SFRPG Update

[Deus Siddis]

Deus is continuing to work on updated race pictures, though I haven't seen very much along those lines yet other than some preliminary Mechan designs (like myself, I imagine he's got a lot on his plate at the moment).

Yes, though I have a bit more progress on that Mechan--



But I do really need to pick up the pace.

[capi3101]

I suppose I forgot to mention how I finished up proofreading on Chapter Twelve...wasn't that hard, really. I just had to go back to the Word file for Chapter Twelve, copied the sub-Chapters Acrobat refused to read into individual files and made individual PDFs out of them. Keeping track of my proofreading progress from there was as easy as checking where I'd stopped in an individual file against the One Big PDF. So that wasn't nearly as hard to work out as I'd originally feared.

The playtest: we tested character-scale combat rules at melee range on the 25th. Put my playtester up against six Hexapods...unfortunately, I think I set them too far away initially. Only one of them got close enough to Kain to try and smack him; Kain put some charged particles into it before its next action round came up, so it never actually got the chance. The others scavenged the body of the first one he put down...

[capi3101]

Howdy all, time for another SFRPG Update.

Well, I keep on telling myself that SFRPG is under a month to final completion and I'd like to think it's true. Of course, like everything that's happened with the game up to this point, the big restraining factor is time. If I can get the time to work, I can get stuff accomplished. If not, well, that's a different story. For the record, over these last four weeks I didn't work on SFPRG for a total of three days, and two of those were because I had family in town.

All and all it's probably a good thing that I got sick to my stomach on March 4 and had to stay home from work that day, and that my son was showing signs of being sick the next day, requiring me to stay home. Had it not been for those two days, proofreading would probably still be ongoing. Thanks to the time illness afforded me, however, I was able to rapidly finish up the last hundred pages of the game and conclude proofreading on March 9th, exactly three months to the day after I'd begun. The last ten days have been devoted to making the final edits, reformatting the pages to the standards required by Lulu and repaginating as necessary. I think I'll still have some final adjustments to make to Adobe's Distiller; when I figure those out I can begin making the final PDF set. As of this morning, Chapters One through Six are complete and significant progress has been made into Chapter Seven, with corrections to Appendix Three and entry corrections to the Index also complete.

Incidentally, never proofread something unless you really, really mean it. Grade-A pain in the ass, I guarantee you...

Deus finished work on SFRPG's covers on February 22nd. They look pretty spiffy; I might have to finally break down and make myself an avatar out of 'em once SFRPG goes to print. Deus is continuing to work on updated race pictures, though I haven't seen very much along those lines yet other than some preliminary Mechan designs (like myself, I imagine he's got a lot on his plate at the moment).

The third playtest is still ongoing, though I was only able to conduct two sessions since the last update (missed one because I was sick and I missed last night's in order to re-think the order of events in the final portion of the adventure). We did reach the adventure's midpoint on the 11th and I don't anticipate it going on for much longer; maybe another two sessions at most. I did create a new vehicle for the campaign (a supersonic transport), but my wife vetoed it; she wanted me to build a hovercopter and I had built a gravship. Haven't gotten around to revamping it as yet. My playtester has also submitted a new design; haven't reviewed it yet, either. Really, the corrections need to come first.

I am confident that the editing work will go by pretty fast. Not a lot keeping SFRPG from the presses at this point. Y'all keep your fingers crossed that I can find the time to work. More disease would be helpful, I guess......


capi

[cosmobreeze]

I don't remember if I already wrote about this, (and its also not a so important thing) but I think that the navigation skill of the Humna Humna should be increased, considering that they are spread trough the whole sector and that they are merchants (they sell also trade route maps), at least here on Earth in past times having a merchant fleet meant having good navigators.

[Deus Siddis]

I'm just glad it's over; couldn't listen to music and listen to Adobe Reader talking to me at the same time, so I've been without my music for a little while. Not the case with the final editing, thank goodness.

Heh that's funny, my productivity without background music is so much worse than with, also. Feels like a two fold difference in fact.

[capi3101]

Yeah, I suppose so...three months to the day for a 722-page book. Sure didn't feel like it went that fast. I'm just glad it's over; couldn't listen to music and listen to Adobe Reader talking to me at the same time, so I've been without my music for a little while. Not the case with the final editing, thank goodness.

Adobe Reader proved to be as useful as I'd hoped. If nothing else, I've caught all the final little misspellings and improper word substitutions that were still in the game. Not entirely sure if I got all the tiny little grammatical mistakes or not, but at this point I'm ready to be done and i don't really care enough to do another round of proofreading to try and catch them all. Like I said, it's minor stuff.

[PB Doughboyy]

That went pretty fast considering you did most of the proofreading yourself.

[capi3101]

Wanted you all to know that I completed the proofreading of SFRPG at about 12:45 PM CST today. The final corrections are underway. Too early to say when we'll be headed to the press, but it shouldn't be too much longer; probably two to three weeks at the outside.

[capi3101]

Hello all you happy people. It's time for another SFRPG Update.

I really can't report a whole lot for the last month. The proofreading effort is continuing at a slow but steady pace. There were only five days out of the past month where there was no proofreading activity whatsoever, and two of those days were spent doing other things for SFRPG. Only 144 pages were completed this past month, somewhat "behind pace" compared to the past couple of months. Things have been busy of late in RL; that accounts for part of the lag. The other is simply the fact that I was in a portion of the game I pretty much ported directly over from AnacRPG (which got nowhere near the amount of scrutiny SFRPG is), and so there was a lot more in terms of simple little mistakes. Still, I did hit a couple of landmarks this past month. On the 11th, I hit page 483, the start of Chapter Twelve. And this last Friday, I passed page 543 (the three-quarters mark). Not really sure I can count that one, though. See, this past Friday was kind of an interesting day (a bad day all around to be totally honest, but that's not really relevant to this update). Occasionally, Acrobat Reader hiccups and doesn't read off the text on a page (instead it just says "warning, empty page"). On Friday I was proofreading along in Chapter 12.3.1 and I'd gotten as far as the Journalist archetype, hit the next page when it gave me the empty page warning. Again. And again. And yet again. I really got concerned once I saw Chapter 12.3.2 come up...and was really upset when it finally started reading text again: at the beginning of Appendix One, 133 pages later. I do have a plan of action for how I'm going to handle this, but I have yet to implement it. I'll have to let y'all know how it works out. Push comes to shove, though, there'll just be a portion of Chapter Twelve that's been less thoroughly proofread than the rest of the game.

The third adventure of the playtest campaign is underway, though I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with it. I really kinda felt pushed into it by my wife and my playtester, both of whom wanted to resume the story. With the proofreading going on, I haven't had the kind of time to prepare as I did while was still writing (simply because I want to get the damned proofreading done). We've still got a top notch adventure going on; I just don't feel like I've had my A-game going as a GM. So far, we've set the premise up and got him going on the first part of the adventure, which involves transporting a second mob boss's nephew between Selma and Comfort. We're about twelve hours into the transit so far, with another twenty-four to go. Going to be testing a few things out here. I don't want to spoil the surprise of what we're going to be testing just in case my playtester reads the update thread; hopefully I'll be able to tell the rest of y'all soon. Only have had time for two sessions so far; like I said, it's been a busy month.

