It being the evening prior to Shroud of the Avatar’s third pre-alpha test release, Starr Long has of course posted the usual set of instructions and notes to the game’s website.

Some highlights:

• Open Multiplayer Online: FINALLY we will let you see what the other players look like BUT we’ll be taking away your house for the month as we prepare housing to have persistence in the multiplayer space for Release 4.
• Chat: You know, so you can talk to your friends! The chat interface now sports a tabbed interface and filters for different channels.
• Emotes: More than 30 18 emotes online so you can look like a clown with your friends. NOTE: We wanted to use facial animations in several of the emotes so they ended up taking a bit longer than planned. Also the additions of jumping and walking took up animation time. Our final count of emotes is 19. On a brighter note we just added another animator to shore up our animation efforts so our animation speed is going to rise dramatically.
• Town 3: A third municipality opens up (the tiny forest village of Braemar). This is a new type of village that starts tiny and overgrown. The forest gradually becomes cleared out as it becomes more populated.
• Shopping: Shopkeepers will be open for business for selling and buying. NOTE: Now that we have this functionality coupled with crafting we have removed many of the loot chests and greatly reduced the content that can be found in them. The chests mentioned in the Ten Ton Hammer article were only for very early testing of R3.
• Configurable Controls: We completely understand the myriad reasons why players desire the ability to play the game with different control schemes so we have started adding this functionality. This first version is quite basic so expect us to expand what controls this can change as we get further in the schedule.
• Friends & Anti-Friends (Blocking): Friends and Blocking were originally R4 goals but we managed to sneak them in for R3.
• Player Housing in SPO: We originally planned to disable all housing in R3 because of the complexity of dealing with ownership in multiplayer. We realized though that we could leave it functional in single player online without having to spend time solving the multiplayer issues in R3. This means you can still experience house ownership and decoration, but only in single player online mode.

The full set of instructions for Release 3 can be found here, along with a download link for the game client if you don’t already have it installed.