~ OMG and Ahra Pahts update; impossible!
Here is a long overdue update on the Age. Two good news:
1) First I have litterally spend all of the week-end preparing all the shells that I still hadn't taken care of. (and there was a lot of them..) I have to say a big 'thank you' to Robert who helped me a lot with this. They are almost all ready, and I will start sending them tomorrow. If you had registered for a shell and you still hadn't gotten it it will be here soon.
2) The elusive version 1 has made a lot of progress. There's been a long and difficult transition to update the Age and make it compatible with all the recent changes in PyPRP but it's finally done (and you have no idea how reliefed I am. )
Also, a good part of the new content is ready. In fact I had most of it ready long ago before PyPRP 1.0 appeared, but the quality wasn't great because I really tried to 'get rid' of that Age, so I rushed it and it just didn't look good. So when PyPRP 1.0 came and I realized I was going to have so much trouble to make the Age compatible, I decided to scrap everything and start almost from scratch. Except for the shells, there hasn't been a single object that wasn't changed in some way.. It was a difficult decision because I really wanted to start working on other Ages, but in the end it is worth it. The Age has changed a lot but I'm quite happy with it now.. It's not complete yet but most of it is done; at this point I'm mostly fixing bugs and adding details..
The only big question that's left is about optimization. Robert and Paradox (among others) have done a wonderfull job with PyPRP recently, adding a number of features that could help a lot with the loading times and the general performance in thisAge. Right now on my version it is really awful; so I would love to include some of that; but that will take a bit of time.. I think it will be worth it though.
So: starting tomorrow shells will be sent out. And starting next week I will start posting some screenshots of the finished areas of the city (some areas will be polished enough that I can show them). But before that...
Rapid Shell Development contest
Because all the shells will be available and the new version is coming, I think it would be a good occasion to have some fun and to do a new Age development contest; this time with shells. The RAD contest was a big success and it'd be fun to do that again using the same rules (and maybe improving them where it is possible). Of course I'd like to release v1 at some point before the contest deadline, but it's hard to give a precise estimate for when it'll be ready.. Just to be safe I'll give it another three weeks; so if we do that contest the deadline should be after the second week of next month.
Does this sound interesting ?