Something really cool (at least in my mind) that's been going on since the January 26th has been a collaborative effort between me and Deus Siddis to design the book covers. Deus has been doing the gruntwork; I've just been making design suggestions as time has gone on. The front cover is pretty well set at this point. The back cover is just about there; I'm happy with the last permutation I saw of it, but we've had a few more ideas sent our way and I don't know if Deus is experimenting with them or if he's gone on to working on pictures of the "missing" species in Chapter Two. Either way, I'm impressed and I hope y'all will be too.

Well, that's all I really got for right now. I've got less than 200 pages left to proofread; hopefully by the next time I post an update I can report the proofreading complete and the editing underway. Cross your fingers.


capi

[PB Doughboyy]

I vote for a picture of some ships shooting at each other with at least one of them in the middle of exploding.

Or you could always have something with ships on one half that kind of shifts halfway down into a planetscape with a TV driving around after some aliens or something.  That might be cool.

[capi3101]

Probably both. I was thinking maybe something like some text in the center with comm images along the sides, or something of that nature. Or maybe ships; either way it'd probably need some updated art images. Deus and I have talked about this privately for about the last week; I'll let you know what finally happens. Or perhaps I'll leave it as a surprise; haven't decided yet.

[PB Doughboyy]

Incidentally, does anybody out there have any ideas for what I should put on the back cover? Back covers are something I've never had to deal with before...

Are you planning on artwork on the back, some short synopsis about the game, or both?

[capi3101]

Howdy y'all. Time for another SFRPG Update.

This last month's activity can be summed up in one word: proofreading. The effort to proofread SFRPG  in preparation for hard-copy publication is continuing at a slow but steady pace. I didn't get nearly as much proofreading done at my in-laws as I had originally hoped when I last reported one month ago (my wife decided I needed to be more social), but I did get a fairly substantial amount complete before coming home. The rest of this month, though, has been a right regular quagmire. Chapters Eight and Nine had a very large number of mistakes in them, and it was not uncommon for me to only get four or five pages done per day as I was going through those chapters. I can still go ahead and report that as of this afternoon I've got exactly 400 pages complete, and I'm pretty far into Chapter 10.2.1. A major milestone of the proofreading was completed on January 14th, when I completed proofreading up to page 362; the game is 722 pages long, but I've come to learn that publishing standards will require the game to have a number of pages divisible by four. This will require me to extend the game by two pages, to 724 pages total. And half of that is 362, so I hit the halfway mark nine days ago. All downhill from here. I've noted that the sections of the games that are table and picture heavy tend to go faster than those that are straight text. So I expect Chapter 10.2.x to go quickly and things to slow again up to the beginning of Chapter Twelve. I have no idea how long it will take to complete Chapter Twelve (which accounts for a full quarter of the entire game in its own right). My best estimates place proofreading complete sometime in March. After that, I'll have to edit all the corrections I need to do and I'll likely have to re-work the TOC and Index. But that should be it; once that's done, and I get the corrected PDFs made, it's just a matter of uploading the material to Lulu before it'll be print-ready.

Incidentally, does anybody out there have any ideas for what I should put on the back cover? Back covers are something I've never had to deal with before...

Let's see...other things this month. I did go ahead and do a few corrections to the game on January 7th; that took me up to Chapter 2.1. I haven't actually done anything with the corrected Chapter One file as yet, simply because it doesn't account for more than three pages. For a very brief time on January 11th, the game had an ISBN, right up until I learned that the distribution packages that included the ISBN would've required me to print the game at something like 6"x7", which simply was not going to happen (I mean, it's 722 pages long at 8.5"x11"). It's too bad, too...I might've been able to distribute the game on Amazon.com and other bookseller websites. January 18th was not a good day; whilst preparing some characters for the next "playtest" adventure, I found a gaping hole in the rapid character creation system, namely when it came to Androids. Given the proofreading effort, I'm glad that we caught this now instead of after the game went to print. Nevertheless, it is something that will need to be fixed, and soon.

And speaking of the third playtest, my wife and playtester have cornered me into going ahead with it. The first session was supposed to have been this past Thursday, but my playtester didn't show up. I anticipate beginning this coming Thursday instead. I'm still concerned about the fact that the "second act" of the adventure has been barely touched...all I know is that it'll take place in Eola and I know where the final showdown will take place. Hell, I've got more done as far as planning goes for the adventure after this one than I've got for this one. I still think we've got a good story lined up and I'll be sure to let y'all know how things turn out.

Well, that's it for now. Time to get back to proofreading. Or fitting out my iron ass in Oolite; haven't decided which just yet.


capi

[capi3101]

Howdy y'all. I'm at my in-laws for Christmas, and I'm bored, so I guess that's as good a reason as any to give y'all an SFRPG update.

After I posted SFRPG online, my focus shifted over to SF3. I gotta say that the news with SF3 of late has not been terribly encouraging; I'm pretty sure we made Stainless mad enough to leave the project at this point. Given that he was our only active XNA programmer, his departure pretty much put the project on hiatus yet again. There's been talk of switching the game back over to Python; the real effort though has been to finally make a unified design document. I was working on that effort between the time SFRPG went live and about the 9th of December. I've been working with Deus on setting up the timeline between the end of SF2 and the beginning of SF3, preparing a draft which was completed on November 20th. Over the next few days, I added information that Deus has provided that greatly expanded upon the available data for the new species in SF3. A lot of what else has been going on has simply been reorganizing what data was already in the design doc, looking to see what bits and pieces are stil lvalid and what has been changed. The effort to reorganize the design doc is still ongoing, though admittedly I haven't gotten a whole lot done with it these last couple of weeks. I've also been considering how to build certain modules for SF3 should the game revert back to the use of Python code. This has included some thoughts on encounter determination and the game's internal clock, and (of course) finalizing the data on the new Sector as much as I possibly can.

As far as SFRPG goes, not a lot happened prior to the 9th. On November 20, I wrote to Zharous and got permission to post the game as One Large File on starflt.com. PB Doughboyy mentioned that he had helped with coming up with some ideas that were incorporated into the game (such as the preliminary synthetic lifeform rules); I added him to the game's official credits on the 24th. Finally, I can mention that work has begun on the third playtest of SFRPG (at least, we're going to finally get around to the continuation of Kain's story). I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that we're making this one on an event tree; what ultimately happens with the game is going to be dependent upon what choices my playtester makes early on in the adventure.

