Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. Typing this one up this morning, so I'll try to be quick about it.
This past week I resolved to knuckle down and get as much work on Tarakh'ga, Elegy Chapter 2.1, as I possibly could. RL got in the way (naturally) but I still feel this past week was productive. On Monday, I took stock on where things were standing in the Chapter and established a list of work "priorities" for finishing things up. Based on that list, I worked on the Jump Point encounter, completing the Problems section and working on the dialogue of the Naj'bakdor cut scene. I also made a few corrections to the setup section of the Elevator encounter. Both of these encounters are straight-up fights, but how to handle certain aspects of those encounters has been eluding me for quite some time. Work continued on the Jump Point encounter on Tuesday. My big decision that day was to drop out the Naj'bakdor cut-scene entirely - I had a picture of how that scene would go in my head, but I came to the realization that in actuality this was probably something that players should role-play out. So, I reduced the scene down to the necessary events (namely that a group of three torpedo-wielding Claymores are detected, with Naj'bakdor flying one of them, he decides to help out by blowing up one of the other ships and a dogfight ensues). This change necessitated a few changes to the rest of the encounter and required me to finally define what weaponry Ni'rakh has installed at the onset of the campaign, but that was easily worked through and by the end of the day I was willing to call that encounter done. I also worked some more on the Elevator encounter, making notes about the specific layout of the corridor where that encounter takes place.
Officially, nothing happened Wednesday - my wife was summoned to her doctor for a follow-up visit on what turned out to be something far less ominous than it had originally sounded. I did, however, have a conversation with her that day about where I was in the story and she pointed out a couple of spots where I hadn't adequately sliced my plot - like "why couldn't the players go after the transport in the Jump Point encounter?", and "how does Dya'a'ji get aboard the ship in the first place"? While I was annoyed in that her questions created more work for me to do, I do appreciate her asking questions like these - any level of plot slicing always helps to tighten up the story. So, on Thursday I went back to work on the Jump Point encounter, adding a contingency for the players attacking a transport that happens to be present. With that done, my attention turned to the Elevator Encounter, where I spent a good chunk of the day working on a battle map for the ship's ninth-level amidships. My big challenge there is converting the coordinates of a triangle grid (which I'm using as a basis of Kilrathi architecture) to a square grid (which is what my go-to map-making tool uses). This has been quite tricky, and I've had to start over a number of times. Work on this map continued into Friday. Finally, I redesigned the flowchart of the Engine Room encounter on Thursday, added it to the wiki to help out the GMs, and then began re-splicing the portions of the Problems section of that encounter to help with the overall flow. I've found that I have two parts of my flowchart out of sequence; they just need to be transposed. I'll need to fix it when I get a chance, which will hopefully happen later today.
I do have a bit of non-Wing Commander related news to pass along. I've been using Firefox on my home machine for quite some time now; I had downloaded Chrome a while back as an intended replacement but never gotten around to it. On Thursday, I got fed up with how slowly Firefox was behaving and decided to switch over to Chrome as my primary web browser, and the first thing I did with it was to clean up some old bookmarks from a few years back, one of which was to the Interstel Comm Center Forums of the Starflight III project, with which I was involved for about a decade. I last left those forums when they'd crashed some years ago and fully expected the link to be dead. Lo and behold - not only was the link good, but a new SF3 community has arisen of which I was not previously aware. The new community is facing the same problems the old one faced when I first arrived many years ago, namely that all the developers had left the project and taken all of the project files with them. However, as a member of the SF3 development team in the projects latter years, I had access to their file repository and (as it turned out) the team's design document, which I wrote (and thought had been lost along with the project's wiki; turns out I had kept the markup of the pages after all). I feel a responsibility to this new community to make these materials available to them so that the work can continue, so I will be taking some time this week to do just that.
So, my Plan for this week is going to be to prioritize SF3 over Elegy. The design document I have for SF3 is written in the markup for ScrewTurn wiki, which differs from MediaWiki (Wikia's markup format) in a few significant respects. I plan to get that up and publicly available as soon as possible; the site for this design document is at starflight3.wikia.com if anybody's interested. I then plan to get the files I have up on some kind of public repository; I was considering the use of GitHub for this purpose (I'll have to remember what's involved in using GitHub first, of course). When this task is complete, I will return to Elegy and get as much as possible done with the remainder of my week. Three encounters remain - the Elevator, Bridge and Engine Room encounters, with my priority on completing the ninth-level battle map since both the Bridge and Elevator encounters are dependent upon it. I had a thought this morning about how I might go about alleviating some of the difficulties I've had with this encounter; naturally, it may be a few days before I can implement this plan. Maybe I can sneak it in somewhere. Who knows.
Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next update will post to the WCRPG site sometime between 11-14Z next Monday, February 22nd. Y'all have a pleasant week.