Special demonic artisan candles hand made from the remains of those taken... 

That makes me wonder what they're made of.

Ear wax and bone dust for the body of the candle maybe?

But then what would the wick be? Skin?

Maybe made from a paste of human hair and fat?  (Presuming the hair was all short.)

Special demonic artisan candles hand made from the remains of those taken... 

I'm still reading... obviously.

In very rare cases, it kind of already works that way.  But I have to be careful not to dilute the benefit so most of the 'fom' members that aren't high donators were invited by me personally for some specific reason.

Heheheh.

Happy Birthday?

"How 'bout the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away... with mind bullets! That's telekinesis, Kyle."

...sorry... you made me think of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL4HSiGvk68

*crickets*

"Did someone say 'crickets'?"

So, I assume the next thing that's going to happen is try to finish everything on your Trello To-Do list Paul?

Eventually... there are many lists and they all deserve attention.

Where is Mythruna in terms of development? Also Paul, how is your wife fairing? Are there any big plan changes I should know about in general for this game? Just a few questions I have to access how everything is going.

Wife is fine... she is off chemo but then they saw another spot.  Not enough of a worry to put her back on chemo but they want to see her again in two months instead of three.  She also still falls a lot and each time that's not a major injury I guess we dodge a bullet.

The past three months or so I've been swamped with other things, life and otherwise.  Work is crazy.  I took spring break off to clean house and didn't end up finishing.  Worked the past two weekends to get the house in a suitable state for my son's birthday party.

Where I can I split Mythruna development out into open source projects that might survive on their own and so I get bug fixes and reports from outside.  Putting together a 2D multiplayer game was part of that... but it's stalled also despite it's simplicity.  Such is life these days.

On the plus side, someone picked up my basically undocumented network library and ran with it... found some bugs and performance tested it with like 800 players or something:
https://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/question-to-pspeed-about-his-bit-stream-class/35781/56

So that 'open sourcing' strategy is at least partially paying off.

Having NPCs remember where everything is and notice when it changes is king of a big data problem.  I don't know if I will have any solutions for that.

Sure.  It's all of interested to me.  After all, I had a VR headset almost 20 years ago now.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear )  (Well, technically I still have it but nothing will run it anymore.)

It's too soon for me to invest any heavy development time into it as a lot will shift over the next few years and the tech will advance rapidly.  In the end, I will have to have non-VR interfaces for things anyway and that's where most of the challenge really is.

As a consumer, I will probably have Sony's offering as soon as it comes out.  It so far seems to be the cheapest/best option (assuming they don't change price and/or specs before October) and is perfect for where I'd use it.

So Paul, how have things been progressing with your work/development/etc? Anything new?

I wish I had more to say.  Work and life have been swamping me lately.

I've had a couple side projects going that are not directly related.  For one, I've been pushing out new jMonkeyEngine releases once every two weeks trying to by a forcing function to getting 3.1 "finished".  On the side, another core developer and I are collaborating on a tool chain project to augment/supplant the existing JME SDK since we split it off as a separate project.

One piece of good news is that SimEthereal (my network library) has a user now.  He/she seems to be pretty knowledgeable too and is figuring it out with almost no documentation.  Hopefully they don't give up if the bug count gets to high and instead help fix them... which would be the point to having open sourced it in the first place: free labor.

Mythruna directly benefits from that bit.

I'm so patient. <3

Sorry.  Sadly, I don't even have the old Mythruna client installed at the moment... yet another hurdle to checking it out.

I don't really know what I'll be able to do when I get to that point.  I like stealth games a lot (Played the heck out of a game called Styx last year... recommended if you like stealth games.)  So I will be influenced by that for sure.

I've thought a lot about how sound and smells will propagate and so there will be something to that.  I'd like players to be able to wear 'costumes' but I don't know if the NPCs will be smart enough for that to matter.

In general, for the size populations we are talking about it's probably unreasonable to expect to walk into a camp dressed as one of them... with a small enough population they probably already know each other by site pretty well.  But who knows?

Also, given that there are specific hunter races, both with different leanings on stealth abilities, it would be really nice if I can get to that stuff.

(Styx was pretty nice with respect to aggro but suffered like most games ultimately do to be 'a game' in that if you hid long enough the guards would unrealistically forget about you.  Though one thing was that once you alerted one guard then everyone would be a little more jumpy than before... every little noise would get investigated with swords drawn.  I don't know that I ever waited long enough to see if they fully stood back down and put their swords away in that mode.  I got the game for free as one of the free games of the month on PS4... but knowing what I know, I'd have paid for it.)