Hello friends, old and new. It's been a while since I've been able to sit down and take a breath but I promised myself I would take the time to catch up on what I've been up to and some of the things that have to be done on the technical end over the coming month.
To start, I wanted to say that Layonara is with my heart every day. The friends I made and the moments I shared in its fantasy setting will be cherished moments I'll hold through my whole life with no regret. The past year I've been at a distance, occasionally trying to force my way back into the magic that I know makes me feel like only roleplaying can make me feel. It's been there for short whiles but real world priorities get in the way and days away become weeks and then months. I'm not going to try to explain nor am I sure I even know why, it just happens.
Life's been pretty good. I've become a bit of a sports nut, I even bought season tickets to the Blue Jays for this summer. Nothing new on the love side of things, though a kiss stolen here and there. Work has had me with a lot less time than I was afforded a few years ago but I remain physically and mentally very healthy.
As with playing, my desire for working on the MMO has had to be forced and again other worldly concerns leave me getting side tracked then ultimately not having the fortitude to jump back into the development. I am making progress in a core area though and when I can catch a breath and bare down for the final touches I'll be eager to move on to the areas that others have continued to bear down upon.
Over the coming month there's going to be a few headaches from the technical end. One of our servers is old and has to be updated, this means I have to make a decision to either stay with our existing server setups or consider moving all of our servers to a cloud based setup. I've not made that decision yet and it's a pretty complicated one as Dorganath would be able to attest to as we discussed it on IRC. Once I make that decision I will get a better idea of downtime for all our servers, web, irc, nwn etc.
I touched on the core area I'm working on with the MMO and that's focused on the web end of things. Using the versatility and module rich Drupal CMS I'm developing both a front end to a new updated community site and a back end to the MMO database structure. This could mean some heavy work needed on LORE and perhaps *cringe* if I'm really feeling adventurous, I would transfer the entire forum to drupal's forum. Alternatively there are modules that allow both vBulletin and Drupal work side by side. I wonder, do any of you have Drupal experience?
So I guess that's kind of it for my update. I'll be informing you via the Important World Announcements forum about server downtimes as soon as I can possibly know and with as advanced notice as possible. I apologize in advance if this gets in the way of some scheduled quests.
My best,
James
