God bless us everyone!

Wanted to say "Merry Christmas" to everyone! Here in Genoa Illinois it is certainly a white Christmas. A gentle snow fell all day yesterday, and the weather folks are saying more on the way for today.

I drew the illustration above over 30 years ago! It is based on "A Christmas Carol" - I did it after seeing the movie "Scrooge" which is the musical version of the Dickens story. Time certainly does fly. I hope you all are safe, warm, and with the ones you love. Those are the only gifts anyone really needs.

Seasonal Screens

There is a line from one of my favorite holiday movies, "The Bishop's Wife", where a bind man says to Cary Grant "I have hopes". That is how I feel - I have hopes that some day this mod will actually be finished! In that spirit, and facing the reality that it probably will not be until this time next year (at the rate I'm going), that I decided to experiment with a new look for my screen shots. Make them a bit more festive and seasonal. It is, after all, called "Winter Promises. Hope you like the look.

Some folks have asked which one I am in the photo in the previous post. FYI - I am the bearded "old fart" on the right.

Road to the Heart (shameless plug)

Quite a few of you have expressed interest in my nusic, so I thought i would share the good news. My singer songwriting partner (David Van Delinder) and I have finally released our second CD - "Road to the Heart". It is available now on CDbaby. Should arrive at Itunes soon. We issued a pre-release signed version a few years back, but were never happy with it. This was the first album we recorded entirely in our basement studios, and between the time we started, and the time we "finished", much had changed. We had new equipment, new software, and of course, new knowledge. So we revisted the tracks, redoing vocals, in some cases redoing whole songs, and changed out one song for another. I think it was worth the time and effort. You can hear the sample tracks on CDbaby here. The full version of "Winter Promises" is on the CD.

There are also 2 "fantastic" (IMHO) Christmas songs, "A place where I belong", as well as "Midwestern Christmas". So give it a listen. If you like what you hear, whether you purchase or not, please leave a review - we would really appreciate it.

Have actually started working on the mod some - its taking a while to get back into the swing of things, but with the season's first real snow hitting today, its definately putting me in the mood. Hope everyone has a fantastic Holiday season!

Hiatus

Figured I should update since its been a while. Had a minor setback with a crash - however all is well and most of the work was recovered successfully. Have not has much time to work on the Mod. Hope to get back to it this winter. Being a social service provider in the State of Illinois means funding is short, and when payments from the state are late, things get tense rapidly. What little free time I have has been spent on the music side of things. Its great therapy, and in times like these it keeps me going.

Wanted to also share my new web site. It focuses mostly on the music, so if you liked "Winter Promises", and would like to hear more, give me a visit here. I have posted some finished songs, as well as a few "works in progress". David and I (David Van Delinder - mu partner in "crime") are just about to release our second cd, "Road to the heart". It should be on Cdbaby in a few weeks, and Itunes shortly thereafter. Hope you like what you hear!

Messing with Custom Load Screens

Managed to pull myself away from the olympics for a while. Ran into a mental block while wrestling with one of the plot twists, so I decided to tackle something I have been meaning to get to for a while - custom load screens. Came up with a few very basic designs and then dashed off into the toolset to set them up, and test. Many thanks to those of you who have "gone before". I would have never figured this out on my own! While there is still a lot of experimenting to do before I get just the feel I am after, it is always a gas to see things functioning "in game" as they are supposed to. Initially, I had the screens loading properly the first time, but then failing when I returned to an area. Turned out to be an error in the way I was saving them (24 bit vs 16 bit tga files). Once I sorted that out (16 is the way to go), all was smooth sailing. Have included 2 variant of the screens captured "in game".

Thought I would post an update just to let everyone know that Winter Promises is still alive and well! Everything slowed down considerably just before Thanksgiving when my desktop machine had a major crash. The good news was that I had just backed up to a zip drive, and didn't lose a thing (I would have lost everything without that back-up). That meant, however, that I was limited to my laptop for a while, and everything slowed down considerably. Then came the holidays with visits from the family, and also helping out with the beta testing of Trinity. And I must admit to being a "little" distracted with Dragon Age.

However - the work goes on. The Desktop machine has NWNII, MOYB, And SOZ reinstalled, and all is good to go. I have been working on updating the world map to integrate the newest content, as well as re-visiting conversations and quests with the same purpose. Only one screenie this time. Those of you who played Price of Honor will remember the good mayor Deeds (Christine's father). This shot is the interior of the Deeds household, where our hero is about to speak with the hired help.

Hope everyone had a great Holiday! And hey - if you aren't one of the more than 500 players who have already checked out Trinity by E.C. Patterson - give it a try. You will be glad that you did - it is fantastic!