work at all in 2.0, so this feature has to be rewritten.
- Summonable mob creation: There are many new conjuration/summoning spells, and some still need NPCs created for them.
- Mob AI Overhaul: This is the biggest piece that remains. The old AI needs work to begin with in general, and it also needs to be updated to use all of the new spells, feats, and abilities which are avilable for NPCs as well as PCs. My thinking as of now is to update the old AI enough to know about the new spells and combat maneuvers, but put off a general overhaul until after the players have had some time to get used to the new system, at which time we would truly unlock their new powers. This would get 2.0 in the MUD faster, and give players some time to figure out how their characters work before the mobs get terribly smarter/more effective.
- Final Statting: Though all of the spells, feats, and races are already created they still need to be gone over and validated that their final stats are in place. I've used some placeholders while developing, and all of those need to get replaced with live values. Races need their default ability modifiers set, spells need their damage dice set, etc. This isn't hard work at all, but it will be somewhat time intensive to get everything finalized.
- General Helpfiles - though we have all the helpfiles for spells and feats, we're still lacking general helpfiles for classes, races, combat maneuvers, etc. It's debatable what level of helpfiles we'll need available to go live, but we certainly need at least the classes and races and new commands documented.
- Miscellanous - There are lots of little things left to do that are too small for this list. Things like setting the guildhalls for the new class(es?), implementing a few feats here and there, etc. This is the "death by a thousand cuts" task.
- Testing - This may be obvious, but before 2.0 is ready to go live it will require a lot of time testing and ironing out the kinks. Everything we have thus far compiles and runs without too many crashes, but it hasn't been stress tested and there are sure to be lots of bugs to stamp out. We haven't put together a formal plan for beta testing, but at some point we will most likely have an open beta test where all players are invited to come check out the system and help find bugs and imbalances.
I think that about covers it, but if I discover something else I'll update this list somewhere.
What's Next?
Let me state this clearly: 2.0 is a priority for this MUD and I am fully committed to finishing and releasing it. I'm currently reviewing what's left to do and prioritizing the tasks while also continuing development. I'd also like to involve the player base more in the development with more frequent updates and targeted discussions. I will try to provide at least a bi-weekly update on the development status as well as previews of new features/spells/feats/etc on a more frequent basis.
I can't promise or even guess at a release date at this point, but I can start knocking out that list above and that's what I intend to do.
Thank you all again for your patience, and you have my apologies for the long wait. Please feel free to ask questions in this thread and I will do my best to answer them.