Monday, July 18, 2011

Monthly Update

Well since apparently I can't update weekly, I think primarily because I am not a big fan on on the blogspot interface thing, I'll try to get something out every month.

Here is what I've done over the last few weeks:
- Bought Spelljammer on ebay, and really like it.  Its an old D&D game with ships in semi-outer space.  Its got great history, well over 100 ship types, and plays like a wargame with RPG aspects thrown in.  
- Bought ISC War for Federation and Empire.  If you love counters, like I do, Federation and Empire is *the* game to own.  I can only hope that CBT takes some lessons from it with the eventual release of Interstellar Operations.
- Dealt with vendor after vendor for our new (though old) house.  The latest is Time Warner, as they are telling me that their cable cards won't work with windows media center.  I just bought 2 X-Box 360's as media center extenders to get rid of the crappy cable boxes.  Got another tech comming today, hopefully he is a bit smarter than the previous one.  NOTE:  If you ever have time warner folks comming out, ask for their IN HOUSE employees, not their contractors which always suck.
- Finally got the MW Technology of Destruction book on ebay.  Not sure what is in it.
- I have 6 things on order from BattleCorps, I'm starting to wonder why I pre-order stuff when it takes months or even YEARS to get shipped :(

And BT stuff.  Basically the last month any free time for BT I've had has been devoted to typing in roughly 40,000 names of systems.  I went through every map, in every book, and typed in the systems and who owned them during that year.  Something like New Avalon,3025=FS.  This way I can not only create a map in any timeframe, I can also create invasion waves by month or even day if necessary.  I've had somebody correcting my dozens of typos and helping clear up when systems were discovered/abandoned.  At this point the list is pretty complete, but waiting on the Kurita handbook so we can get those maps inputted.  At that point I'll have to create a single map, with all systems from all time periods, to get their new interstellar coordinates.  This is a huge pain, as TPTB have gone the way of detail and automation and create the maps in Adobe Illustrator, ugh.

Now I'm still dealing with some vendors, and working on some algorithms to programatically generate systems (including stars, all planets, all moons, etc, etc).  I hope to be done in a day or two, at which point I can randomly generate statistics of all types for all the systems.  Then I'm hoping to start working on formulas to procedurally create planet terrain, which has been a long term project of mine.  I actually have a "bid" sorta thing for $1000 to help get it wrote on freelancer.com, but I am starting to doubt the success of the winning bidder.

I'm trying to get a few things knocked out before the end of the year, as I'm running for US Congress next year and have to devote all my time to trying to win the primary for the Texas 32nd Congressional District.  I am going to run on the Republican ticket, but my "American" party takes precedence.  I refuse to take even $1 from anybody (you can offer your time, but not your money) and am running against a millionaire, so the likelihood of me seeing anywhere near the votes I need are, well, slightly above zero.  However, I feel it is my duty to try to do the right thing, and if Americans are truly educate themselves about the candidates I feel I can't loose against my opposition.  However, if they don't, and just vote for the "old guy", they really deserve what they have coming to them :(

No comments:

Post a Comment