Visited my dad this weekend. Kind of strange, thing have really changed between us in the years and it was neat to see some of our old relationship coming back. Well, the relationship we kind of had, but I didn't really see or understand until I sat down to write My Father's Bike. They also recently extended I-355, so I got lost since it was so easy to get to his house instead of wandering through the backroads. That should take a bit to get used to. But... it was really nice.

The Subaru got back from the dealer on Friday night. The Saturn went into the shop for minor stuff. This morning, the Subaru wouldn't start. :( And the toilet doesn't appear to be working either. Not really a good sign when I'm scraping the bottom of the bank account. Hoping to get paid this week, if we do, everything is fine. If we don't, then I'm going to be miserable and Fluffy won't be able to get a hotel in Iowa. She loves hotels and I hate not giving them to her.

Oh, I updated the theme for mfgames.com to reflect the winter season. If I did it right, it will automatically change the theme based on the time of year. So, December through Feburary it will be winter, then it will cut over to plain after that, but you can use page styles to change between the two if you want. I also updated the Exalted pages since I was talking about them over at White Wolf's forum.

Apparently, it is "Kitteh" not "Kittah". A sad day when I get my spelling corrected for a bastardized form of English. But, oh well. So, one of my projects is Kitteh Break, once I get through everything else. Getting slow progress on it, mainly because of the math, but I almost have the character builder done. Only one medium task and two large ones and I'll be able to mark this first step of Ponies Among Us as done.

You'll notice the character editor has a bunch of new features. The black "bones" are visible, just there for my debugging purposes. The hair is also color. It is the same file as before (white), but I wrote a stream editor that searches for colors and lets you change them on the fly. This is going to let me do things like have the character's hair color change over the game, based on their elemental powers and skills.

Rotation is fully in. You can rotate the main bit and everything spins around it. You can rotate each individual part and it keeps that rotation through the rotating of the parent parts. The general arrangement doesn't change as you move the bones, so I can do a kick now and it should look pretty good. The piece movement works correctly, so it is now a "done" on the posing bits.

And, to be silly, you can add, remove, and sort the individual graphical components of each part. So, in the above example, I moved the "head" part over the hair. Silly, but it will let me layer graphics on each part before rendering them to a texture or the screen. This is how I'm going to get changing armor working.

So, pretty good progress for a couple days of work (and one short story written). At the moment, I don't have much more on this step:

• Saving characters
• CRUD the color keys: The keys work to change the colors, you just can't change them in the program
• Poses and Motions: This program is also going to be used to generate the stock poses used by Ponies.
• Add parts: I want to add right and left parts to the system to let you add a sword or tool. That should also give me the final bits I need to pose these for Glorious Saber.
• Flip: Oh, this is a hard one, when a character flips over, they should also flip their hands and some graphics should change based on what side they are one.

Other than that, I think that is all that is left to the first major milestone of Ponies Among Us. Exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Character Builder (60%)
World Builder (2%)
Kitteh Break (0%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)