0.4.2 Should Be Out Tomorrow! (Patreon)

I wanted to announce that I should be done with Picture Pack 0.4 tomorrow, which means I can release 0.4.2 then, too! My poor computer has been rendering all week, but it's almost done. Just to be clear, 0.4.2 won't have any new content, it's just a bugfix/tidying update.

In addition to postworking images and fixing bugs, I've also been planning out 0.5. I expect I'll finish the planning this coming week, then I can move on to development and content creation.

There are two sorta complicated projects that I don't think I'll be able to avoid much longer - namely, developing a look for male humans/elves and developing a threat plugin. 

I haven't finalized the H-scenes that are going to be in 0.5, but the cast of characters involved in them is going to expand pretty rapidly beyond Alex and Ana very soon. Having a consistent visual style in the H-scenes is very important to me. I have a little bit of work to do on the orcs, but I think they're mostly fine. I have a lot of work to do on male humans/elves - I've sorta planned out what I think will work using lessons learned from developing the female look, but it's going to involve a lot of trial and error. Then, of course, I'll need to develop looks for taurine and goblins, but that can wait a bit :)

The threat plugin is intended to make combat more WoW-like by allowing me to meaningfully use the standard tank/healer/dps model. For those of you who don't know what "threat" is in this context, I'll briefly explain: there are a lot of variations, but basically combat in MMOs is built around the so-called "holy trinity" of tanks, healers, and dps. DPS (short for damage per second) is supposed to do the bulk of the damage to monsters, healers are supposed to keep everyone alive, and tanks are made to keep the monster's attention and take most of the damage. Threat is the mechanic that allows this whole model to work.

How do the monsters know what to attack? Why don't they attack whatever's hurting them the most? Well, that's where threat comes in. Monsters attack whatever character has the most threat, and if you're playing correctly, that will be the tank. In practice, threat usually works out to:

threat = (total damage to that monster) x (some number)

That number at the end will usually be larger than one for a tank, and possibly smaller than one for a DPS. There are all sorts of nuances, but this is the basic idea. Note that it is still possible for the monster to attack a DPS if they're doing too much damage too fast! (This happens a lot in bad raid groups.) Usually you don't want this; sometimes you do!

I suspect this plugin will be a lot of work, particularly since I haven't written any plugins before.

I'm determined to get 0.5 out in the last half of March, so I may end up putting the threat plugin off until 0.6. I already plan to have a lot of stuff in 0.5 content-wise, and I don't think I can avoid developing the male look anymore - that sounds like enough work for a single release to me.

By the way, in a previous post I'd said I was using Scrivener to organize information about the project. I'm beginning to think this isn't enough, particularly as it continues to grow, and I'm considering a (private) wiki. Does anyone have any software recommendations? A bit about my preferences/requirements:

• I mostly work on a Mac
• I need complete offline access on my main computer
• I need it to be completely private (i.e., I don't want the public to be able to view it)
• The ability to sync to/view on mobile devices is nice, but not required
• I'd prefer that it not be very complicated to either set up or use regularly

If you have any suggestions please let me know! I was kinda looking at VoodooPad, but I don't think it's powerful enough for what I want. I'm starting to look at DokuWiki and TiddlyWiki, but I'm curious if there are any other good ones or if anyone has any relevant experience.

Thank you for your support!