Removed a bunch of plu­g­ins that I wasn’t using on the site, should hope­fully speed things up a bit.  We’re going to be migrat­ing our sites from our cur­rent co-loc host to a new one in the next week or so as well, so that should (if all goes accord­ing to plan) make a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment on the over­all per­for­mance of things.

More about that later…

So, we’ve been heads down in crunch mode on the ‘other’ game for a while now — there’s a light at the end of the tun­nel at least, but in the mean­time, I’ve been chug­ging away on CSO, mainly on the design and archi­tec­ture of the game.  Some of the high-level details that were still a bit fuzzy have become alot clearer now, par­tic­u­larly with how I want to see the over­ar­ch­ing ‘macro’ game to play out, and how it will affect the indi­vid­ual tac­ti­cal bat­tles themselves.

Cou­ple of games that have been inspi­ra­tion with this regards:

• Act of War : Direct Action
• Joint Task Force
• Empire Earth 3
• Com­pany of Heroes
• End War

Act of War has been very use­ful, par­tic­u­larly in the way that the player receives upgrades and enhance­ments to their bases and the main flow of things.  It def­i­nitely has a few major issues — par­tic­u­larly in the fact that it doesn’t have any kind of easy way to find all of your units, so you end up spend­ing way too long just scrolling across the map look­ing for where that stu­pid unit wan­dered off to.

Com­pany of Heroes has a unique sys­tem for this (the slide-out panel), but this also becomes cum­ber­some when you have large num­bers of units later in a par­tic­u­lar mis­sion.  I think that I’ve come up with a good approach to han­dle this, and should have some sam­ple screens / footage to demon­strate in the near future.

Full List at http://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html

Some of my favorites:

6. Syn­chro­nized pan­ick­ing is not a proper bat­tle plan.
13. Must not mur­der canon NPCs in their sleep, no mat­ter how cliche they are.
17. Col­lat­eral Dam­age Man is not an appro­pri­ate name for a super hero.
21. No longer allowed to recre­ate the Death Star Trench Run out of genre.
27. I am not to shoot every corpse in the head to make sure they aren’t a zom­bie in Twi­light 2000.

ah, good old Twilight:2000…sigh

57. In the mid­dle of a black op I can­not ask a guard to val­i­date park­ing.
129. Not allowed to name my ship The Antidis­es­tab­lish­men­tar­i­an­ism.
266. At the end of a black-ops, I can­not crank call C-SWAT on the target’s phone.
303. I can­not grad­u­ally describe my char­ac­ter more and more until it’s obvi­ous I’m describ­ing Burt Reynolds.
383. It is not ok to use 10,000 rounds to kill two sen­tries.
406. The first rule of Finnegan school is not “Do not talk about Finnegan school“
407. I will not blow all my start­ing funds on hook­ers and booze.
484. If the word ‘Mul­let’ appears any­where on my samurai’s char­ac­ter sheet, he’s vetoed.

And pos­si­bly the best of all:

25. The green elf does not need food badly.