Thu Feb 16, 2006 4:15 pm
Last Notes.
For those of you who do not read the Front Page... I will be sending email to BP this evening, officially announcing the more-or-less obvious, which is that I'm done with FL, and I will be providing all of the files I have done.
I will be releasing both Toolkit 1.3, the SUR Exporter Beta Plugin version that I still have, since I believe beta-testing for this is, in a practical sense, dead... and my big baby, Warriors of the Sky, Beta Two, which is not complete-able until that day when custom SURs actually work pretty well.
Toolkit is 90% done, and pretty much crash-free. The only bugs remaining are content-related- namely, one of the "little things" I talked myself into- a whole new system of ship stats for everything in FL, using XML. Anybody interested in finishing that part just needs to copy the Liberty ships' XML code and change it, after using the balancing formulae I developed to make the ships to fit your mod. I'm very proud of how I hacked up common.dll to make that work right, but it was sucking up too much of my life to finish it for 30-odd ships.
I am pretty sure I met most of my design goals, but the project kept slipping, slipping, slipping, as people requested more features, or I talked myself into doing "just one more" thing ... that invariably ended up costing me sleep for a week or three. I exhausted myself around Christmas, decided that I was no longer having fun... and now it's time to move on. I will still answer questions via email, but I'm going to mod something else now, because I just can't stand to stare at INIs anymore.
WOS B2 is not well-documented, and compared to Toolkit, it's pretty primitive in places. That said, it's really cool, and I hope somebody will poke around with it and get its flaws smoothed out. I was not happy when I stopped it, because of the SUR issues, then stopped it again because of Toolkit. It was why I started modding FL in the first place, and I am not happy that it never reached the point I wanted it to, despite the help and support of a LOT of people.
If anybody who has worked with me on content (i.e., ships, etc.) or scripting is vaguely interested in knowing what I am working with next... email me, and I will talk about it there.
I will be releasing both Toolkit 1.3, the SUR Exporter Beta Plugin version that I still have, since I believe beta-testing for this is, in a practical sense, dead... and my big baby, Warriors of the Sky, Beta Two, which is not complete-able until that day when custom SURs actually work pretty well.
Toolkit is 90% done, and pretty much crash-free. The only bugs remaining are content-related- namely, one of the "little things" I talked myself into- a whole new system of ship stats for everything in FL, using XML. Anybody interested in finishing that part just needs to copy the Liberty ships' XML code and change it, after using the balancing formulae I developed to make the ships to fit your mod. I'm very proud of how I hacked up common.dll to make that work right, but it was sucking up too much of my life to finish it for 30-odd ships.
I am pretty sure I met most of my design goals, but the project kept slipping, slipping, slipping, as people requested more features, or I talked myself into doing "just one more" thing ... that invariably ended up costing me sleep for a week or three. I exhausted myself around Christmas, decided that I was no longer having fun... and now it's time to move on. I will still answer questions via email, but I'm going to mod something else now, because I just can't stand to stare at INIs anymore.
WOS B2 is not well-documented, and compared to Toolkit, it's pretty primitive in places. That said, it's really cool, and I hope somebody will poke around with it and get its flaws smoothed out. I was not happy when I stopped it, because of the SUR issues, then stopped it again because of Toolkit. It was why I started modding FL in the first place, and I am not happy that it never reached the point I wanted it to, despite the help and support of a LOT of people.
If anybody who has worked with me on content (i.e., ships, etc.) or scripting is vaguely interested in knowing what I am working with next... email me, and I will talk about it there.
. Good luck, wherever you go.
