State of Topaz: March 12th, 2009

It's been a while, hasn't it been? </swt>

We've been receiving some ups and downs on activity. I'm grateful for the new posters, user activity hit a high in February, 24 people registered on February 19th, and in general February was a relatively good month in terms of activity. Since the beginning of March, things have started to tone down, but hopefully we'll pick up now.<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>A fair amount has happened since the last State of Topaz, so I'm glad I won't just have to reiterate everything that the last one said.

Firstly, pHoRe came out with some epic Topaz userbars, absolutely incredible:

http://i41.tinypic.com/efkmdh.png http://i44.tinypic.com/ehkdac.png http://i43.tinypic.com/idheo1.png http://i42.tinypic.com/f37qk5.png

Be sure to put these around your signatures in forums you frequent, as long as it abides by those forum's rules (of course), and link back to the Topaz forums! Thanks pHoRe!

Pheonixsong has started helping me with the Caldera/Kirant Pokedex, and she's doing a wonderful job, making the process a good ten times faster than before, but we're still looking for one more person to help with this! We need one more dedicated person to help out with the coding of the Pokedex!

Thanks to Inevitable, we now have a bank map: http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2.../GifHost-4.gif I think it looks pretty awesome, for the demo maps-wise we just need Cranewing houses, Neo Bay houses, the Softwind/Cranewing gyms and possibly PokeCenters and PokeMarts! I think I'll be attempting PokeMarts soon so stay tuned!

Among the Topaz Contributors, we have also determined the names of the Elite Four, they are as follows: Steel E4 - Grayson Water E4 - Torrence (but subject to change due to gender balance issues) Dark E4 - Layla Light E4 - Tristan

This should help a bit in their sprite-making, hopefully, and please go here to suggest an alternate name for the Water E4, as Torrence only won by a very slim margin, over Torry which in the end isn't very different.

For revamps, they're still going extra slow. Meowth is finally done, and Tropius is almost, and the newest one is Trapinch -> Vibrava -> Flygon. This one's important for Osiro, so please get this one done quickly. Just a quick reminder for those who don't know yet, the ability Trained Mind has been renamed Cunning and given to Meowth/Persian.

On that note, Orange Islands needs two sets for Gerad, Christina and Osiro, in case someone decides to skip the whole Rocket/Orion plotline and move on with the league. So, if someone would like to do contribute in this way, please do it here.

I have started again doing Wild Encounter Rates, Dynamo Sanctuary and Route 232 have been done, though I would like a little more public input on them, similar news on Safari Discussion. We have some good ideas, but we need more input on them.

Pokedex Entries have stalled, but there are only 27 left to be done, 9 of which have topics! Lets get these done as soon as possible! Remember, the ones that have topics are mainly in need of votes, so there's no talent or anything required, just bring your opinion and vote!

Items still require sprites. We got a few since the last SoT, most notably Pika-Freaka's decent Zap Ball, but most of the recent ones are recolours, which are nice but usually don't match up to scratches. Thanks.

Which brings me to overall graphics, which have not moved since the last Topaz apart from what was mentioned above. Back sprites, icons? I can attempt to do some myself but it's a little odd how all our graphics workers have disappeared...

Also Random NPC Lines in before end.

And that's about it, I think! So I'm glad progress is still being made, and I hope people continue to post and start contributing!