Since the earliest days of playtesting on SFRPG, my head playtester has repeatedly said he wanted a hardcopy of the game when it was finally finished. With the game finished, I began to consider making hardcopies more in earnest. Printing the game off myself was not an option given the game's size, so I began looking around at the local print shops. The best estimate I got was $26 for a comb-bound paperback with a clear plastic cover. Well, that might've been fine and dandy, but the same day I decided to check out some "print-on-demand" services on the Internet, thinking that the $26 tag was probably going to be the best I was going to get. I found a site called Lulu.com and as I was checking out their services, I found a project cost calculator for hardback books. Out of curiosity, I put in the parameters for SFRPG. It turns out that at Lulu, I could get a case-bound hardback of SFRPG made at a cost of a little less than $35 per unit. In my mind, the extra nine dollars was more than worth it, and so I began an effort to get the game ready for hardback publication. This has involved two seperate efforts. The first was gaining permission from Rod McConnell to do so; I wasn't sure if the publisher's cost was a violation of the licensing agreement for SF3 (under whose auspices I'd be publishing), so I asked. I received the green light yesterday; we are going to be doing this. The second part, and by far the more involved part, has been proofreading the game. If I'm going to make a hardback out of it, I want it to be right. So, I began searching proofreading options. First I checked out the Writing Center at the University where I work. They told me they could check out the game and the first proofreading session for SFRPG was held on December 7. Unfortunately, I had had to schedule that session a week in advance and was unable to get any additional sessions scheduled prior to the end of the school semester; the Writing Center was closed finals week and won't be open again until mid-January. I didn't want to wait a month, but I didn't have very many options. So all in all, it was a good thing I decided to take a course in Adobe Acrobat back in October, scheduled for December 9th. During the course, I learned that the newer versions of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader could read the text of a PDF file out loud (if this has been something Acrobat's done for a number of years, I apologize; just shows how far behind the times I can be in some aspects). I immediately realized I could use this feature to help me proofread the game (one of the best ways to proofread something is to read it out loud and listen to how it sounds; moreover, the program's talking rate is much slower than my natural reading rate, so it forces me to slow down in order to follow along). Since the 9th, I've been using Acrobat to help me proofread. As of today, I've got just under 200 pages done and have just started with Chapter Six. I don't anticipate this effort finishing up until late January at the earliest, but once it's done I'll make the corrections, fix up the PDFs, post new versions online, and get the game up for hardback publishing. I'll be sure to let y'all know when it's ready to go.

Well, I need to get back to work, so that's going to do it for now. I hope y'all have a pleasant holiday season.


capi

[capi3101]

Hello all you happy people. Time for a special SFRPG Update (one I've been waiting on for a little while).

This past month hasn't really been all that terribly busy as far as SFRPG has been concerned. The wiki is still down, though Opie says he'll be trying a new build this weekend to see if the ongoing problems have been fixed yet or not. What has happened with SFRPG lately all took place between the seventh and seventeenth of November, and has all involved my attempts at creating a PDF version of the game. I've got some exciting news there, so I'll save it for last. First, I'll tell y'all what else I've been doing.

I've done some refining of the Sector Generator since the lat time I talked about it. I've created a routine that reports on objects when they are clicked on, and another which reports the current coordinates to which the mouse is pointing. This has made things a bit easier to edit, since you don't have to guess at the coordinates of various objects. It's not the most user-friendly routine (you have to click on the exact center of stars and flux-points to get their information to come up), but it's still better than it was. I've also been able to fix a number of bugs and design problems with the newer version; for example, a message now appears when you try to open a new dialog box with an existing box already open. Cancellation routines are also in place for all functions at this point. The code has been designed to be flexible enough to run natively on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), but I've been hitting snags with my attempts to get it to run on Mac and Linux (I have Cygwin -- a Linux emulator -- on my Windows machine at home, which has problems with one of the program's modules, and the Macs I have access to have had all X-terminal access removed). I'll be visiting my family over the Thanksgiving break and hope that my brother-in-law can help me out; I gave him the code a couple of weeks ago, but he's been moving lately so I'm sure it's slipped his mind.

Lately I've also been working on the design document for SF3. After the last lurker came by to complain about the apparent lack of progress with SF3, there was an argument between the members of the current design team as to how combat should be conducted in SF3 (with the big debate being whether or not combat should be turn-based, real-time, or some kind of hybrid; for the curious, a hybrid-system was suggested as the best way to go, though I don't know if you can say a consensus was arrived at with that decision). To prevent this kind of problem from cropping up again, the current SF3 design team decided it was time to go ahead and finally write up a formal design document for SF3. I've been charged with at least starting on that work. So far, I'm afraid to report there hasn't been a lot of progress, largely owing to the work I've been doing on the Sector Generator and the PDF version of SFRPG. However, I will be picking the design doc back up in earnest soon. What work I have been doing has involved a review of the documentation of the original Starflight games (not to mention a peek at the design doc for The Lost Colony).

So, on to what's been happening with SFRPG. As y'all know, I'd previously found a method for loading pages off of the wiki into MS Word format, and had found an open ScrewTurn Wiki sandbox where I could save the markup and load the resultant page into Word. If y'all will recall, I had all of the game's pages done except for two (2.4 and 10.2.1) because they had images. Around the 7th, I had some free time, so I decided to further refine my procedure for re-parsing the DOC files into a final finished format. As part of this early work, I decided to ditch the Jawbreaker and Steelplate header fonts; I never really did like them all that much, to be honest. I replaced them with Microgramma, which in my opinion gives the game more of a sci-fi feel to it (if any of y'all watch the new Stargate Universe on the Syfy channel, it's the font that's used when the credits run at the beginning of the show, or at least very similar). It might not be a free font, but screw it; it's not like I'm selling the thing anyways and I'm still using a free font for the bulk of the text. I kept on working on the game over the next couple of days, largely avoiding the pages that contained images because I didn't have a procedure for preserving the captions, and many of them got shrunk down in the translation process. It was on the tenth that I had an epiphany (and I'm embarrassed it took me that long before it finally occurred to me). I could just copy over the images straight from the wiki and replace the images in the DOC file. Moreover, I could do the same thing with 2.4 and 10.2.1. And preserving the caption text turned out to be much simpler than I had anticipated: I could just highlight the image and the caption, hit "Add Table" in Word, set it up so that the table's column width was no larger than the picture, remove the border, and position the table where I wanted it (easier and faster to execute than it was to explain it to y'all). By the end of the day of the tenth, I had full-sized images in all the files (including 2.4 and 10.2.1) with captions, and no real excuse to not work on the PDF version any more. The next four days I hit the game like gang-busters, processing over half of the files in the game and fixing the ones I had done previously for the new font set. After adding headers and footers to the finished chapter PDFs, I had finished the first eleven Chapters by the evening of the thirteenth and finished up Chapter Twelve early in the day on the fourteenth. I re-worked the table of contents section, and added it to the composite final version of the game. A pagination problem set me back one day (largely owing to the need for time to work on it), but by the morning of the sixteenth I was ready to build the Index for the PDF version. Using the same spreadsheet I'd used previously to build the Index for the wiki markup, I spent the day finding specific page numbers for the Index entries, and was finished by that evening. The morning of the seventeenth (today), I remembered enough of what I needed to do in MS Word to go ahead and create the Index for the PDF version, and at the same time built a new, cleaner version of the Index for the wiki version. This evening, I finished re-setting the font and parsed the Index into PDF format. I then built a set of plates for universaltm's deckplans he'd prepared on the Call for Artwork thread and added them to Chapter Seven's file, as well as the master PDF. Finally, I uploaded the individual chapter PDFs to the same Google Sites download page where I'd placed the sector generator (I couldn't upload the master PDF, since it was over the maximum upload size).

