EverQuest depth, one field
Two days ago the server existed. Yesterday the engine rendered in a browser tab. Today those two things met — and the world underneath them grew from one starter valley into a planet with a level curve.
A planet with teeth
New Earth now has seven hunting camps spread across its zones — Vantiel Woods, Emberfall Reach, Palegrove, Duskwater Flats, the Korrath Wastes, the Sunken Ring, and the Anvil of Ractr at the south pole — 50 creatures from level-1 valley outlaws to a level-15 colossus. 12 quests chain across 6 NPCs with real prerequisites and level gates: finish Foreman Duri's troll cull before he trusts you with the ogres; hit level 3 before Scout Veyra sends you after Captain Skarn Vane's head. Creatures drop hides, tusks, and crystals off per-creature loot tables. Nineteen items now exist, and the weapons and armor among them are equipment — a Steel Longsword adds 8 to your swing, Warden Plate eats 32% of what hits you, and /equip, buying, banking, and dying all handle the slots correctly. TAB targets; con colors tell you at a glance whether the thing you targeted is grey-trivial or red-run. Grey kills give no XP. Go fight something your size.
Netcode that respects the planet
An MMO on a 10 km sphere can't broadcast everything to everyone. The server now replicates on an interest radius: you only hear about entities within 300 m, and the client interpolates remote players between authoritative snapshots (rendered ~150 ms in the past, the way real MMOs do it) so 10 Hz updates read as smooth motion. Names float over everyone's heads — con-colored, hp bars included — projected through the same camera that raymarches the field. And if your connection dies mid-fight, the client now auto-reconnects: re-login, re-enter, same character, and the server hands back your exact level, bags, equipment, and quest progress, replaying only the terrain edits you missed.
The login screen is in the tab
Yesterday's browser build flew a camera over placeholder terrain. Today it has a login screen. The wasm client speaks the same WebSocket protocol as the native one — the server needed zero changes — so a Chrome tab can register an account, create a character, and walk the shared planet, ground-snapped by the same scene SDF the server uses, seeing every nearby player and creature as a live tag, chatting on all five channels, hailing NPCs, taking quests, buying, banking, fighting, looting. Headless Chrome verified the whole flow: connect → register → login → create → enter world, 17 entities visible — while ψ was still converging on the GPU. Honest caveats, stated in-game: browser players see the world and its inhabitants as tags for now; GLB bodies and terrain-edit visuals arrive with asset streaming (M3).
Proof or it didn't happen
The bot suite grew from 13 stages to 24, and all 24 are green: accounts, quest-chain gating (the server refuses a quest whose prerequisite you skipped), kill-target filtering (an outlaw kill doesn't advance your troll quest), guaranteed drops, level-ups, equipment persistence through a hard socket drop, /who, OOC, ping — and a closing 6 km trek from spawn to Vantiel Woods that proves the camps are really out there, entering the interest radius exactly when they should. All four DFD physics gates stay green (strong-field lensing still at 0.10% error), 33 unit tests pass, and single-player is untouched.
Engine v0.14.0. The playable alpha now includes online mode and its own world server — one player hosts, friends connect. A 24/7 official shard costs about $5/month in hardware (the deploy kit — Dockerfile, systemd, TLS proxy for browser play — is written and waiting); flipping that switch is a launch decision, not an engineering one.