Had a fairly busy couple of weeks since my last update. Most importantly my brother and his wife have been visiting from Canada, so we've been out and about a lot of the time, and when we haven't we've been sorting out some of his stuff/junk that I have to live with (and sadly he hasn't been able to sort out getting shipped yet, so I'm still living with most of it) or making inane banter... a lot of which I feel I've grown out of (and I'm the younger brother with the avid furry interest).


On a plus side, during this time I've had some strongly renewed vigour to work on a Shining Force mod for the game Jagged Alliance 2, which the smart folks at The Bear's Pit Forums ([link]) have making into an expanded and easily moddable game over the last couple of years. I'd done a bit of work a year or two back on putting a few Shining characters into it (notably Grace, Masqurin, Synbios and Kate), though mainly just editing intial stats and images (i.e. cropping in-game portraits) with a few audio files being replaced for voices.

Gone a little bit further this time, having added a few of my Shining Furce characters (for whom I've already put up concept sketches) - this meant creating some animated portrait sprites (some of you will have noticed my portrait's changed - I've been making pics like this) as well as the usual changes. I've also been making sprites for some new items and getting those added to the game, as well as work out how to edit some of the in-game text data (which is a tricky job as it means hunting for text strings in data files and making sure the new text is of a "safe" length). I'm hoping to get a few of the pics and sprites added to the gallery, even though some are far from great (sprite art is not my strong card).

It's still a case of having characters from a game set more or less around the middle/renaissance ages racing about with assault rifles and grenades (I've been trying to keep these aspects in character - e.g. Grace has a high medical skill to reflect her healing power, and being a fire mage Tammy gets a grenade launcher with napalm and thermobaric grenades!), but once I've had fun playing through the game with this set up, the end target will be trying to make something more akin to the Shining Force games - i.e. strip out all the guns and set up the in-game items and such to more closely reflect their style of combat. On paper it seems feasible, as there's plenty of capability for melee combat in the game already and a few "guns" can be set up as bows (and spears/knives/tomahawks as throwing knives)... magic's going to be an interesting thing to handle, so it's still in the planning stages.


Moving onto other things... Had a 3-month review at the Jobseeker's office (three months out of full time work - gah), and the only thing that really came out of it was that they suggested I look into some college or uni adult training courses on web development (or other things), as I may be elligible for a grant towards these. Sadly there's nothing suitable at Bracknell College, so I need to look further afield. Part of me's tempted to see if Portsmouth (my old uni) offer any decent distance learning courses.

Done a little to get myself back into reading... mainly through the help of the hilarious "The Pirates!" series by Gideon DeFoe. I've been reading "...In an Adventure with Scientists", where the pirates help Charles Darwin get his monkey-in-a-suit on stage in London and foil the evil plot of the Bishop of Oxford to stop Darwin stealing the show, with plenty of hams and yars and shanties along the way. Picked up "...In an Adventure with Communists" at Waterstone's on Monday, as well as a couple of other books (not including John Barrowman's autobiography, which he was signing at the store). Wierdest part was wandering up and down the graphic novel & manga section, and not seeing anything jump out at me. :/