Yeah, I never got much experience with vb3. I'd say I'm a lot more comfortable with all the features and skinning of vb4. But I've done the demo of vb5... I say a prayer every night for the people dealing with that mess. I love HTML and CSS. They are so fun to work with and really so easy to use once you really get going. I've started to do a little bit of JavaScript, but it's just so annoying compared to HTML in my opinion. So much more involved to me.
It's been under development for a little while now, but it is not ready to be open at all. We have a lot of the base parts of the game written out and set in stone. And we have started heavy coding for it. Right now, we're looking for a few Game Artists that live close to us. Once we have a good team together, we're thinking we can have a quality test of a few different parts of the game within 6-7 months. Just an estimate based on how much we have done coding wise.