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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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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The Character Manager core engine is still in QC but in the meantime I’ve been fine-tuning it and continuing to work with other GameMasters with implementing it into their scripts. I intend to spend the rest of the week seeing how it will tie into the actual Character Manager system but first I need to finish adding all the new options for all the features and making sure they look okay in a player’s LOOK description.


I’m also looking at DIRections for Alexandria and Gamlebyen. Oddly, I had these done 4 &frac12; years ago but I don’t know if they were tested and QCed so they were never released for some reason! With the update to Alexandria I need to review them to make sure they’re correct anyway.


I’m also working on updating the website with RSS news feeds and XML data with a brand new domain name. I will be redirecting you to the new website once it’s been properly set up so be prepared to reset your bookmarks.

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Eeeps! I neglected to keep things up to date each week so be prepared for quite a bit of news.


First of all, there was a good deal of discussion over the potential addition of a Blood-loss system being added to combat. One of the things we insisted on the developers doing was to gather feedback before coding began. I added a survey item (type SURVEY 8 in-game) for feedback and wanted to thank players for responding. We also added some info about the changes to the forums and would love to hear details from those who have questions about it!


Now I know that somewhere amid my ramblings I made players a promise to get the Character Manager updates finished by March. I guess I missed that deadline but I’m relieved to say that the core engine is being entered into QC right now! I had the chance to help a couple of our GameMasters with specifics of its various features and so far the feedback has been fairly positive. That’s more than what I could have hoped for so I’m fairly happy with things so far.


After the core engine gets through QC then I can start tweaking what might be hundreds of scripts within the game to use the new feature system and to tie it directly into the New Character and Reallocation scripts.


This week I hope to add in a small tweak to combat to allow more than one hand-worn brawling weapon at a time. I’ve QCed a couple of new Ambush combos for Leonius and he has 4 more in QC already now that he’s getting used to them do I’ll also be taking a look at those.

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