I don't have any substantial progress to update here - vacation here has been truly a vacation and most of the time I had planned to spend modding has been spent playing snooker with my friends. I am working on the talent scripts as and when I can and while coding them, I realized how some of them can appear so simple in conceptualization but extremely hard to code. One example is the new Phantom Strike ability where the dreamweaver can disappear from the waking world and materialize behind the target to deal a devastating blow to the surprised target. Getting the location and setting the facing, etc is not a problem - but determining whether the nearest safe location is actually near the target is another problem altogether.

Anyway, the short update is that I am working on the talents as and when I can - the last few days of my vacation are drawing near and the evenings are going to be definitely longer than usual. Let's see what can be done. 

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I suppose I should have made a quick post here on my blog about my vacation. Well, I am in India right now and the past 2 weeks have been hectic, tending to familial and visa matters. I finally got a chance to go online and was browsing the wikia site for some information on spells when I saw the DA2 announcement in the news feed. Boy, was I shocked! When nothing about DA2 was announced during E3, I was actually very happy - hoping that Bioware would fix some of the outstanding issues with the current toolset and give the modding community some much-needed support.

I have no doubt DA2 will be an outstanding game in its own right but I am shocked at the announcement of a sequel so soon after a big expansion (Awakening). I am worried about the future of the current modding community. Some of the most promising mods in development look set to be released around the end of this year or early next year. Given that, where will the DA audience be? I just hope DA2 is in the vein of what Shadows of Undrentide was to NWN.

Enough of that...
The past two days, I have got back to modding with a vengeance and it is not just the announcement of DA2 that makes me want to finish the module on time. Now that I'm doing a lot of 2DA and scripting work, I am running into small, niggling issues that are taking up too much dev time to fix. Especially, the coding for the new abilities. I want to finish coding all the new abilities (currently estimated to be around 40-45) by the end of this month and tie together all the required 2DAs for the new classes, abilities, etc - when I don't have the power of my desktop to tempt me into doing level or area work. That  is the only target I currently have set - coming back after a 3 year break has meant a lot of visiting and catching up to do and I don't expect to have the amount of free time I thought I will have.

Till the next post (which will hopefully be in a week's time)...

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