Hi all,
I wanted to give you all a quick update. There have been many questions flying as to where the roadmap is and what’s on the horizon. Last month, we did that 3 week cleanup pass. From our standpoint, it was a success. We managed to squash quite a few issues. both small and large. This went so well that it set a new precedence for us moving forward.

We’re going to change the way we approach our roadmap tasks. The reason for this is simple. Bugs and performance tuning take priority to anything else. Going forward, we’ll give you all a slightly higher level view of the current plan. Think of it as “Here are the things we need to work on for the next couple of months”. As we close in on a solid/stable test server, we’ll collect all the pertinent release notes (Most which have been called out for Test Server already) and post them for the next publish. So, you'll know exactly whats coming to live if you pay attention to the test server(or atleast read the release notes for it). We’re not going to commit to a weekly publish cycle going forward. Instead, we'll focus our efforts on the test server until we feel it's stable. Once we hit that mark, we’ll move it over to live.

I can confidently say that we’ll publish to live at least a couple times a month going forward.

As of today, here are a few things we’re working on for August/September timeframe. These are the larger tasks only. There will always be a handful small improvements mixed into each publish.

• Hospital point of interest
  
• New Zombie types
  
• Guild/clan System (Version one is mainly for permissions)
  
• Professions (version 1)
  
• Base building improvements (construction box + UI)
  

Keep in mind, we’re leaving a lot of room for Bug fixing and Tuning. To give you some perspective, Test Server currently looks like this...

• Server performance tweaks
  
• Assorted small occurrence crash problems
  
• Fix for a case of "stuck on the loading screen"
  
• Adjusted "damaged" effect
  
• Fix for mouse wheel zooming map out
  
• Fix for problems with melee weapons and actions in BR play
  
• Fix for parts of models not rendering (including some cases of invisible players)
  
• Loading screen spinner and status
  
• Game hints on loading screen
  
• Improved grouping controls
  
• Adjustments to VoIP displays
  
• Fix for lost focus on UI with Steam Overlay active
  
• Fix for many cases of containers immediately closing when being looted
  
• Changes to address invisible players
  
• Changes to make vehicles more persistent
  
• Fixes to help prevent additional cases for vehicles not staying on top of objects
  
• Cases of riding player’s camera flipping out while being driven around
  
• Cases of damage dealt when player is logging in
  
• AI responsiveness and overall spawning
  
• adjustments to jumping height and mechanics
  
• adjustments to falling damage calculations
  
• fix to help prevent damage issued on initial login
  
• fix to code preventing some files from properly loading
  
• Adjustments to placement rules
  

...Not many features in that list eh? Is that a bad thing? Hell no! I’m sure many of you will agree our recent updates have improved the game significantly.
We’ll get the actual Roadmap updated very soon to reflect the things I mentioned above.

What happened to the city style zone?
In short, we’re going to backburner this effort for now. For a good reason though! We’ve made great improvements to our world building process in the last 6 months. The current live world needs some serious attention, not only from a technical stand point but also visually and playability wise. The way our current world is constructed places some hard limitations in regards to future expansion. Our world building team has a plan though. If all goes well, we will have the ability to more densely populate it while maintaining performance and gameplay.

Does this mean the city zone is gone?
Nope, a lot of that work will feed back into the reimagination of our current world. What about all the cool points of interest we have come to love? They will all remain. They may not be in the exact physical location or look exactly the same, but they will be retained. Think of our current map as a rough blueprint for the new version.

In the near future, we'll get a thread going regarding the new map. Keep a look out for it.

Hope this sheds a little light as to what's going on over here!
Peace out!
Steve George
@ShockDev