So, things have been a bit visibly slow lately. I've had a few irons in the fire but mostly I got slammed with a few things.
On the Mythruna front, I've completely rewritten the input management system that Mythruna uses. I was able to clean up a lot of things this way and more easily support joysticks and gamepads. Furthermore, I'm only a proper remapping UI away from being able to let people remap the controls how they want. Remapping from mods will be easier, too.
I'm also redoing my user interface library. Right now I use a third party toolkit for the menus and stuff and I'm tired of it's little idiosyncrasies and I only use it for some menus, anyway. I want something that works for all of my user interface stuff so I'm slowly pulling some of the custom UI stuff I've already done for game mode, property book, etc.. into something more general so that I can redo the main menus, create a proper world seed selector, proper character creation screen, etc.. This system will allow fully 3D user interfaces also so I'm hoping I can use parts of it for some of the crafting activities. Anyway, that's just in the beginning stages but hopefully the next release can have a new main menu at least.
On the home front, this past week a nasty cold/bronchitis has kind of knocked me on my butt. Also, the kids have been back in school now and back in after-school activities. I'm the only driver in the house so this takes a significant amount of time. On the plus side, I get a lot of time with books and my sketch book. I recently purchased about 12 new art books ranging from straight up inspirational stuff like Frazetta compendiums to more "how to" books on creating fantasy art, etc.. Much of this is rehashing old ground but it's ground I need to rehash and I pick up the strangest "new" stuff also. (Some sillier than others, for example, I learned a better way to clean art brushes that makes me feel stupid for never having thought of it before.) Anyway, all of that has been inspiring and productive in its own way.
One thing that resonates deeply through my own experience and is reiterated in nearly every how-to book is the need to practice. The common recommendation is to carry your sketchbook with you everywhere and just draw all the time. One issue is that I spend almost 18 hours a day in my office and there is only so much inspiration/sketchable material here. The days I'm out with the kids, I'm sitting in the lobby of the gymnastics place, etc. and the other parents will only let you draw them for so long before they get suspicious and creeped out.
So... I got the wild idea to resurrect one of my older DLP projectors. A ceiling mount and a hung up screen later and now I can have any inspirational material on my wall that I choose. I can easily sketch figures, creatures, landscapes, whatever my imagination desires at a given moment. And it's pretty cool to have up anyway... if the bulbs weren't so expensive then I'd keep it up all the time, I think.
Here are some sample pics. (The monitor in the lower right of these screens is the one showing the Mythruna server console and logs. It sits at my left side when I'm working.)
http://i.imgur.com/gxkia.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/diQ9k.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/V6g2P.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/0bfjY.jpgIf this doesn't get my artistic side more productive then nothing will.
