It’s been a busy few months and excluding Symposium meetings I have not been around regularly, in what is a continuing refrain.  I could say it’s been busy at work and at home which is true, but it’s also true that Season 5 of Diablo 3 sucked up my recreational time.  The season journey they introduced with rewards for completing different tiers absolutely plays into my OCD 🙂  I had previously suggested some sort of achievement system on Realms as well, one of the things I think I’ll wind up doing here on the website eventually or perhaps that’ll be my first attempt at coding in SMAUG, we’ll see.

Other things I’m working at:

• I continue to work on the Mr. Dressup mode item database … it’s slowly progressing, I just haven’t tuned my brain back into it.  The rough draft version of it is at  http://realmsofdespair.info/itemdb/mrdressup.php
• I’ve revisited my map idea, that was partly working on a local copy of the site.  My goal is to make the Herne map navigable so that you can zoom in and see rooms.  To this end I’ve figured out how to read cMud map files locally.  I don’t believe it will be possible to algorithmically  generate the Realms of Despair map just by reading rooms and exits (eg drawing the map from an area file) because there is no fixed room size or distance between rooms but I’m going to investigate it a bit before I give up.  At one point I had Darkhaven and surrounding forests on a single zone which was very difficult to manage, however with this change I can now put them into zones for use in cMud but ignore the zones when I render them on my overall map.  Work in progress lots to think about.
• The main site still needs content… I have got literally gigabytes of Realms info from old sites, game logs etc, and the site looks like it was made by a child (not fair, children actually are more creative) so I would like to get some of that content posted and shared.
• I want to go back and get the time line built for the information I gathered some time ago.  Right now it’s presented as a table and I think a visual representation might inspire some more contributions.  The idea that the game doesn’t acknowledge it’s own history except in very rare spots is something that strikes me as a bit of a travesty.  Thousands of people have played the game and left their mark on it, I’d like to try and bring that history to life.
• Speaking of which, I was contacted by Haus who has prepared a bit of an article for you, which I will post up shortly.

Thanks for visiting, I’m still alive and well, the Guild of Origin is still here and I’m still looking for ways to contribute, feel free to drop a line in game and say hi.

Until next time,

Tharius