10tinnabuation

I can't believe it's noon already!  I've taken the morning to do some design work that will help lay the foundation for a balanced game, and things are coming along extremely well.  It's important that we start getting numbers together that jive with each other--after all, most of what the server does is just running gameplay equations.  Unfortunately this takes dev time away from finding code bugs, which is my next task.

As for the list of three things that I'm working on next:

1- Balancing global design equations in a big excel spreadsheet so Erich/Joe/Alex can assign  numbers to the items they make that won't have to be continuously revamped and should stay balanced

2- Changing the way the game editor saves files to use a database.  For many projects I'd imagine this would be a huge change; however, I expect to have it done tomorrow.  This solves a big problem:  it will let me write tools that load and work on only sections of the game file individually without having to know how to handle the parts it doesn't recognize.  For example, I can write an item editor that *only* edits items--even though all of the textures, images, maps, npcs, meshes etc etc are all in the same file, they are transparently ignored by the specific editor.  It can just go in, do its thing and leave.  By being able to make very modular editors, I should be able to improve the overall quality of each.  Included in this "step" is to write an item editing tool using the new editor model to make sure everything is working.

3- Bug fix update