The Pirates of the Burning Sea has released a new update on game status,including works on the current milestone and got planned for the next.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is an ever-growing world. To build it we structure our work in milestones, which are blocks of work six to eight weeks long. Each milestone focuses on specific objectives in development, art, and world-building. As we create the game, we抣l tell you what we‘re working on in the current milestone and what we‘re got planned for the next, so you can see all the cool new features that are coming down the pipeline and get an inside look at the creation of a new MMORPG.

Current Milestone Goals

The last milestone completed at the end of February. There were two huge changes: First, we reduced the overhead of the game significantly so that it can now be played on 512 meg systems with ATI 9600 cards. Second, we put in the real navigation zone. There was a lot of polishing as well, and some new features, but these were the biggies. While there are new features coming, most of the work left in the game is polishing what we have. To that end, we now devote half of each milestone specifically to bug fixing. This milestone started on 2/27, and is projected to end on 4/14. So far, we‘re tracking nicely on it. Here‘s what‘s coming:

• New Missions Now that we‘re polished our current missions in the last milestone, we‘re adding a whole bunch of new ones in this one.
• AI Work We did a lot of this in the last milestone, but there‘s always more to be done.
• Battle Marker improvements This is new work to propagate information up to the navigation zone about what‘s going on in a given battle.
• Flags!!!! Long promised, finally delivered by Brendan, a new programmer who just joined us last month.
• Ship Sounds Brendan‘s also doing much in the way of going back into our sound code to make sure all the correct sounds in a battle are being played.
• Bow sprays will move with the bows Look closely at our videos, and you抣l see either a mysterious lack of bow sprays, or sprays that don抰 move correctly with the ship and the water. My year long griping will finally be silenced.
• Surf Effects For the islands and the waves.
• New Town Construction We have a new process in creating our towns, and it should both speed up the process as well as create a more distinctive, lived in look. I抣l make sure that the artists generate a dev log on the new process.
• Convert to Visual Studio 2005 Words cannot express the horrors of our old version of Visual Studio. Life is finer in 2005.
• More Avatars More, more!!!
• New Economy We抳e talked a little about this in the forums, and now it‘s being implemented. Players will drive the economy. This is probably the biggest single piece of work in this milestone, and is mondo exciting.
• Loot Board a ship and loot it!
• New and Improved Animations More and merrier.