Goodness! It’s been a long time since I let you folks know what’s been going on.

Last I stood, I had been working on the last of the main components of the Character Manager backend system. This was delayed by two things. One, the coding for the restrictions between ages, races and heights was taxing to say the least. Two, I took a tree branch to the eye which left me hardly able to see what I was doing.

The eye has recovered after getting a contact lens bandage for it but this delayed me until the mentor faire. Congrats to the mentors on a job well done! Most of the new prizes that you may have seen there were designed by mentors and coded by myself. The mentors have been reviewing their events and coming up with some new ideas and games for next year. Preparing for the faire delayed me from further work on the Character Manager before I was presented with a visit on short notice from my distant sister and her two kids. It was a great time but preparing for their arrival and spending the week with them also stole my time from working on in-game things.

After that I has a week to recover and lock down the house and make sure it was set while I went away for a week with my other two sisters to my dad’s hunting cabin upstate. I was tasked with loading a trailer and a truck load of goods and tools that we needed and with cutting up logs to give my dad a nice 7 or 8 cords of wood for the fire. It was grueling work and I pulled a muscle in my hand from all the heavy lifting but we had a great time going fishing, 4 wheeling, mini-golfing, toasting smores and my nephew shot his first game - a chipmunk! Since returning I had more cleanup and recovery of neglected housework to tend to as well as a slightly injured hand.

In the rare time I had during all of this to spend on the game I’ve gotten a couple of things done. First, I’ve been preparing items for the upcoming auction. There’s a couple of nice things started that I hope folks will like. Just one question - doesn’t anyone have ideas for items that aren’t weapons!?!

I’ve also been researching some ideas for advertising our game. I spoke to some of the Home Office people about the Buddy Referral program to see if it can be re-initiated for us. I also found a way to earn free advertising links for us by using some PTC (Pay To Click) advertising websites. I’m not sure if these have any real chance of roping in new players but it’s essentially free and is worth a shot. If you have any other advertising ideas then please be sure to post a comment here so that we can look into them!

For now I’m still focusing on my auction items. Thanks to Jostinian and Xxenos for some inspiring ideas. If you have other ideas then send them to aoh-jubalee at play dot net or post them on the message boards. I just want to get back to the Character Manager so I can reveal the sweet new features you all will be able to use!

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For those who have missed it, I have a list of all the options currently planned for the new Character Manager on the play.net forums at The Alliance of Heroes >> Council House - Discussions with Simutronics >> Reallocation. This is your chance to request the features you’ve always wanted!

Feel free to make suggestions here as well. There is no need to create an account or to log in to reply to news items.

While waiting for player feedback, I’ve been working out the details of Height selection. The choices will vary based on Race and Age and the format of the choices list is a bit perplexing. Do I let players choose their height in inches? Is it appropriate to give human adolescents 8 choices and adult giants a whopping 48 choices all on one screen? Do I let players choose feet+inches, thus limiting the choice of inches to no more than 12 despite the fact that this will complicate the CM scripts and possibly confuse new players in the CM?

I’ve also tasked Jubalee with offering messaging for changing choices in the CM and have begun coding the actual rooms.

Aside from that I’m working on things behind the scenes and keeping busy with spring farm-work. I’ve got my garden planted and the fields sprayed, fertilized and seeded. I also had my sister and her friend and their families come to visit on their way up to Hershey Park so entertaining five children was quite the chore, but fun nonetheless. “Uncle Jeff” seems to have become iconic in their little circle of kids.

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As I worked on my auction item script I found things in the combat engine code that could use upgrading. As a result I updated the targeted hit location options in combat. For those who don’t know you can often target specific locations on an enemy using:

<attack verb> [HEAD|ARM|HAND|LEG|BODY|EQUINE] [<enemy>]

Each of these might give added benefits and penalties to your attack. Most likely the THT will be increased but some might stun easier, cause knockdowns more often or even disarm opponents.

I’ve also been working on filling in the remaining features of the character system and hope to have those fleshed out and finalized early this week.

Other than that, I’ve been very busy with spring farm-work! All the equipment has been cleaned, blades have been sharpened on mowers, bushes and fruit trees trimmed and oil and other equipment fluids changed and/or checked. I’ll have to take a couple of days of spraying the fence-line to kill grasses an encroaching brier bushes but otherwise it’s all going to be a ton of mowing.

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How many times have you heard this…?

“I’d trade Firefox over Internet Explorer any day!”

Well I’m going to rant about it again, only this time I’ll give clear reasons to all you FireFox virgins! This rant was spawned during the rewrite of the website which forced me to test the pages on IE as well as FireFox, thus reminding me why I loathe it so much.

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Here’s an explanation of what I’m doing with some 3D modeling and animation work. My niece was enjoying The Little Mermaid videos and so I wanted to create a small animation for her.

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