I kind of have mixed emotions about this anniversary. On the one hand, it's a milestone and should be recognized. I've met lots of cool people related to this project. On the other hand, it is a stark reminder that I'm not anywhere near as far along as I wanted to be. It's been kind of a mopy weekend.
Not coincidentally, it is about the two year anniversary of discovering that my wife's brain tumor had returned. Little did we know what a significant amount of time and energy that would sap from our lives this past two years and counting. In fact, I'd created my company (Simsilica, LLC) just one month before that. But we deal with things as we can and life marches on.
At any rate, it was three years ago this past weekend that I wrote the first lines of code that would become the Mythruna that you guys play. In 10 days it will be the three year anniversary of the first release.
During this time I've gotten to meet a lot of cool people on this forums and in the game. I've gotten to watch my kids grow up around the game. Going from barely able to "mouse look" to being avid players and giving me feature requests and ideas. I'm sure my 10 year old son could give you an hour long dissertation on all of the things he'd like to see in the game. That part has been really cool and these days it's what keeps me going as much as anything else.
Latest status:
These days I've been mostly working on the user interface. Some time back, I published an open source project called Lemur which is a GUI toolkit built to work directly with jMonkeyEngine. This is what Mythruna is now using as the base library for its own GUI. This past few weeks Lemur has seen a lot of activity as I add things to support the latest Mythruna UI. I even got some contributions from another Lemur user that make it work cooler on Android platforms (multi-touch dragging for the win). The latest additions on my side have been mostly shoring things up to support the book user interface and adding some missing GUI elements like list boxes.
Here is the latest screen of my test book:
Various side projects have revolved around improving my music composition skills and I've also been improving my Blender knowledge. I've even tried purchasing some sample assets to see if I can make them work. I think the formats will take work and I'm not sure how much but it's all a learning process.
(There was another side project regarding low-poly rendering that I'm not sure I posted about here... that's a completely different story and maybe something I revisit in the coming months for a side project to test Mythruna AI.)
Anyway, for those who are still reading these updates and still following along, I really appreciate your patience. I know it's not easy to keep tabs on a game whose development is moving glacially but I really enjoy interacting with you guys. I've even considered setting aside a regular time per week where I login to the game server just in case anyone wants to chat in real time. I may wait on that until this version is a little further along. (It would be great to do it on the new server, for example.)
Thanks again for reading.
