After a vigorous week of plotting, revising, and meticulous debugging, I’m proud to announce that the Character Manager’s main scripting engine is finally…

Yes, at last the initial testing has proven successful and I can feel confident about saying that this stage of it is done. So what’s next and what else does it need before players see the results?

Well all of the features and their options are entered into the system. I just want to review them and verify that they all have default settings. Then I want to write a conversion utility to switch players from the current feature system to the new one. After that is the tricky part - I need to tie the system into the Character Manager itself. This will take a little time but I’m hoping no more than 2 weeks or so.

The final step is to dig through over 5900 scripts to make sure they get any changes needed to work with the new feature system. This will be arduous and time-consuming but at least it won’t be complicated!

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I’m clearly not very good at updating blogs after 2 years of silence!

Yes, I’m still working on the Character Manager project but I feel I’m making progress again at last. Here’s the issues that have been holding it up:

• Race determines potential age ranges, height ranges, and in fact almost all player feature options.
• Age determines weight based on race and height.
• Height (along with race and age) determines weight based on physique.
• Physique simply determines weight which is based on race, age, and height.

Problems arise when say a player is 4 years old (the minimum) and changes their race from human to giant. A giant’s minimum age is older than 4 years old so I need to adjust the age as a percentage of the range of youngest to oldest possible ages in order to maintain consistency. I also have to alter their height as a percentage of their original height of course. And since their age and height changes I also need to adjust their weight.

To add to the confusion, I also have to validate all the new values to make sure they are allowed for the given race. So I set the new race, validate the new age or height which calls the race value to establish valid ranges which calls the age or height routines to get valid ranges which goes around in a circle until the system regurgitates in a dizzying infinite loop!

The good news is that I believe I have a solution which involves smoother code flow and more logical subroutine progression. Keep your fingers crossed!

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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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There was talk, jibes, jokes, chatter, gossip, complaints, and confetti eggs.

Wait… confetti eggs?

Don’t ask. The point is that the GM forum went well and the GMs outlined many of their projects and plans and offered a glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes. Players were gifted with a commemorative 10 Year Anniversary token to celebrate Alliance of Heroes being online for 10 years now! There is USAGE on the tokens so be sure to email Sunako or Holyph with your requests for custom Post-Titles.

The full forum log can be found at http://www.amaranthsgardens.com/files/GM_forum_4-1-08.txt.

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DIRections are now complete for Alexandria and I verified that Gamlebyen and Thebes were still working correctly. This took far more time than I had hoped but at least it’s done now.

This week I’ll be working on the rest of the player features for the Character Manager and hopefully integrating it into the Character Manager interface. The core LOOK <player> is in full testing for GameMasters so I should see any issues that need to be addressed soon. I’ll also be making some auction items as the mood strikes me.

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