-=Quick Update=-

Look at that screenshot, would ya! What a fantasy world.. I bet you people think its a place you'll never get to visit!

Yes, I missed an update this weekend cause I spent most of the past week at the CPL Event in Dallas Texas. It was a major undertaking but its all over. It was fun, but it was work. bla bla bla..

I have some links collected for next week's update and hopefull I'll have some good TLOT news then also. As for now, there's a new mailing list. If you were on the old list, you're now on the new list. If you've never subscribed to my list, why not? Check it out.

-=TLOT Progress=-

Arg, still not back in full swing but I'm getting in more and more time each week. I spent a lot of time trying to play with the grass.. I didn't want to, but after getting a few e-mails and discussing it some on the mailing list, I decided to play with it. I wasted a bunch of time on it. First I tried just slightly altering the current grass tile (including flipping and rotating it). This wasn't even noticeable much less benificial. I played with my current grass tile enough to figure out almost the exact process I went through to create it but I still either hit one of two extremes every time I tried to make another. Either it was so close to the original you couldn't tell when scrolling around the map, or it was so different that it looked really bad. I spent some time writing code into my map editor that changed plain grass tiles (or any other tile I specify) into a set of random tiles. This worked ok, but because of my art problems it was kind of a waste of time.

Finally, I took my multi grass tiles and replaced them with some grass/object tiles such as rocks or stand alone trees (small stuff you can normally walk over). While in a few places it was cool, for the most part it looked bad being randomly placed. So, it looks like I'll continue to manually place that stuff on the map. What I really need is a few good artist. =)

-=Other Stuff=-

I'm hosting a workshop at this year's Quakecon/CPL event. Its going to be a Live Oracle (like The Oracle section of Gathering's website). I'll probably skip next week's update because of QuakeCon. For anyone intersted, it will be Thurs night at 8:00. I'll probably send and official announcement to blues news sometime at the beginning of this week and I might do a mid-week update here to let everyone know about it.

But for now, I've got stuff to do.. g' night...

-=TLOT Progress=-

One of the many things I've learned while making this game, and I may have mentioned this before, is that you really need to pack a lot of stuff on the screen. Big blank fields of green grass get boring very quickly. While you are going to see a lot of that in TLOT, its something I'm going to try to avoid in the future with other projects. The screenshot up for this week is a good example of a screen with lots of good stuff on it.

Anyway, I've been playing with the status screen a little. I was trying to get all the info to display in a nice readable manor. Of all the things, I was having trouble with placing the character's name at the top. It just wouldn't center/line up like I wanted it to. This is mostly due to the different length of each character's name. I'd just write some quick code to center the text, but I'm using a variable width font.. wich complicates things a little. The font data doesn't contain the width of each letter, I just make it up as I'm blitting the letters. I may just paste each character's name on the status screen manually in an art program. Not that big of a deal, but it did waste considerable time. You can click on this weeks image to get a shot of that status screen.

I still don't know how I'm going to lay out that inventory screen. I haven't really worked on that, but I have put a lot of thought into it. I'm finally starting to lean one way though.. I'm thinking about listing items in the panel on the right just like other menu items. Popping up the text box seems like an in-apropriate use of the menu system and bringing up an entirely extra screen seems like overkill. Perhaps I will go ahead and bring it up in the menu box, but place the menu box at the top of the screen instead of the bottom. That way it has the feel of something seperate to the action of displaying normal text. You know what? I think I'm taking this tooooo far.

-=Links=-

Aphrodite's got another midi contest going. She's also updated her entire site to reflect some changes in her life that I will address in a moment. My "Talibah Now" button found a new home, check out The Beginning of Greatness. (thanks Shawn) You know, it sure is tempting to put my button on the Gathering website.

-=Other Stuff=-

Arg, I don't know where to start. In a nutshell, me and the mighty Aphrodite decided it was time to see other people. She's about to go to school and I've already moved a good distance away from her. While I see her every weekend, being apart still causes a lot of tension. We'd always suspected this would happen around this time in our lives so we had lots of time to plan for it. Unfortunately, this isn't the type of thing you can plan for.

Yesterday was our first time out on a date together as two single people so to speak. There were some problems toward the end of the night.... one could call it a fight... but it all ended on a positive note at about 2:30 this morning. The entire event has had a strong emotional impact on me. As most everyone knows, The Legend of Talibah is dedicated to her. But, TLOT will not die because we are no longer an exclusive item. We're mearly putting a little growning space between us. Regardless of everything, I love her very much. She is the closest and best friend a human could ever hope for. She's my "best friend with benifits."

-=TLOT Progress=-

No progress... first no-progess week in forever. Anyway, the screenshot is an older shot I never put online because the shadows of the trees conflict with the shadows of the characters... but this shot makes it clear to see the shadows I added way back when.. too bad it didn't work out better.

-=Links=-

I'm sure that Aphrodite will be updating her page as she just got her new machine. I think someone won the midi contest. There is a new release of MiuraSoft. Just some bug fixes, not much thats new.

-=Other Stuff=-

This week was sooo freakn' full! I spent a solid 48 hours spread out over many days configuring Aphrodite's new pII333 and fixing her old p90. I won't go into the sick details, but it really had me strung out. I can barely stand to look at a computer screen as I make this update. Don't worry, things will change and soon I will pumping out the TLOT... atleast I hope I will anyway. =/

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