Plan for Ted Southard

It just occurred to me that I use the Synopsis field as if it were a Title field. Works for me :P Anyways...

Just moved to Alexandria, Virginia for a job, settled into a new apartment not 5 miles from my first apartment ever that I had, back in '94 when I was in the Marines. Almost ironic. Almost. So after a week of moving, getting into the groove at the new job, and resolving issues with my email and new cable modem, I'm ready to roll.

Of course, I promised that I wouldn't post another .plan until I had a playable version of my game-and I do, kinda. I can't join a server on my LAN yet, and I'm pretty sure it's something small like a port setting somewhere. But, I can get into the game and fight bots until one of us die, with all the stats pulled from my test database. There's also some buildings to run around, and grass, and rocks, and trees on the way... So, playable it is. Fun, on the other hand, it's not...yet.

I got tired of the scotch-tape-and-bubblegum implementation of the map generator I was using, so it's being redesigned from the ground up to be more flexible and powerful and even faster. It was already made into a command-line app for backend use to populate sets of maps for players for individual, instanced quests. But there's a lot of work to do on that and precious little time.

On top of that, I went to the bank today to talk about money. They didn't laugh at me, they took my info, we talked for about 15 minutes about the project, and now I'm reading an email telling me what information I need to give them. And that means I have to do what I always hate doing: business stuff. But it's necessary, so, whatever...

So, here's a rundown of the old and new tasks for me:

1) Business Plan: Done. Redone to make it more attractive to lending institutions, and also cut the costs of the project in half.

2) Build the World: On it's way! All 130 zones for the planet of Chi'Hamak are in, with zoning functions, and now I'm concentrating on the first city to be launched, Ris'Totema.

3) Animation: It's this task that makes me want to become physically violent towards my computer. gameSpace is fighting me every step of the way, but at least in that, I know the mob's I'm animating will be bad asses... ;) And if you're an animator out there looking for a project, I could do with one or more of you.

4) Dungeon Generator: Done, made into a command-line app, and able to spit out missions you can spawn into. How? I employed a bunch of Keebler elves. Unfortunately, they didn't design it right so I fired them all(back to making cookies for you!), and I'm redoing the core of it to accept expansion without me having to have 2-day cut and paste marathons. I will also make a change to it to accept "libraries" of room tile "chunks", so that when you generate a .map or .dif, it will generate it using pieces that you created, for your own specific look(sort of like "themes" for your dungeons). Or, you can have it draw the map, scan it, and put it together that way, which is plainer, but has it's uses. It will also come with a gui front-end for configuration and testing.

And the new tasks:

5) MissionMan: That's the code-name of the mission generator module for Epic Frontiers. It will feature a command-line app for mission content generation, a gui front-end for testing, and will be built to interface with databases through Torque Script with the TorqueODBC snippet. It will also be built to call that handy-dandy Dungeon Generator and build it's own private mission areas. Eventually, it will be the brain that also creates all the NPC's and whatnot for the missions.

6) Drag and Drop Inventory: Yes, the ol' Drag and Drop interface to get tradeskills working. Or maybe I'll make a different interface, like a "workspace" interface, instead of just cramming it into the inventory. Good or bad idea? Laziness? I dunno. The Drag and Drop part is there, thanks to Stephan "Beffy" Moises. Making the tradeskills combine with it... well, that's where I think I should make a tradeskill-specific gui.

7) Website Updates: I have no doubts that people think the project is dead because the website hasn't been getting updated. I'll be bringing in a person to do that for me very soon though, so I won't have to divert so much time to it(a reason why I have been avoiding it).

8) Persistent World Rountables: It was bothering me that with as much talking about all the things done wrong in MMO's and PW's, noone was talking about improvements. To change this, and help everyone out, I'm starting a series of "roundtable" discussions on different facets of MMO's and PW's, focused on solutions rather than stating the issues. The first thread, here, is going great, and I have no doubts that people are getting a good amount of information out of it. Hopefully, more people participate so that everyone can be heard and get feedback.