Hi Treyu,
Good to see you around. The In Development list is actually what I've been spending the majority of my time on since January.
In particular these:
Creature revisionsCombat revisions
Animal Taming
Pets
Mounts
The list needs slight revisions to display recent updates and building functions that are being released, but for the most part it's correct. The focus is still the creature revisions. I haven't thought of updating it as I have a lot on my plate and that page receives very little traffic.
I've been slightly side-tracked as the first important change to creature path finding required fixes that prevented the tricks players used to construct multi-story buildings. My choices were to continue with creatures and essentially completely remove multi-story building from the game or implement a proper multi-story system as originally planned and designed.
I chose to take a bit of time to implement a proper multi-story building system. It was the best decision I've made since the Prelude launch in terms of attracting new players.
The bulk of my time is still being spent on the above with simple updates going out as I do have down time waiting on assistance in cleaning up old creature code by the previous programmers (they are doing so on their own time right now).
I've been keeping players informed of what's going on in the
Developer Updates
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Regarding desynch, this is a difficult issue to deal with due to different latencies between players from around the world. We have an open discussion on creature desynch
here. There is a good link explaining desynch on that thread. The biggest issue can be explained simply as this:
Imagine player 1 and player 2 are standing next to each other. For a message to travel to the server and to the other player it takes 250 ms.
Player 1 begins to sprint, at 10 m/s.
No matter what is coded, by the time the 'begin sprint' command reaches player 2, player 1 has already moved 2.5 meters. While positions can be predicted, starting or stopping motions can't.
Obviously this is problematic for 'twitch' combat.
Very early solutions to deal with this problem included targeted, not free swing, combat, reduced speeds and disabling running and sprinting while in combat mode. Players in general did not want those limitations and we implemented the current system a long time ago in response to what players desired.
To accommodate for latency issues, ranges will be increased with the current round of revisions even if they are not realistic. I'm always looking for better solutions but have not seen or been recommended an MMO with good twitch / free swing combat to check out. Most MMOs that I've checked out use the typical targeted and key press systems which I honestly don't like at all for melee combat.
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Regarding PvP, some of the changes I'm working on will certainly affect PvP as well.
If I didn't care about PvP it would never have been part of the game, period. It is true that the drama often brought on by PvP players in the past few years has greatly diminished my enthusiasm for PvP. This was greatly reduced by adding the PvE server, which in retrospect should have launched day one. PvP will still continue to be improved over time and part of the game as intended.
I hope that answers your questions!