The Story
The Age of Mortus is over. The Dread Lords held sway over the lands of man for thousands of years, until their defeat at the battle of Vallendahl. The curse of undeath that held the realms in its ancient, vice-like grip for so long is no more. A kingdom has risen, built upon the deeds and honor of the greatest heroes of the Dread War. The forest of Taelendor has awakened once more. Life, once a rare, precious commodity, has returned. It is a new age, one of exploration, peace and prosperity.
But all is not what it seems. Ancient evil is not so easily vanquished. The dark kin of the elves stir in their mountain of power once more. Tribes of norse-folk have set aside their enmities under the banner of a new, cunning Warlord. The forests have seen the passage of a race long thought extinct, and the Kingdom of Illiana is beset by political infighting. Yet worse than all, there are Dread Lords who survived the epic battle and now plot and scheme for their return to power and subjugation of all the free races.
Great deeds await those with courage and mettle. Dead civilizations await those with the fortitude to wrest away their secrets and artifacts. Dark foes await those with the skill and power to end their threat to all.
It is a time for Heroes and Legends. This is Arcanoria.
Overview
Arcanoria is a Medieval Fantasy Online Role Playing Game, where solo players or groups can go on quests, craft custom items, join trade guilds, and face deadly challenges using their expertise with sword, bow, magic, stealth, or guile. Arcanoria offers rewarding non-violent quests (in addition to hunting/fighting quests, which are also available). You can advance your character to high levels without ever being required to attack a living being. Arcanoria proves that RPGs don't have to be violent to be fun and interesting! The game also provides meaningful choices in your character's development, where your in-game actions determine your abilities. The more you focus on certain skills the better those skills become - at the expense of unrelated skills. The world itself is very large. From cities to castles to murky caves to wind-swept mountaintops to volcanic islands to barren deserts and salt flats, to lush forests... Arcanoria has it all, just waiting for you to discover!
Player Races: Human, Norse, Elf, Dark Elf, Gnome, Lizardfolk
Combat Classes: Warrior, Wanderer, Mind Mage, Lightbringer, Necromancer, Druid, Elementalist
Non-Violent Classes: (list still in development) Fisherman, Cook, Healer, Blacksmith, Archaeologist, Alchemist, Merchant, Farmer, Tailor, Carpenter, Researcher, Trapper
Most Recent Update
The game is not finished being built yet, but we're hard at work developing it! If you'd like to participate as an early tester, please contact us at web-inquiry@arcanoria.com. Here's a quick look at our latest news update (we post updates here often):
February 13, 2008 - Ogre3D is Back; New Engine Development Phase Begins
After thinking long and hard about the (lack of) progress we've made over the last 10 months while trying to get Torque running as a decent game engine, we've decided to scrap it altogether and return to our previous engine, which was based on Ogre 3D. We've got it all building again and it looks great so far! However, it doesn't have nearly as many features implemented as Torque, so we'll need to take a few steps backward in the short run to retrofit the new engine and we should come out much leaner and meaner after that.
On the good side, we DO have the following things already working in the new engine:
- Ogre rendering engine, including support for both OpenGL and DirectX.
- Custom camera management system, including 4 presets (chase, 1st person, stationary, top-down), plus a 5th setting with ability to save/recall camera position arbitrarily.
- character animations
- on-screen FPS and polygon counts, plus alt-Z to show collision boxes.
- simple network connect/disconnect with a server process on another machine using RakNet.
- GUI moveable/resizeable windows with alpha transparency, and also 4-state rollover buttons (inactive, active, rollover, selected)
- background music, using FMOD sound engine.
- customizable input mapping to game functions (reading configuration from a text file), including support for up to 8 mouse buttons, any keyboard input (including alt-, shift-, ctrl- combinations), and/or joystick.
- ArcReporter system for custom display/logging of messages from the engine.
- TRANSITIONAL - Physics was mostly working using Newton, but was ripped out in favor of Bullet, and now we're changing over to PhysX. Not currently fully implemented, but Coming soon!
- TRANSITIONAL - Lua scripting language for flexibility during development. The library is built but not yet integrated with the engine.
For the full list of project status updates, please take a look at our History page.
What Is Arcanoria, really?
Actually, Arcanoria is none of those things. It's just a figment of the imagination. We're working hard in order to turn this farfetched fantasy into a Virtual Reality. This project directly involves lots of cool buzzwords including:
- 3D Graphical Modeling, Skeletal Animation, Physics Simulation, 3D Sound Rendering, Real-time 3D video Rendering
- 2D Graphics Design (i.e. Photoshop/Illustrator)
- Client/Server Network Programming, Security & Encryption, Database Programming and Administration
- Delivery-on-Demand (i.e. downloadable program and data updates)
- Object-Oriented Programming (using C++), UML Design and Analysis
- Game System Design (characters, economy, combat, crafting, quests, monsters, spells, etc.)
- GUI Design and overall UI Design
- Music and Sound FX Design
Our main game engine is based on several technologies including Ogre 3D as the central rendering engine. Please review our Tech Page for more details on the specific tools we use to create our game.
Miscellaneous Other Information
This project was begun on January 9, 2007. For more information, please review the different pages of this site, or contact us at web-inquiry@arcanoria.com. Also, please check back from time to time as we will continue to update this website to chronicle the unfolding of this ambitious project. This site is updated frequently - at least once every week or so, sometimes multiple times per day - so check back often to learn about the latest updates to Arcanoria!
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