Will there be a single networked community sharing a single virtual space? Or will it be a few predefined communities, or will it be loosely organized groups of folks?
At launch, the only officially supported server will be the Titan XMPP server that we are in the process of setting up. This is for two reasons, first is that it's running the server software that we've been developing and testing against (Openfire) so it's the most likely to actually work smoothly, and we can better support problems that people run into. The second is to get a decently sized chunk of the community together in one place to get the ball rolling. Also, for people who already have Titan accounts, they will automatically have an XMPP account and not have to set up something extra.
That said, it's designed to follow the XMPP specification, so in theory it can be used with
any XMPP server that anybody is running so long as it supports the MUC (multi-user chat) service. The initial release defaults to the Titan server, but I'm sure it will not take enterprising users long to figure out how to point it elsewhere if they so desire, creating smaller private communities. That's up to them.
It was designed so that it
should also work with open federated XMPP, allowing users to be on different servers and still chat with each other. Seeing each other is also possible, but at the moment requires typing some slash commands to establish a connection to a map hosted on a different conference service. It's also much less tested than the single-server setup and is kind of a 'for future use' item.
Also, special zones like the ski slopes and others, will those be available?
The Ski Chalet is currently not available, but it's on my to-do list to add a quick hack to that map to make it visible, so it'll probably make it in.
Also, will we have some sort of auto-notification of updates as you fix bugs and improve performance (and features) or will we need to check this website?
Update nags when a new version is available are also on the "not yet implemented, try to get this done in the next week or two before release" list.
Question: Since doors ingame are being worked on. Are you also working on zone travel? Per say as in entering the big gates (i.e open highways to other zones) or metro-rail travel?
That's a wish-list item that may or may not be working in time. It's not too difficult to implement given the current state things are in, just a question of getting the time to do it.
Question for travel is the trans working? Or is it dev input commands?
This is awesome btw 
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Trams are less likely to be working than the direct zone connections. There is a slash command to jump to any of the normal city and hazard zones by using its numeric map ID, so it's relatively quick to get where you want.
In-zone travel is a little slow since there's just running at the moment. Movement modes approximating flight and the other travel powers are something we're targeting for the 1.1 update.
