Broke-Ass Game announced the Beta4 of Ruin Online will be released in January 2007. Many new elements will be added into the beta4 version. You can see the datails belows.

 
We been busting our BrokeAsses behind the scenes getting some big work out of the way for BETA4. The hard work is over and we will announce the official start of BETA4 as soon as we agree on the date (January 2007). The new version of Ruin will be a new download and testers will need to recreate their characters. Current testers will not have to reappply, though new testers will still have to. We will however make the sigh up process much easier.

New Stuff:

New Character base: NEW BrokeAss Humans

New Melee Fighting System: Its like a fighting game in my mmomfg!

New Engine Version: TGE 1.5 fixed nearly 986348093.237 bugs

Cross Platform: PC, Mac, Linux

Faster Zoning: Under 1 minute.

Vehicle Revamp: They work now

Read more:

New Character base
Our new characters are done for male and female base humans. MountObjects is working and many clothing, armor pieces and other accessories for customization are now available. We built these characters with an open architecture which allows us to easily add new animations and enhance their functionality. More player meshes, as well as mobs and NPCs that differ from the base human build will be added as well based on our new system. Additionally the male and female base humans mark our first official product at BAG, a developer kit in which is included all the source for our base human characters.

New Melee Fighting System
At the core of our new players is the melee combat system, a series of attack/defense animations that represent 10+ years of fantasizing on ?how it should be?. We?re finally building the fighting system we have always wanted!

Simple to use, but robust in technical controls.

Individual controls for left and right Punch, Kick, BLock, Elbow Strikes, Knee Strikes, headbutts and other special attacks.

We are also developing in Evades and directional differentials for the move inputs (Forward and left punch will have a different effect than Back and left punch.)

Dual wielding is inherent to the system, as well as guns and melee being weilded simultaneously.

Still prolly don?t want to bring a knife to a gunfight, but swords don?t consume ammo... thats important in post-apocalyptic times!

New Engine Version
We shed a few tears, sucked it up and decided to start over! Not really, but sorta. We are now in the process of porting key features/frameworks from the BETA3 build of Ruin into a new, glassy smooth version based on the newest revision of Torque Game Engine!

After new some monkey-wrenching we immediately saw that we made the right choice. Though we lost a few features in the process, they will be added back in as we go. A list to large for the internet of bugs was fixed simply by porting to TGE 1.5. At the same time a list, equally as epic, of new features and functionality were made available by doing this. Dynamic Lighting, Bloom effects, access to more Shaders, to name a few.

Cross Platform
Along with the in-game improvements comes the uber-ness of now being able to compile our game to PC, MAC and LINUX...say it with me: "Oh Hax!"

Faster Zoning
Well Shanty town takes 8 seconds to load at the moment. Need I say more? For those non-Ruin-Testers reading this, our old zoning times were morbidly slow at 3 mins average on an speedy PC. 8 seconds < 3 minutes! This is a tremendous improvement and I am sure it will promote more players, playing longer.

This also has opened our minds to creating more zones, in some cases smaller for dungeons and such. We will keep the large ?outside? zones, because feedback has been great on them, in terms of the large scale and getting lost all the time. 

Vehicle Revamp
Lead Dev Ari has decided to throw vehicles back in early because they R0xx0rz! We now have aircraft and wheeled vehicles that work properly! multiple mount points for passengers, weapons, stable landing, water vehicles - It?s On!

We are working up a basic character creation interface then we are pretty much ready to unleash hell again!