I'm restarting my dev blog, now that I'm doing something interesting again. I work on Fearann Muin - a Multiplayer Online Roly-Playing Game (MORPG). You may notice the lack of the word 'Massive' - which is used for many a commercial games that are similar - World of Warcraft, Everquest, et al.

While I've been working on development of this game on and off for 1 year and 3/4ths - it's now finally starting to take shape in a number of areas - such as inventory, combat, dialog with NPC's, and trading. While all of these elements are still in there early stages, they are becoming usable.

You can now talk to NPC's in the style of a discussion tree (think Baldur's Gate or any similar ADnD game, as well as countless others. Inventory works (although it's still pretty simple - you can't do anything besides pickup and drop things). Combat works - but you don't really see anything - no animations, just results of basic attackes dumped to the console. And the trading frontend in the client still needs to be written (the backend in the server is done, more-or-less).

If I can keep the work up, these areas will be working in a stable fashion in a month, even if they aren't very feature rich.

The major issues we have are many. We need to work on Collision Detection (CD) in the server - so players can't cheap by walking through walls. This will also keep our own AI from cheating. We are still working on how to deal with this without making it overly complex.