Sorta got too busy to even write anything on this blog for a bit….quite alarming.

Anyways its been a banner month in CoLA and we’ve expanded our land situation and CCS 0.4.9 is in production and Lindens are talking to me about doing patch based cache related wizardry to make SL lag less and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

I’m so busy right now really that theres just no way to even keep up with everything I’m trying to do. Theres three new sims to build out, theres a shit ton of work to do for the new CCS version because we’re not even bothering with a minor release here….and to top it all off somewhere in there I have to try to work out where I’m going to have a first life. I guess life would be a lot easier if I just…..paid the bills and let everyone else do the work…but thats not how I’ve ever operated.

Anyways this has its ups and downs because for everyone that seems to understand that as busy people get….I’m as busy as they come….and for all the people that tell me to remember to take time for myself and relax and have fun, well theres 50 other people in the CCS network that are up my ass about “when is the next CCS version coming out?” and the constant and more or less totally annoying class warfare that goes on within the CCS power player community where pretty much every race and class is in constant comparison for which one is the best.

Overall I think that probably annoys me the most. So many people are getting so focused on a race/classes ability to be powerful in 1 vs 1 situations that the player base is losing sight of the fact that CCS was designed for group vs group combat. Some racial classes will excel in 1 vs 1 due to their design, other classes are designed to be more powerful in a group. Thats the games design, but its a design that is slowly but surely being lost in the white noise of power player soloists that insist that they must be able to take on whole factions by themselves.

Rather annoying really…..and something thats going to change a bit with the 4.9 release seeing as we’re refocusing character development on stats over level…..so to be truly “uber” people are going to have to work out the optimal balance of stats in the system that work best for the race/class, rather than just ensuring they have lots of HP and Stamina.

Regardless we have so many good things going into the 4.9 release of CCS…it might as well be an all new game system, though the general design of CCS is still there, its been totally reworked internally allowing the game dynamic to become more complex and more powerful.

In a funny side development, one of the features I’ve been discussing with Melanie, for CCS’s final additions…..has come up in World of Warcraft’s future plans as well, we’ll probably get ours released before they get theirs released but I find it funny that I’m doing Blizzard level conceptual development for CCS, what was a home brewed gaming solution for a tiny little sim on the mainland back in the day, before Blizzard even announced theirs. I guess you could say Great Minds Think Alike…but I don’t say stuff like that because it reeks of conceit.

Anyways must run, I’ve got more texture work to do for the build additions….its not even 8am yet…and a saturday no less, and I’m working.

Probably the best example so far as for why the Team Fortress 2 design direction is probably one of the coolest non MMORPG games on the net these days as compared to any other game.

Valve has slowly been introducing us to all the classes in Team Fortress 2, which is a nice introduction to the game for new players, but are especially funny for people like me who have been playing Team Fortress in one form or another since 1996 or so.

For those of you not up to speed on Team Fortress or what it is, its class based team play FPS gaming, its been around in one form or another since the original Quake and what Valve has done with the intellectual property in Team Fortress 2 is a beautiful thing to see, taking what started out as a mod for another game to a level so far beyond almost any other gaming title.

Team Fortress 2 combines fast paced and fun gameplay with the strategy and tactics of class based team play and then rolls it up in a humorous and satirical graphic novel style that is hilarious. Overall the release of Team Fortress 2 and Portal by Valve Software should be the measuring stick for game design from this point forward and for an old hand at this style of gaming, to see TF2 come into its own in such a grandiose style has been a sexy thing indeed.

And yeah…I still play occasionally when Second Life cuts me a little spare time.

If you haven’t heard as yet, the Spore Creature Editor demo has hit the internet torrent scene a couple days before the public release of it on the 17th.

I’ve seen a lot of screenshots and info on it, it looks extremely cool for what is, essentially, a demo. From what I understand its only got 25% of the editors content and only unlocks 100% of the content if you pre-order Spore.

Overall though I don’t look at that as a bad idea. Pre-ordering, that is, I probably would pre-order it if I had the money to do so. Spore is done by Will Wright of Sim City/The Sims fame so overall anything done by him is going to be a guaranteed 100% hit as far as I’m concerned. The full game doesn’t release til September though so I’m not so sure I’ll be willing to pre-order this far out. But the demo approach Maxis and EA is using to generate pre-release interest isn’t a bad way to go.

From what I understand you get a really good look at the content though even from the demo so its worth picking up, one way or another.

The next big thing though really, is Bethesda Software’s upcoming Fallout 3, given Bethsoft’s absolutely obsessive focus on graphic design, its almost a guarantee that you’re going to need a super computer but that aside, its going to be an eye candy feast provided they don’t fuck it up with the same stupid AI and lame attempts at sexual humor that sort of made Oblivion fall short of its full promise.

Fallout has one of the best known and loved concepts in PC Gaming, and Beth Soft is a great dev house to take a stab at it. So October of 2008 looks like its going to be a seriously busy month for me between working in Second Life on CoLA related stuff and spending a shit load of my spare time completely immersed in Fallout 3.

World of Warcraft is expected to release the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack somewhere towards the end of the year as well potentially November or early December. Which for me isn’t a really big deal because I don’t play WoW, but given Age of Conan and its relative failure to release well(my opinion), the Blizzard folks are pretty much guaranteed to once again be the big dogs in the MMO industry this year, with the new expansion recalling in most of their errant subscribers and potentially even creating new ones.

Pure speculation on my part, but given GTA IV’s major successful release under the console platform, I think it would be a bit silly of Rockstar to ignore the potential PC market port of the title for this holiday season, but I guess we’ll have to see on that, there may be some licensing issues in regards to a PC port of the title which may hold it up til summer of next year potentially.

So overall the summer of 2008 can’t end quickly enough, in my opinion, since theres no big releases planned for the gaming scene til September at the very least.

Seems to be the cool thing these days, having your own personal web presence and what not. And anyways who uses MySpace other than chinese spammers these days?

Anyways seems to be the “in” thing for the designers of Second Life to do, to give themselves some kind of personal space to talk about what they’re doing or what they do and who they are.

So who am I to argue with the flow of the zeitgeist?

Anyways just getting this all hammered together. I’ll add more as I get the system working more like I want it to.