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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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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Well I finally did it! The website has moved from its old address to a dedicated domain. If you visit the old website then you should be redirected here from now on. Here you’ll find enhancements to the News section of the website including the ability for visitors to post questions and comments about the news articles as well as RSS feeds which will help you folks get your updates to the website more directly through any number of free RSS readers.

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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 ½ 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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I hope everyone had pleasant holidays! I personally had visits to relatives, a dinner party and the whole shebang.


I managed to start integration of the Character Manager core system into player usage scripts between all the holiday hubub going on this past week. It’s been slow going since I’m uncovering issues I hadn’t foreseen ahead of time. Those issues are being resolved but they do slow me down.


I also managed the end of the Solstice Tree Contest and made plans for an upcoming Mentor event for Cupid’s Day. I’ve also been asked to help design a website for a small business so there’s been a lot of study into the latest website design techniques and philosophies as well as researching my customer’s options on the best web host for his needs.


This week I hope to begin testing the use of the new player features on myself. I don’t expect it to be quite ready for testing but I want to be sure that the theory and core of the system works before I fine tune it.

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