The New Plan

[RonHiler]

Hey guys,

Just wanted to let y'all know what was going on.

As you are probably aware, worked pretty much halted on Dungeon Crawl and my Maya Training as of late. Two things happened that caused that.

One was a guide I was writing. I get it in my head every once in a while to write game guides. It's kind of a hobby. I don't do it very often, because they are very time consuming to do, and I don't really have the time to do them. Anyway, I started one way back in May, worked on it for a couple of weeks, and then put it down, deciding that I just didn't have the time for it. Well, I had made the mistake of letting someone know (at the time) that I was writing the guide for a particular game, and around the end of June he called me out on it.

And he was right. Having said I was going to do it, I felt obligated to actually finish it (besides I had already put a good amount of work into it). So I picked it back up and spent about a month doing some intensive writing. The guide ended up being the largest I've ever written, and is 225 pages long (it is in fact the size of a typcial novel).

If you are interested, the final results are here:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/xbox...e/939458/57494

So that project is done, and I don't intend to do any more guide writing for a long while.

The second thing that happened is the long rumored Mod9 for DDO finally became a reality, and it was a major update to that game. As a result, the DDO character planner needed some major overhauls itself (we got another 4 levels plus a new class).

Now, major work on the planner for this Mod is wrapping up. Not to say I won't still be working on it (I do want to overhaul certain parts of it even after we finish up all the bug hunting we are doing now), but for what it needed to be functional for the current state of DDO, it pretty much has it. I will be working more on the planner during this week, and probably into next week. After that, though I expect my involvement on that project will slow back down to a normal level.

So, what that means is that I will be heading back into my advanced modeling course for Maya, as well as getting back to the game. I do want to continue my modeling training (I'm on project 2 of a total of 7, and I'm still learning a lot). But I'm not intending to focus solely on that, I will be working on the game simultaneously. I do want to get the milestone advanced.

I am kind of wating on the release of the 1.6 version of C4 (the engine I am using), which itself is a major update. It was supposed to go into beta on July 31st, but it's been delayed. Presumably that will happen soon. That doesn't preclude me from doing a lot of stuff in the engine, but it would be nice to have available.

So yeah, if you are waiting on news of DC, I should be getting back to it shortly.

[RonHiler]

Okay, slight change in plans. But not too changed.

The recent work on the Character Planner was more difficult than anticipated, and it convinced me that the planner is in serious need of a class overhaul.

So I'm going to be working on the planner for a bit longer than I first thought.

However, I am now also back to working on DC (gods, we do need to come up with a new name for that, don't we?), splitting my time between the two programs. So while DC won't be getting 100% of the attention it needs, at least it's not at 0%, where it's been for the last while