What does this all mean? Simple. The complete PDF version of SFRPG is now available for public download. All I've got left to do with SFRPG is to wait for Opie to restore the wiki so I can finish up that version of the game. Meantime, y'all can go download the PDF version of the game at your leisure; I'll leave instructions on where to go on the Other Races thread (seemed redundant to have them on both this thread and the Other Races thread, and that one's been around longer). I should warn you that the whole thing is 24 megabytes in size (so it might take a while to download the whole thing on a slow connection), and over seven hundred pages long (so plan to shell out some bucks if you want to go print yourself out a hard copy).

If I do anything else with SFRPG at this point, it may be to begin publish some adventures/campaign settings. I've also had in mind add-ons for the Sega Genesis version, as well as (perhaps) materials from SF3 and The Lost Colony. All of this is formative at this stage and if I do anything like any of these things, I'll probably be looking to the community to help out. I'll keep the submissions thread open indefinitely for those of you who want to contribute these sorts of things. Meantime, I'm shifting my focus back to SF3, where there is still ample work that needs to be done. Design doc ain't gonna write itself.

So that's it, y'all. SFRPG is in the can. Hope y'all enjoy it. Commodore (loser) Out.


capi

[capi3101]

Hey all, I'm bored, so I figured I'd go ahead and give y'all an Update. What the hell.

Apparently, I'm one of those guys for whom old habits tend to die hard. Case in point, for the last year or so, I've kept a daily log of my activities working on SFRPG, so I'd remember what I did during the previous week or two and have something specific to write about. While this hasn't been necessary for me to do for about the last month and a half, I'm still doing it (though not as faithfully as before). I guess what this means is that I do have some stuff to tell y'all, and this won' t just be something to relieve my boredom.

Friday, September 4, was a good day for SFRPG. After the last official update, I continued my work on the Index, which if y'all will recall was very near completion already. All that remained to do was a sorting and review of the entries, as well as a check for well-formedness in the involved hyperlinks. My original intent had been to place the entries on the left side of the page, with the links on the right and a series of dots connecting the entries. Unfortunately, the alignment didn't work the way I wanted it to. Because I was anxious to have the index completed already, I decided to just throw it up into the markup the way that it was, instead of changing its formatting around. In other words, I got lazy, and anxious to have the game finished, so I just said to myself "it's done" and didn't bother with it anymore. With the Index done, I added a short dedication to the TOC markup, kicked back, and sighed...at least as far as the markup went, the game was finally finished.

I spent most of the rest of that afternoon and evening backing up the existing markup onto my jump drive, which I then followed up by overwriting any markup I'd modified since the wiki stopped working. For those who are curious, the final total overall size of the markup (just the text, no pictures or downloads are included here) is a little over three megabytes; that's a hell of a lot of text. So, with my markup in hand, I became interested in getting the game to the point where I could create a PDF with it, the final final step in finishing the game.

As those of you who've followed the regular SFRPG Updates are no doubt aware, the wiki has been un-editable since mid-August, owing to some problems Opie's been having with SQL and the new version of ScrewTurn Wiki. According to Opie, it will take a server migration to fix the underlying problems with the new version and a regression to the old version is not possible, so I'm afraid that it may be a while before a finished wiki version of SFRPG is available at the SF3 wiki. Of course, once I'd finished working on my markup, I really wanted to finish up a PDF version of the game, so I started searching alternative methods of turning my markup into something I could edit. The first thing I tried was an upgrade to the latest version of OpenOffice.org, which I was led to believe could translate wiki markup to another format. Unfortunately, my understanding was backwards; it was three days before I finally realized that. On September 10th, I hit on a method that worked: MS Word has the ability to open HTML documents, including ones that already exist on the Internet. If I understand what Opie's data dump would entail, I'd wind up with HTML copies of the wiki pages, so doing this allowed me to skip a step (though I don't think what I wound up with isn't nearly as clean as it would've been had I been more patient). I had all of the game downloaded in word DOCs by September 12th (with the exception of the files that had been updated). From there, I conducted a search for working fonts, which went on until September 15th. I'm still not happy with the style of the final large header font, but at least I can embed it in PDF files. Next, I began searching for a way of producing finished versions of the updated pages. This one was a bit trickier, and I had to wait a while before I finally hit upon a working solution. Meantime, I put up a draft version of Chapter Three up on ICC so that the community could comment on my font selections. The final break in getting the updated pages ready to go happened when I stumbled upon an abandoned Screwturn Wiki sandbox (which I later learned was established by the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University, but was never used for anything; there was just the sandbox and the main page present). After determining I could load the sandbox page into Word, I began uploading the updated pages into the sandbox and converting them into DOCs. This let me get updated versions of those files, which I then copied over the older version DOCs. This allowed me to get DOC files of all one hundred wiki ages of SFRPG, with two key exceptions: Chapter 2.4 and Chapter 10.2.1. Those Chapters still aren't done because they've been modified and they contain images (which have to be in a specific folder to show up in a wiki). But hey, having 98% of the pages is not bad. I'm still searching for methods of getting those two Chapters converted. Work with converting these pages into PDFs has been going slowly, largely on account of my busy schedule, the unavailability of the final fonts and Adobe Acrobat or Flashpaper at any terminal besides my home computer, and general laziness on my part. I promise to pick up the pace a bit; I'd rather not have SFRPG as the Christmas offering of the SF3 project this year. Thanksgiving perhaps...

While all this has been going on, I've been trying to finish up the SFRPG Sector Generator mentioned in Chapter 10.2.2 and preparing a public version for download. I really started picking up the program in earnest on September 9th, fixing some bugs in some of the existing functions to account for new features, adding a function to figure up the value of colonies, and cleaning up system reporting for homeworlds. Some of my changes required me to adjust the planet creation procedure in Chapter 10.2.1, forcing me to wait on having a finished version of that page available. I fixed the auto-encounter function on September 14th, and fixed some problems with the editing encounter function the next day. Trade routes took up the next four days, after which I felt the program complete enough to run through py2exe (that was September 19th; I'll need to remember that for the version history in the documentation file, next time I work on it). With the program finished, making the old maps became a priority. I wrote a routine that would allow me to drop the data in place from the SF1 and SF2 surveys. It took me five days to finally get all the bugs out of the routine, and it required me to re-compile the code (on September 23rd) owing to the "breaking up" of several functions into smaller chunks. At that point, I went ahead and re-built the Beta Sector for SF3 and reported the data to Stainless, who promptly reported several pieces of data were missing that he needed for SF3. So, I spent the next couple of days adding those functions to the generator, recompiling again on the 26th. The new version worked well enough, and after correcting some existing errors I finally had a nearly finished product. That's when I started working on the Starport code, which went on until October 6th, and started looking in earnest for a new personal web host (my existing account is on Geocities, which is getting nuked this coming Monday). While that was going on, I started massaging the data on the old maps in preparation of making finished maps for SF3. Debugging of the starport code went on until October 14th, and after writing an editing and deletion function for Starports, I was finally ready to call the thing done and re-compile once more. I'm happy to say that as of October 15th, a beta version of the sector generator is available for public use. It can be downloaded at http://sites.google.com/site/anacostiastation/secGen.zip. I also plan on putting it up at Starport Central at some point in the very near future. I'm afraid it only Windows users can use it for the time being. I'm investigating ways of making it more of a cross-platform app, and am continuing with the debugging process. A discussion of the generator is up in the SFRPG Sector Generator thread here at ICC. I have considered building an SFRPG creature/character generator, but considering the complexity of characters and creatures, it may be quite some time before anything of that nature is ready for public usage. That, and I'm trying to become more involved with actual useful work for SF3 (such as writing up the game manual).

