Hello all! I have created this thread because lately I saw more and more statements of player in the type of: "It would be nice if XYZ would be in Illarion" or "It would be better if feature ABC would be available in the client". I will give some sort of an answer in just a second.
But first, let me give you a short introduction to myself, if you do not know me: I am Seajiha, a 25yo professional software engineer and the most obvious element I've added to Illarion is maybe the staff magic fighting (together with Jupiter). Besides that, I have fixed some bugs in the website and the game (e.g. quest planner and time converter).
Back to topic: Nitram and I had created a plan to recreate both the server and the client of Illarion using more modern technologies, because the current ones are very old, creating much of the problems Illarion currently has - technology-wise - and making it very hard to add new features, no matter how simple they may be. But a year of development brought certainty, that our initial plan could not be realized: We were lacking both money and man power. Mainly man power.
But rejoice, because this is not the end of developing something more modern
I have changed our initial plan in a way that the effects are not as huge as planned before, but still very perceptible for any player AND implementable for the dev team. This will include: better performance, less lag if you are having a high latency, ingame character creation, key bindings, more and higher quality effects (for light, magic and so on), weather, an ingame noticeboard, a nicer user interface, an ingame clock, and much more. As always, I am open to suggestions and help - and nothing it set in stone.And that's all for the moment - just a short announcement, that client development is not dead
There is no release date for the new-ish client, as I just entered initial development and it will still take a long time to create something production-ready. Please note: this will not slow down content and map development at all, as this is done mostly but other devs.