State of Topaz: July 4th, 2012

[ImmunityBow]

Welcome to today's State of Topaz and happy Independence Day to the Americans among us. Enjoy your spectacle of firework wizardry the way I did for Canada Day on Parliament Hill three days ago
So, this State of Topaz has been like a month in the making, I'm sorry about that. On the bright side, when I originally mentioned to Cyndadile that I was going to write one of these last month, he asked "Is there even enough content to write about"? I was confident that yes, there was. But now there's even more! Some really cool things have been happening recently and I'd love to share them with you so you can hop onto the ship and know where you can help out. First, however, I have a very important announcement to make. (Followed by two more).

The results of our mod applications are in (well they were in a while ago. My fault.) and I'm happy to announce that longtime Topaz stalwart Cyndadile has been given the position of Global Mod and assistant project leader. Please give him some words of encouragement, and thank him especially since he's been doing recently even without having been yet given the powers. As an additional announcement, NyteFyre will be taking on the role of Topaz Text RPG administrator and will manage all aspects of the TRPG. I hope he will be able to do far better than I ever could with my extremely limited TRPG experience and help build our community through the TRPG. If you wish to help in the development of the TRPG, send him a PM, and we'll work out something probably involving a TRPG staff forum to really get this rolling.

The second announcement is both good and bad news. The bad news is that Triumph has gone MIA and once again we're left without a dedicated programmer. However, the piece of extremely good news is that this isn't the roadblock it was before. Black Temple Gaurdian, in particular, has done some excellent work examining the moves codes and has started steadily using the work of past programmers to build, at least partially, the code that will get our moves into the game. I think the time has come for us to make the decision that we can't rely on catching a windfall programmer to come and rescue us by doing all the stuff we feel we don't know how to do. There's a great wiki which helps us realize all the light scripting work that we can do right now. Since the work will be done in house, we don't have to spend months courting a programmer for them to go MIA and for none of the work to be on hand to do something with. We now will have the files for what is worked on in Topaz. That's not to say that we won't need programmers! I'd still love for some with Ruby experience to come in and help out on the hard stuff. It's just that we won't need to depend on them specifically and instead we can try to steadily build our game together. A lot of this SoT will be telling you how you can help out with this, so please come and do! A lot of us are inexperienced but progress is being made and it can only get better with more people helping out.

Finally, Topaz has decided to open a joint Pokemon Online server with Pokemon Turquoise and Ever Grande City, which can be found at IP address 74.140.201.198:508. The server name is Jirachi's Lunar Comet, and it'd be awesome to see some of you on there so I don't have to wade into a sea of strangers the next time I appear. So come on in and we can figure out that daunting new 5th gen meta together! Thanks to Saeyru, Skyler and Chronicler for opening up the server, they did it in token of goodwill so let's visit the server often and play a little!

So, onto news!

In tune with our ideas of doing as much programming as we possibly can as a community, we have Trainer Lineups. This went off to a blazing start, which is awesome considering that TehLurker and I ended up doing all the work last time with basically no one interested in helping. There are two (technically 3) parts to this part of the project. First is figuring out how many trainers are on each route, who they are and what Pokemon they have. Second is writing them into the format of trainers.txt so the game can read them, and this involves creating new trainer types for Topaz's new trainer types. Both sides need work, so come on in and help out!

[content removed for code issues, please see last post in forum thread]