Hi everyone, We've been a little quiet lately but we're making great progress. The inventory rebuild turned out to be a bigger task than we first expected, and is still being worked on. This has given me time to look into an old character avatar system available for our engine. It worked well so I extended it to work with our setup and character generation is now integrated. You can customise everything from your character's gender to forearm length. I also have it saving and loading characters with each save file, and the systems are in place to add clothing. There's still a lot to be done but I'm working on this every second I can, and it will make multiplayer possible once it's finished. We had to come up with a way to replace our first-person rig with a full 3D setup, and this is a very efficient solution. It will keep performance impact to a minimum when we extend everything to multiplayer. This will be the next major update- the game is sort of in "surgery" right now and we have to close everything up before it's playable again. Right now my biggest problem is an issue with applying animations to the loaded characters. Once it's fixed I need to create some basic clothes to act as placeholders for the time being. This will just be a single outfit in the beginning- more clothing models will be added in future updates. Speaking of clothing, we've had some questions around armour and combat gear. Plans are to eventually add leather armours, and similar lightweight gear to help with damage reduction. These are far-off plans, but they're definitely a part of customisation we want to include. I've also replaced the old camera control setup with a brand new controller. You can now CTRL-scroll to zoom in or out, and you will seamlessly jump between 3rd and 1st person mode if zooming in past a fixed value. It's possible to jump between modes without zooming by hitting 'V'. The camera is attached to your character's head, so your eye level always depends on the character size you choose. Here's a quick preview:

I will be working on this all week, and hopefully the animation issue will be resolved by the weekend. I'll then be able to rebuild all of the old tool systems with the new 3D rig. It's a big job, but once it's finished we'll be ready to expand the game with all sorts of new systems. Our environment artist has also been hard at work building a construction set for us. It's a kit of mine sections for building structures you can explore. One idea we have is to add in the ability to purchase mines, to create a realistic economy on servers. This would be beside other lucrative roles, so there are many different ways you could build a fortune. Here are a few renders of his work:


He has also been trying out a few ideas for the first map update. We are aiming for an iconic Western setting with desert lands, plains and even rivers. He designed a "monument generator" which creates layered sandy landmarks which will be scattered across the landscape, and this will form the basis of the new environment. They are all unique- below is a preview of just one variant.
You can see more of his creations at: https://sketchfab.com/playdagaimz We are still at a junction with the Mac and Linux issues. We are doing our best to resolve them but it's very difficult for us to trace the cause of the problem. We have ensured that everything we do is suited for multiplatform use, and the rendering chain is configured to work with both DirectX and OpenGL- in other words, the most common causes of these sorts of problems simply aren't there. It is still a work in progress but we are determined to find out what is causing this issue and we will continue to look into fixes. We apologise again to everyone who has purchased the game for Mac and Linux and would like to remind you that we haven't stopped working on the problem. That's about it for our first Devlog. We will post more of these inbetween updates so everyone can keep up to date on what we're doing. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to post in our Steam forums or leave a comment below and we will get back to you as soon as we can! We have a lot of upcoming plans and the team is excited to create the huge simulation we've pictured since the beginning!