Well, that's all I've really got. I'll let y'all know when I've got anything else to talk about. Or when I get bored again.


capi

[capi3101]

Hello gentlemen (and ladies, if there happen to be any out there). Time for what's probably going to be one of the last SFRPG Updates...

There are technically three draft pages remaining as of this morning. In reality, there can be only one.

Well, here's where we're at. For the last three weeks, I have been unable to edit anything on the wiki (to be more precise, I can edit but I can't save anything, which basically amounts to the same thing). All the work I've been able to do these last two weeks has either been on paper or in text files on my jump drive. Let me reassure all y'all that there's been a lot of work taking place these last two weeks, even if it hasn't necessarily been out where y'all can see it.

After the last update, I spent some time continuing work on filling out terms for the glossary in Appendix Three. I actually had that work done late in the afternoon the same day as the last update, and by the time I was ready to go home from work that day, I had already searched for and eliminated duplicate terms and had them in their final overall formats. They were ready to post to the wiki at that point, but as the wiki couldn't be edited, I was stuck on work for Appendix Three at that point. Later in the day, though, I hit on the idea of copying off the existing markup on the page into a text file, copying the entries into that text file, and posting the text file to the chapter once I could commit edits once again. So, right now I've got a completed Appendix Three sitting and waiting on my jump drive. That all happened on the 21st, the day of the last update. The idea of copying off the existing markup to my jump drive for editing frames most of the work I did these last two weeks; in fact, last Friday I spent part of my afternoon copying off the markup of the entire game onto my jump drive (thus giving me a backup of my own game, something which, surprisingly, I hadn't done yet).

Appendix Three was the last of the appendices, so after that I decided to focus in on finishing up the Who's Who (Chapter 12.3.2) after a short break on the 22nd. It took me three days after that to complete my paper notes on all of the profiles, after which it was time to start putting it into a file for posting. By mid-morning on the 26th, I had all of the data transcribed, and posted it for review by the SF3 community. After then taking some time to build an enumerated list for Stainless (something for SF3), I started the process of moving the character data into yet another file, this time a spreadsheet in preparation for a data merge. I had the data ready to merge that same evening, and went ahead and completed the merge early in the morning of the 27th. After adding the existing markup to the merge file, I began writing preambles for individual sections within the Who's Who and made a few corrections to the formatting of the existing tables (Dennis Orr and Captain Morgan). Meantime, NCCAD posted his long-awaited profile of Sumiss, which I reviewed and added to the Who's Who markup after a few corrections last Sunday afternoon. After Sumiss was added to the markup, I went to the wiki and copied off what I had into the file for 12.3.2, and previewed it. This allowed me to see what the final page would look like even if I couldn't post it; I had a few more corrections to make, but by Sunday evening, I was satisfied with how Chapter 12.3.2 looked and called it done. So, like Appendix Three, I'm now sitting on a completed copy of Chapter 12.3.2, which when I can post it will officially close out Chapter Twelve.

While I was finishing up the Who's Who and Appendix Three, I was turning some attention towards the final set of system corrections, though any meaningful work didn't take place until I got the markup pages copied off last Friday. Prior to that, I did some of the things I talked about at the tail end of the last update, such as reviewing the fast packs and composing an "apology" for Sega Version fans. I did ultimately determine that I needed to add slot data to fast packs, but also that I was going to have to change the existing rule for maximum slots. Simply put, there were some of those packs that a Human in the game wouldn't have been able to carry but in RL would have few problems carrying. The apology I kept in a seperate text file, at least until after the markup was all copied off, at which point it was added to Chapter 1.0's markup (which happened on Saturday). Once the markup was copied off, I began making systems corrections to those files, moving the changed files to the same place where I was keeping Appendix Three and Chapter 12.3.2 so I could keep track of which files I had actively changed. This allowed me to fix two links in Chapter 9.2, make the aforementioned adjustment to the maximum number of slots a character could handle in game in Chapter 5.4, adjust rules for Grapple Checks in Chapter 9.2, add the materials for Starport Earth to Chapter 7.4 (for the Pophopse-class) and 6.4 (for the Workbee and the station itself), adjust the examples for Attack Bonuses in Chapter 9.2, adjust the character creation rules in Chapter 2.4 to allow an option for a character to take the average discipline scores for their race and add limitations to the initial scores for Poor and Average racial disciplines, (something I did after NCCAD posed a question on the subject while creating Sumiss), add "cross-archetype" rules, the aforementioned slot data and equipment removal guidelines to fast packs for Chapter 12.3.1 (as well as adding EC data to fast packs), add the Diamondback-class cruiser as a creation example to Chapter 7.2, add the Galilei shuttle as a creation example to Chapter 6.2, and finally make some minor adjustments to both the Diamondback and the Galilei in Chapters 7.4 and 6.3, respectively. In short, the final set of systems corrections was completed on Tuesday.

Even while I was finishing everything else up, I had begun turning my mind towards the Index. There's a rule in writing that says authors should not index their own works, a rule which I didn't really learn about until I was already working on the damned thing, but I digress. I spent some time on the 24th reviewing the Index I built for AnacRPG, mainly to see what kinds of topics I had included in that index (I figured it would be a good guide, since a lot of materials for SFRPG were migrated over from AnacRPG and the two games are both from the same general genre). After copying off the markup, I began making notes of where certain topics were in the game, comparing them to my notes from AnacRPG. I moved the remaining to-do list entries off of the markup for the Index page on Monday (in and of itself significant), and began work on the Index in earnest once systems corrections were complete (on Tuesday). As of this morning, I have completed gathering data on topics for all Chapters in the game. For the wiki version, this information is going to include not only the chapter in which a specific topic is discussed, but a hyperlink directly to the topic (or as close as can be managed). I might've actually had the Index completely finished up by this morning, but RL hit yesterday and I managed to not really have a break the entire day (rotten luck there).

So to recap: Chapter 12.3.2 is done. The Appendices are done. All the corrections are done. The only thing left I have to complete at this point is the Index, which will probably be finished in short order. I anticipate finishing up principal work on SFRPG in a few days. All that I really need in order to present a finished game to y'all at this point is a working wiki.

I guess I could go ahead and discuss a few other administrative things about the game. As part of the "wrapping up" portion of the game, Opie said he would to conduct a dump of the wiki pages in preparation to make a printable PDF version of the full rules. Prior to that time, I will continue to accept any submitted materials for review and inclusion in the game. Once that's done, however, anything new is going to have to wait until the next draft to make it into a print version. I don't anticipate there being a lot of draft copies of the game and I have no clue when we can do a dump, so if you've got something you'd like to add, now would be a good time to send it in. I'm also still looking for artwork, if anybody wants to submit some for including in the game (I haven't forgotten about universaltim's deckplans; I was just planning on putting them in the PDF version of the game).

In anticipation of the game's conclusion, I'm going to say that this will be the final regular bi-weekly SFRPG Update. I will make an announcement when the game is complete on the wiki, and another when the PDF version is ready for downloading. I have no idea when that's going to be, so keep checking back to this forum at ICC. I want to thank y'all for your support and thanks for your input over these last four years. I think we've created a solid game together, and it's my sincerest hope that you'll enjoy playing it.


capi

[capi3101]

Hello all you happy people, time for another SFRPG Update.

