Plan for Ted Southard

Lot's of stuff going on right now. Not the least of which is the launch of Caligari's Torque Pack, which features my mapExporter. Aside from a bad file upload and a bug that's been discovered, it's going quite well ;) The buck stopped here, and I have another upload to Caligari in the morning, both for some artwork for the Pack, and to stomp a scaling bug that was discovered in the exporter.

I plan to have another version out in a few weeks as well, covering a few more lighting entities, and maybe setting up for supporting some other stuff like .map importing, but we'll see how my schedule goes. Right now, I have a more pressing issue: The Epic Frontiers business plan. I can see investment on the horizon if my plan goes across well, and I'm getting help from another local entrepaneur that I know.

Also, I've entered the realm of the fifth milestone of development, titled "Playable Alpha" to give you an idea of where my persistent world is at.

Scripting in TGE affords me with a fast way to get the rules into the game, and it's enjoyable watching a bot get killed by my character's dice rolls ;) The database is in place in both Access(for testing) and MySql(for open-alpha testing when more visual assets are in place). The mission generation system? Almost ready for primetime, as soon as it can generate large rooms and compile to DIF's on the fly. Tradeskills and skillpoints are in their most basic form, and the only thing that I haven't had time to work on in a while is my AI project "Archetype".

So, there's a whole lot on my plate. A taste of what needs to be done through the rest of this month:

1) Business plan: Refactor to reflect open-source software and other cost-cutting features.

2) Build the world: The heightfields for Chi'Hamak, the first planet of Epic Frontiers are ready to be put into the 130 "mission areas" of the game. I've already tested going from one mission to another, and this is going to be the zoning method used(along with server handoffs, which have yet to be tested).

3) Animation: Still haven't gotten past those bugs, and that's caused me to do thinking on something else, but what I'm thinking won't be told until June or July...

4) Dungeon Generator: This is almost mature enough to hook into the game, and I do consider it to be one of the more important features of the game for questing. I'll probably get to this Sunday.

5) worldScape: Probably going to be my last plugin for trueSpace/gameSpace for a very long time, since it's just hard to scrape together the time to work on it as I try to get my game playable enough to start testing over the internet.

6) Refactoring my vision: My l-system code-named "Amber", edgeExtrude, and autoWeld are all being shelved due to limitations of the trueSpace SDK. edgeExtrude works, but you need to delete an adjacent face for trueSpace to allow it to function, defeating the purpose. Amber *can* work, but generating that much geometry is not good, and I don't have time to introduce instancing to it. autoWeld is just going to be a casualty of my time shortage.

In refactoring my vision, it's become apparent to me that the tables are turning in that my smaller projects are going to most likely fall victim to the time crunch that had threatened my large project early on. But the closer I get to bringing Epic Frontiers to fruition, the more I'm willing to invest the majority of my time in it.

Yeah, it's a long .plan, but I'm not posting again until I have screenshots of both EF's playable alpha, and of the new version of the dungeon generator...