Return of Krom

I must say it is good to have some more Immortals around. I was just glancing at the board at the west gate and noticed a few of the posts on there were from people from long ago. The first couple posts are on average 7 years old from Jake.

Posts included contributions from Ming, Judge and Alana. Ming is gone and likely never to return. Alana said she is gone, but may well come back at some point. Judge is around, but very infrequently. He's done coding, which is a shame, because he was a great contributor.

Judge and I started on a really interesting project to upgrade the live maps to have much more information. He did some good reorganization of the code in the mud and then turned over some stuff to me for the web page, but I haven't had time to get to it and don't have the art to back it up, so it won't happen any time soon (if at all). To go into a little more detail, we had discussed making a graphical interface for immortal information such as areastats and mobstats. This would be tremendously helpful for us as we continually try to balance the areas so that players don't get in a rut of cycling one area at a time over and over.

This was a pretty daunting task to me a couple of years ago, but a lot of technologies have evolved (or at least become more mainstream) in that time. Things like SVG, AJAX and even to some extent PHP could make this quite a bit easier than it was the last time we discussed it. For now, I'm going to try to stay focussed on my current project which is building a better version of the equipment list. I'll post more on the approach I am taking to that in the future.