There are three draft pages remaining as of this morning.

I definitely had a sense of "mopping up" these last two weeks. After finishing up 12.3.1 and with 12.4.1 largely complete, the only things that still really needed doing were Chapter 12.3.2, the Appendices and the third set of systems corrections. I decided to kick off these last two weeks with the third set of systems corrections, starting things out by finishing my notes and posting my stats on Starport Earth (as well as some peripheral vehicles) for community review after the last update. So far there hasn't been any comment, which I'm actually kinda disappointed about (but am taking as a sign that things are good with it). From the 8th through the 10th, I made changes to the starship and vehicle catalogs for changes in hangar modules and special cargo modules, and changed the inefficient space design flaw to include hangar module space. After that point, the only remaining correction from the list I had when I began the period was to reinstate all of the hyperlinks, and so I began a effort to locate and re-link them all, something which took most of the rest of the day on the 10th and finished up on the 11th. While this was going on, I was keeping my eyes open for additional things to fix. I adjusted the planetary creation procedure in Chapter 10.2.2 to make more gas giants and even out the occurrence of other planet types a little more, and I also moved the skill and sub-discipline abbreviations table back to Chapter 12.4.3 (the Bestiary) after I determined they wouldn't be necessary for either archetypes or the characters of the Who's Who. Finally, I finally got the text of the Human territory discussion to the point where it was okay and posted the changes to the wiki, and altered the EAD module in 6.2.3 and 7.2.2 to make it more efficient; this wound up requiring me to make a very minor change to the programme of Starport Earth.

In the midst of correcting hyperlinks, NCCAD posted his long-awaited non-planetbound race overviews for Chapter 12.4.1, the final missing piece of that chapter. After a quick review, I felt they were good enough to go ahead and add to the chapter, along with the overviews I had posted to ICC beforehand. On the 12th, I took the completed profiles, re-instated the seperate "denizens" section for the two Sectors, and posted them up while adding links back to 2.2 and 2.3. This was the last bit of work that needed to be done on 12.4.1, so I saved the chapter. The only thing I had left to do was to try and remove the page from the drafts category. Here, I hit a snag - the wiki did the same thing it did with Chapter 12.3.1 (as I talked about in the last update). I decided to leave it be to work on other things (a decision I reversed during the week, as I'll talk about shortly).

With 12.4.1 done and the third set of systems corrections down to just posting Starport Earth, I had the appendices and 12.3.2 left to do. I decided to start working on the Appendices first. I whipped up a generic preamble for the three appendices, adjusting the text as necessary to cover the purpose of each appendix as necessary. In the case of Appendix Two, all that was still needed was a preamble; by adding it, I completed Appendix Two, and so I made an attempt to remove it from the Drafts category, an attempt which was successful (which surprised me at the time). I then began work on the other two appendices with a review of the entire game, beginning by scouring the site for boldfaced terms and tables. That effort took up the morning of the 13th; while it was going on I found a number of small things as I was going through the game that needed fixing, and added those items to the final list of systems corrections (technically still open, since Starport Earth is still there). I then began importing tables into Appendix One, ultimately finishing that effort the same afternoon. With the tables in place, the draft snippet removed and a table of contents added, Appendix One was complete, so I again attempted the removal of a page from the Drafts category and was successful.

Getting Appendices One and Two removed from the Drafts category bothered me for the rest of the day on the 13th; I even lost a little bit of sleep thinking about why I could get those pages out of the category but not 12.3.1 and not 12.4.1. It was during my morning walk to work last Friday that I formulated the hypothesis that it had something to do with the types of tables that were in 12.3.1 and 12.4.1, something they didn't share with the tables in Appendix One. I did a quick review of the 12.4.1 and Appendix One once I got to work (I was early that day, so I had some time to kill), and found a difference: 12.4.1 contained a table that had boldfaced rowspans (the Eola residents table). So, after backing up the chapter's wiki markup, I moved the Eola table to a text file, saved the markup page without the table, and tried removing the page from the category. I was successful. It was then a simple matter to put the table back. Realizing it could work, I then attempted the same thing on 12.3.1, which involved removing all of the archetype tables from the Chapter (basically the last two-thirds of it). It was a bigger pain to get everything back due to the size of the chapter, but it worked. Short story is that at long last 12.3.1 and 12.4.1 are officially complete, leaving 12.3.2 as the last thing in the Chapter (I bet y'all have probably gathered that by now, though). Probably a good thing I got those done when I did; Opie put another upgrade in place for the wiki later in the day, which ultimately made it impossible to edit the wiki and made the stylesheet up and vanish yet again. He is still working on correcting the problems. I hope they get fixed soon; gonna be difficult to finish the game otherwise. I should mention that 12.3.1 does seem to be loading up a lot easier since that last patch was put in place.

With the other two appendices done, I turned my attention to Appendix Three, and quickly realized just how much work there was there. Turns out there were over five hundred acronyms and boldfaced terms listed throughout the game. Defining them all was something that was going to take more than a day to complete, so I started in on those. They've largely been taking up the days during the course of this past week. As of this morning, I can report that I'm within a hundred terms of being done, with entries spanning from Chapter One into Chapter Ten. Meantime, I decided to finally get started on Chapter 12.3.2. I decided to take a paper notes route with the chapter, with the goal of allowing me to work on characters even if I didn't have computer access. After re-reading the logs of the Intrepid and the tale of the Buttershark, I elected to start the chapter by submitting most of Intrepid's crew; Captain Zarfleen didn't go into any details about his crew's personality, so it was a good opportunity to include some largely generic characters in the Who's Who. I completed those notes on Sunday afternoon and had them posted to ICC later for review; since no one's commented on them, I assume they're okay (of course with the wiki where I can't edit it, I can't actually post them). Since then, I've been working on the crew of Buttershark whenever I had a spare minute. Prutzoop was completed Sunday night, Cionia on Monday, and Grrg'Ah on Wednesday (mostly; she actually had some equipment mentioned in the story I haven't accounted for yet, namely her Slice-O-Matic). I hope to be a little less generic with Buttershark's crew, and I hope to be able to pull some surprises with the remaining characters as well. Meantime, I have got the height, age and mass data completed for the remaining character set, I've made attribute and discipline rolls for them, and I've determined which archetypes I intend to pattern them on if necessary. Really, I could have the remaining characters done in short order, but I do want to give some of them some extra thought.

Small things: I fixed some text that needed italicized in 6.2.3 and 9.2; it originally was in boldface. The Lifting skill was finally corrected to reflect the fact that, yes, these were the full rules to the game, and several variable traits were underlined in Chapter 4.1. I also have been keeping notes on further things that needed fixing; among them is the need for listing out the slot data on fast packs and rules for removing equipment from them if necessary (for less durable races such as the Elowan). I also now have plans to add a sort of "apology" to Chapter One for fans of the Sega version, given SFRPG's PC version "slant".

