Since December of 2022 Stratus has finally gotten a major development boost after being in a very slow development phase over the past few years.. I am pleased to announce that Stratus battle for the sky is back on track and we have accomplished a set of major milestones paving way for new update to be released at last. Unreal5 As many have seen we moved the project from unity over to the unreal engine which is a much easier to work with engine but required a lot of changes and adjustments for the team and learning stuff from ground up.. Over December of last year major progress made finally on fully implementing the online battle lobby with fully working battle rings in the lobby and match creation and we are currently implementing steam and and epic user accounts for lobby access.
In the last few months the project has further gained speed as we brought on a highly skilled networking coder who has been busy digging in major work of networking key elements of stratus and has taken our core stratus unreal code and gotten building construction working in multiplayer a long with separate priest control of their own priest by individual players Bridge placement is now working fully and smoothly on bridge placement and replicating for players, we are just in the process of finishing updating and networking the unit construction and the player control of their constructed units.. Code has been completed for rituals for altar for slaying of enemy priests and we are in process of finalizing the pickup and transport of stunned priests by resource collectors to place on altar.. Our current road map has us aiming to have a build ready for public playing by early to mid July.. We are excited to get this new stable build out that will be playable and we look forwards to seeing player feedback once this build is out.. Beyond the coding side we have also been pushing on finalizing concepts for the missing thunder faction so that in the coming release we can have the start of thunder in-game and have four playable factions of Rain, Thunder, Wind and Sun in-game.
A long with the new thunder faction we have redone the missing below ground home meshes and they are being integrated into the prefab islands at this time...



A new spell obelisk mesh that draws a little on the old classic look but a new look modernizes the spell obelisk look has been created and and rough textured.
We hope with the coming release update that people will see the time and effort that has gone into getting the project back on track with functioning lobby and smooth travel between lobby and game map that we can move past the issues and negativity that the project has had in the early days and start growing players as we release more updates and content moving forwards.