It's been a while. I say this because I think the last post I put up was back in September. We've been busy in the meanwhile. Of course the fall months brought schoolwork and holidays which kept our pace down a little, but I'm here to tell you what we have done since then (if I can remember it all).

One of the most visible changes is that we overhauled the UI. Spearheaded by Paul, we changed the look and feel of almost every aspect of the game.

Multiple windows can be shown and you can drag them around as needed.[/caption] One of the nice things that v2 (as we call it) of our UI did for us was give us a better structure to build on top of. We took the functionality that already existed and organized it better so that going forward, we and anyone else who was looking at our code could understand and extend it better.

Log in across our site.[/caption] We built on the login system that we setup for our forums. This means that you will have one identity across the site, be that inside the game or on the forums or using anything else that we may introduce in the future. We intend to allow users to play through at least an introductory portion of the game without signing in in the future, but for now this allows everyone to not be a "testUser5664" when they log in.

Lots of this game is about choice. Choice to pick your skill path, choice to where you live and choice to pick an input device. So having the trees and vendors respond to both keyboard and mouse but only allowing mouse interactions with the signposts was wrong. Now that's been fixed :). You can use your keyboard keys to get you from one street to another and not ever need to touch you mouse.

I bet everyone wondered why going to a vendor and hitting the sell option still took them to the buy screen first. Then you had to click on the sell tab to get your business done. Worse than that, the sell interface got broke a little while back. Well now both of these issues are resolved. You can once again sell items to a vendor and even better, you can go directly to that tab by choosing the sell menu item. I always meant to implement that, just didn't take the proper time until now.

If you can find this mysterious vendor (hint, it's not hard and I bet many of you have already seen him), then you'll find that you can now find out what he's up to. One of the things that always interests me personally in an mmo is an auction house. It's something that I loved participating in in Glitch and it's one thing that I'd like to improve on in Children of Ur. This is only a beginning. What you can see in this screenshot is basically all there is. That said, it is doing real queries on a real database so it's a start.

And finally, perhaps as a kind of challenge, there is one new feature that I'm not going to tell you about. Partly because it's only half done and partly because I think it'll be fun to see if anyone can stumble across it. I will however give you a hint: input choice. Any comments or suggestions? We would love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below, in our forums or on social media.

— Thaderator