Well, it's been a full two weeks. We're definitely into the endgame now; with any kind of luck, I hope to be working on the Index by this time two weeks from now. Keep your fingers crossed...


capi


P.S.: RL? Still the same. Too many other exciting things going on to talk about it this week, though.

[capi3101]

Hello all you happy people, time for another SFRPG Update.

There are seven draft pages remaining as of this morning, but only because the damn hands of the clock are stuck.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the SFRPG Update thread. It's hard for me to imagine that it was only a year ago that I was working on the Beastiary, Androids and Uhlek for Chapter 2.2, just starting out on Chapter Eight and making the Pages With Broken Links list. I want to thank all y'all who have helped contribute to the game this past year; the work that has been completed would've taken me a lot longer to do all on my own. Tomorrow also happens to be the day my son turns six months old, which in and of itself is hard for me to believe. I mean, I thought I was flat broke before, but......

The week following the last update my wife and son went to go visit her family, leaving me at home by myself (this was a conscious choice on my part; I've taken a lot of leave this year and felt it unwise to burn the hours I had left unnecessarily). Though I was pretty lonely last week, it did mean I had substantially fewer distractions than normal, and as a result I was able to get quite a bit done. Things are otherwise pretty much the same in RL.

I used the time I had last week to focus on completing Chapter 12.3.1. As I reported in the last update, I started off these last two weeks with the archetypes were complete on paper except for equipment packages. My first priority after the update was to go ahead and get my paper notes transcribed into my spreadsheet, something which I had done later in the afternoon of the 24th. Work on equipment packages then commenced. I created some paper matrices for equipment and archetypes, and spent the next three days filling in what archetypes should have what equipment, completing those notes and their transcription to a spreadsheet by the evening of the 28th. I quickly discovered a problem when it came time to give characters storage for their items, though, namely that some of the archetypes had been given far too much equipment (I think the highest encumbrance class was something like 174, the equivalent of "smashed flat as a pancake from the weight of your crap" in any other role-playing system). To prevent having to completely re-do equipment and waste who knows how much time on trying to make corrections, I decided to borrow an idea from Microlite20 (the RPG system I mentioned in the last update) and create "fast packs", creating pre-arranged sets of useful equipment that could be carried around using a Wilderness Backpack as a container. Adopting this system required me to adjust a few rules and create the actual packs, but that work was completed by the afternoon of the 30th (only two days later). Meantime, I had gone ahead and "decoded" the archetype spreadsheet, running the text through a spellchecker to boot. I was able to get the work done on the reduced equipment packages done quickly, and by Thursday evening my spreadsheet was complete. The final merging of the data into wiki tables occurred next, and afterwords I began composing short preambles for each archetype (no more than three or four lines each). The final preamble was ready last Friday evening, and so I attempted to add the tables to Chapter 12.3.1 then. After one false start, I decided to start putting them up in smaller chunks. It took a while to get them all up, but by five until midnight local time, all the archetype tables had been posted to Chapter 12.3.1, finishing out the chapter.

Which brings us to the part about the hands of the clock being stuck. Chapter 12.3.1 was taking an excruciatingly long time to load up, but since the Chapter was finished, I deselected the radio button that put the page in the Drafts category, and hit "Save". Three minutes later, I got the system error message and wasn't able to load up the page again for another three days. When I did get it to load back up, I found it still in the Drafts category. I'm assuming this has something to do with the ongoing namespace problems Opie's been having with the wiki since the upgrade; hopefully it'll be resolved soon. Meantime, the Chapter is finished, though consider yourself lucky if you can get it to come up.

With 12.3.1 out of the way, only two sub-chapters remain in Chapter Twelve: 12.3.2 (The who's Who) and 12.4.1 (Navigational Data). I still wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do in 12.4.1 yet (something which I remedied and ultimately completed during the evening on Saturday; I'm now waiting on NCCAD to do the parts he agreed to in order to finish out that Chapter) and I couldn't get to 12.3.1 to help me out with 12.3.2 (though ultimately I did get that going and was able to get a draft of PBDoughboyy's Captain Morgan character up for review on Tuesday, which he approved last night). So the next place my attention turned was to the final set of systems corrections. The third set of systems corrections have been going along pretty swiftly; to be honest, I'm not sure why I couldn't have just done some of them as the issue that needed correcting came up. Anyways, in the past two weeks, I've added links to the life-support failure rules in 12.4.2 to 9.3 and 9.4, corrected some of the wording on the Space Station chassis in 7.2.1, added a blurb about marching order to Chapter 10.6, added a blurb about lock-picking to 3.2, added rules for attacking objects (meant to be used for breaking in) to Chapter 9.2, deleted the remaining un-discussed topic notes in Appendix Three, changed the trading rules in Chapter 5.1.2 to favor an opposed roll over a static DC, changed the formulas for biodensity determination in Chapter 10.2.1 to include the ecosphere, and made medicines resistible (like poisons). Most of this work happened on Saturday. During the week, work on corrections has seen the abolishment of the one weapon Class Only rules in Chapter 6.2 and 7.2, clarifications in the drops in accommodation and cargo spaces from multiple hangar bay modules in Chapter 6.2.3 and 7.2.2, allowance of shifts between accommodation, cargo, and hangar spaces in 6.2 and 7.2, and a review of the existing vehicles for changes due to the changes made to the Hangar Bay Module and Carrier Systems accessories (the only vehicle that actually needed changing was the PEG; those changes were affected on Wednesday). I also made the corrections I'd intended to make to sea vehicle chassis, adding one level to the Cruiser chassis, upping the maximum chassis speed and decreasing the prices. Finally, I made a few new vehicle accessories specifically for sea vehicles, and added some additional options to missiles that would enable them to be used like torpedoes.

Some issues with the systems corrections still haven't been resolved. On Saturday, I proposed some changes to the Human and Elowan territory profiles. While the Elowan profile didn't garner any further discussion (and I was able to officially close them out for good yesterday afternoon), the changes to the Human profile have had some more lively debate going on. I'll probably wind up leaving them open for a while longer, at least until NCCAD has had a chance to chime in on them. I also still need to adjust the procedure in Chapter 10.2.1 and 10.2.2 to make more gas giants, review all starships for errors to cargo spaces and correct for changes from changes to the Hangar Bay Module and Carrier Systems accessories, and review/reactivate the remaining hyperlinks that were disconnected in the upgrade.

I've also been spending the last few days working on ideas for Starport Earth, which isn't really a correction but is listed as one in the to-do list. That work started Monday night when I built a concept model for the station. See, the idea behind building it was to check the rules for building a space station out of conglomerate capsules, like the Mir station or ISS. My model basically was to check to see how many capsules would be needed to build the station I wanted, and to give me a rough idea of the station's final overall dimensions. Along with the actual work on the component capsules, the project has given rise to a new class of Interstel starship as well as a new service vehicle. All of this stuff is non-canonical and I'd like the community to look at it before I run with it, and it was largely finished up yesterday (though I still need to post a few additional rules regarding conglomerate capsules as space stations), so I'll be dusting off the submissions thread sometime later today. I hope y'all like the finished product.

I'd venture to say this has been a solid two weeks. I anticipate having systems corrections done by the next update, and NCCAD has told me that he'll be coming back from vacation next week, so I foresee being able to move the hands of the clock yet again pretty soon. Provided, of course, that we can get the damned things unstuck...


capi

[capi3101]

Good Morning, gentlemen. Time for another SFRPG Update.

