The El Somni Quas development team have released an exclusive development diary to gaming site Massively OP, which covers news related to MMORPGs both mainstream and indie. El Somni Quas, you may recall, has been presented as an Ultima Online-inspired, 3D, open world MMORPG.

Here’s an excerpt:

What’s completed:

World: Has been ready some time in the means of generating the surface of the world, nature, oceans etc. While creating the world, we were really trying to keep as close to the original world of UO shard Endor as possible. Part of the world has been built already and pictures are available on our Facebook profile. It is rather important that we have tuned our building processes, and even when building new locations we are trying to please our players by keeping original locations.

Data migration from Endor: We have brought over all of the settings, monsters, items, spells, rituals, recipies, quest text, and NPC conversations – basically everything that made Endor Endor in the last 13 years – and moved it into a usable database of our ESQ project.

Patcher/launcher/updater: The launcher, the first thing the player sees and the thing that keeps the players clients code up to date, as well as the patcher and updater, are already done. They’re only in rough graphics, but nevertheless it’s here.

Network layer: After conducting demanding tests, we expect that the network protocol can handle the load of 10,000 simultaneous users. This is mainly because the server part was designed as extremely scalable and therefore is able to dynamically increase performance. All of the actions on the client are controlled by the arbitration server, which greatly reduces the possibilities of speedhack and similar cheats. According to the alpha data, we will prepare server farm design and followed it by more stress tests.

For additional details and more development notes, you’d best click on through to Massively OP. Suffice it to say, the team’s progress sounds promising!