There are seven draft pages remaining as of this morning..

Well, it's the end of July and SFRPG is still not finished as I had optimistically hoped three months ago; I can't even say that I'm done with Chapter Twelve. When I made that prediction, I hadn't fully considered my son and the impact he was going to make on my life...so I guess y'all can blame him (it's not like he's sapient yet, so no harm done). I'm not going to knock these last few months - we're very close to having Chapter Twelve wrapped up right now - I just wish I could've accomplished more in the time than I have. On the plus side, these last two weeks in particular have been quite busy.

RL is still largely the same; I won't bore y'all with too many of the details, other than to mention that I've been in contact with the Examiner and they've told me they'd like to take me on as a hobby game freelance journalist. I'll have to let y'all know when I finally get on; if I understand correctly, the amount they pay me is directly proportional to how much traffic I generate. My only concern with the whole deal at the moment has to do with Stainless looking for a photo of me a couple of weeks ago...and that's all I'm going to say about that; no real need to remind folks of things best left forgotten. Hell, I probably shouldn't have brought that back up in the first place......

Probably the biggest news these last two weeks was Opie's upgrade of the wiki software to a new version. It created a number of initial headaches for me; I pretty much lost last Friday (when the upgrade took place) aside from doing paper notes on character archetypes for Chapter 12.3.1. Among the things the upgrade caused, it required there to be no dots (periods) in any of the filenames for the wiki pages. Unfortunately for SFRPG, most of the pages did have dots, since I chose to give the filenames the initial chapter number first. Opie quickly got them changed over to underscores (which I apppreciate), but a new problem cropped up: all of the hyperlinks in the game still reference pages the old way (using dots). Most of the hyperlinks in the game are therefore broken as of this update, though I've repaired the navigation links at the bottom of each page. Leaving the other links broken for the time being will give me another chance to confirm that the topics they link to are in fact located somewhere in the game, not to mention letting me make sure they're linked to the right place. We also have a problem with tables; the final row on certain tables (unfortunately, I mean most of SFRPG's thousands and thousands (dozens) of tables) has part of the text drawn out from the left-most cell, generating a new row and generally making a mess. I'm hoping Opie gets this one fixed soon, especially given the seventy plus archetype tables that I plan to dump onto the wiki sometime in the coming weeks. Don't get me wrong; now that I've gotten a little more used to the new interface, I actually really like the upgrade. It's just a matter of working out the kinks in the technology. And I can still edit the wiki, though for some reason the new stylesheet up and vanished on us yesterday for no apparent reason...

So, once again, I managed to deviate from my intended plan for SFRPG these last two weeks. This time, however, it wasn't entirely intentional. After the last update, I continued work on the community of Eola in 12.4.1 and largely completed it that day, but I wasn't happy with the distribution of hero points within the community, so I decided to revisit the issue and make a few tweaks to the procedure in Chapter 10.2.3. I was still working on this on the 13th, when the wiki decided to have some odd technical issues; I could access every page except for 10.2.3 and 12.4.1 (which was very annoying, given that those were the very pages I needed to work on). To kill time, I decided to work on 12.3.1 instead, and that was the start of pretty much the rest of the last two weeks. I did eventually get to make my changes in 10.2.3 and finish up Eola later in the day, but the work I'd done on my break got my mind set on picking work back up in the chapter, and pick it up I did. After picking up the work, I was able to finally complete the rapid character generation routine on the 14th (complete with an example and rules on how to account for aging with the procedure). Later that same day, I decided to go ahead with an idea that had been rolling around in my head for a while, namely a procedure for creating custom archetypes. This included a set of instructions and table for translating given feats, skills and traits from other role-playing game systems into SFRPG format. Ultimately, an example included with this effort resulted in a new, totally unplanned and probably useless archetype. Along with the addition of section preambles in Chapter 12.3.1, this effort largely completed that chapter. All that remains at this point is to include the archetype tables themselves. To do that, I'll need to complete my notes on the archetypes, something else which has seen some milestones these last two weeks; notes on archetype disciplines were completed on the 14th, and after a concerted effort, trait sets were completed yesterday (at least on paper; getting them into a spreadsheet may take a while). All that still remains with archetypes are the equipment packages, and I've been making in-roads there as well. I will heed the lesson from three months ago and not say that they'll be done by such and such a date, but I will say that it probably won't be too much longer before 12.3.1 is 100% complete.

I suppose I did mention finishing up Eola, and if y'all will recall, the only other thing I still wanted to add to Chapter 12.4.1 was something about the non-planetbound races. Well, that was my original plan for how things were going to go this week, and I've already mentioned that I deviated from that plan, so that's pretty much that. I did start building Minstrels as a lifeform on Monday and gathered up some notes on Tuesday, but as of this update I'm still debating as to exactly what I want to say about these lifeforms. Having writer's block on the subject is frustrating, especially since 12.4.1 is otherwise done as well...

With 12.4.1 largly complete, though, I did decide to do some work on the final set of systems corrections, starting on the 11th. Since then, I've moved the blurb on the ship's log to Chapter 7.1, added a blurb about the effects of weather on characters in 8.2 (linking it to 12.4.2), corrected typo in 8.1, added a procedure for determining the colony value of planets in 10.2.1, added the Insane Complication to Chapter 4.3, linked weapons that causes burns to the Fire discussion in 12.4.2, Changed the effects of cryo-gas dispensers in Chapter 5.2 (and linked that to 12.4.2), changed the name of a recommended archetype in 10.2.5, and corrected the links to templates in Chapters 2.4 and 10.2.1. That may sound like a lot; I don't think I went through more than a third of the whole list. Probably should've stopped to do some of these as I was going along...

There was some work done on 12.3.2 these last two weeks, believe it or not. After adding a preamble for the chapter, I went ahead and gathered up a partial list of characters I want to generate on Tuesday, based on the little discussion there's been on the Who's Who. I'll still need to see if we're going to want to add more characters or not; with archetypes close to completion, it's likely that discussion will be picked back up in the next two weeks.

One last thing that happened that I should mention was the final completion of the synthetic lifeform rules on the 16th. After debating with myself where I really wanted to put the things, I bit the bullet and moved them back into 10.2.5; it just was the most logical place to put them. Ultimately, it took us about a year to finish those rules; it has been a year since PBdoughboyy first submitted his ideas for maintenance cycles for androids, something which had a large bearing on how the rules for synthetic lifeforms evolved. I even incorporated his original table, though I had to adjust his table from its original format (i.e. I had to generate a different set of effects).

I'll close this update out with a discovery I've made since the last update. Out of sheer boredom (I think this was when the wiki was down for upgrades), I went looking to see if I could find a listing of free online pnp RPGs. I was successful in that endeavour; one of the ones that really grabbed my attention was Microlite20. Aside from being a pared down RPG, the coolest thing about this game was the fact that a version of the game came in little booklets that could be folded up and put in a pocket. It's a fascinating concept, particularly for someone like me (who used to make pocket games all the time). The site for the project, for those interested, is here.

Well, that's all I have for now. It's been a full fortnight; hopefully with the next update I'll get to move the hands of the doomsday clock again......


capi

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