Due to outside influences I am unable to spend much, if at all any time here for an extended period; most likely minimally a month, extending until about June. Do no worry, anything that could go wrong already has, so things can only improve for myself and my wife from this point forth.

My general contributions that I have plans for working on/am working on/are finished are thusly, put on hold. Here is a brief list of the projects I have currently and their status of completion:

Character Build Guides - 80% done [all but mindslayer, doomed, temporal warden, corrupters, summoners and reavers are 100% done, while these are at about 65% each]

The Order - This is my module using t-engine 4 and is currently not open to outside play, and unfortunately moving extremely slowly mostly due to my own incompetence. Weather this game will ever be released in even an alpha stage, remains to be seen.

Item Sets - I am the creator of Star and Moon, and the ideas of creating a 'pair' or 'set' out of them [with help from edge, Het, yufra, Zonk and ofcourse, DarkGod], and I have many other set ideas and plans in the works - however as these are generally more complex than Star/Moon or with unique/exotic abilities, they require much more code and much more testing [those of you that paid attention/were in the know may have noticed that the Star/Moon pairing went through more than 5 ... stages before they were finally deemed functioning].

Champion of the Arena Guide - I, being a very avid fan and beta tester for the Arena [thanks Het], have began writing a guide or short series of guides to the Arena mode itself, especially as it is so drastically different from the main campaign. This is one of my more recent projects however it is progressing very quickly. Depending on my available time, this might get published before my departure, however, do not expect as such.

Racial Talent Trees - This was something that was generally brought up and was kind of asked/forced upon me by several people and I attempted to deliver a general and sweeping lore filled tree for each race. With the lack of feedback from players and developers I feel that this may have been a wasted effort however I will, eventually, attempt to code the trees out completely and implement them myself.

Redesigning the weapons - Yesterday I took on the task to differentiate the various weapons in t4 as many are extremely similar to each other. In place, I have attempted to add in a sense of being and flavor to the core of the weapons themselves, adding in values to make each weapon be unique enough that picking the one with the highest damage value isn't always the 'best' choice, while not making the weapons too closed to be useful in very few situations.

- = The character build guides was one of my original projects that had some favor to the community, and had help grant me a title similar to " Keeper of the Tomes of TOME " ; and have unfortunately not been posted outside of 2 of them. The reasoning behind this is mostly due to the fact of how quickly the guides were getting obsolete - it would take me about a week to fully write a really good, in depth guide [more so than the 2 already posted, these guides have/had everything I could possibly think of] - however by the time I had it written and formatted to be posted - some change was announced or some such that pretty much made the guide not accurate anymore to the point that a rewrite would have been the best option. I will not abandon this project, but don't expect them until a full release or a damn near full release is out there. - =

- = Item Sets currently planned are a massive armor set using Head, Body, Hand, Feet that grant various powers based on which parts of the kit you have equipped, and is by far the most complicated thing I have attempted to code, in fact, the Body part can be found as Coltuur in the artifact/egos thread. I also have a Cloak & Dagger set planned, Greatmaul, Hand, Cloak set, Ring, Ring Amulet set, and a Sling & Shield set all planned and some partially coded - however these are taking a backseat while I am gone. - =

- = Champions of the Arena: A Guide for Tactical Play - is the Arena mode focused guide that I began to write about a month ago. As the mode is so drastically different than the main campaign in t4, while presenting a different array and kinds of challenges, along with forcing a different play style and generally different character growths, I thought a guide for the arena might be in order. Be a generalist guide, it is mostly a FAQ and Tips & Tricks style work with common play tips such as fighting as few at a time as you can and killing off the higher valued targets first [and telling you which those are at the various waves]. - =

- = Racial Talent Trees was one of the major changes/improvements I was looking forward to with contributing to the game, however with my general lack of understanding how t4 does math, and the lack of feedback on the trees themselves [other than screaming that 1 tree in particular people think is overpowered or stupidly underpowered {Cornac}] I was greatly disheartened at the lack of further development that was brought to them. I still really think that having racial trees will, in the end, benefit t4 in many ways, however as people seem generally content without them currently, this is clearly a dead project - =

- = Redesigning the weapons is, at this time, complete outside of making certain weapon only egos; and as such, will be sent to DG soon. Depending on the feedback of these changes, I will continue on and definitely finish this project before my absence. - =

Thanks to all the good people here and the friends I have made while I have been here - I will be back, but I will miss you guys, the community, while I am away.

FM

Hi,

I just added a new feature to te4.org which uses the existing database of characters to offer statistic graphs of those characters split by levels.

I.e: you can check how many Archmages reach level 10 or compare the death curve of Cursed and Berserkers or .../
Well you get the point!

Check it out: http://te4.org/realtime-statistics-levels

Well it's been a long long time coming and I've learned a lot getting here so I'm very happy to say that the Paradox Mage talent trees are completed.

Now that's not to say that the class is done. Because of the number of new talents and the nature of the resource I need to get some playtime in with them to test the numbers, make sure that the class is balanced, and most of all to ensure that they're fun to play.

So... mostly finished? That's pretty safe to say. I still need to run through all the talent descriptions, particles, and sound effects. Give it all a once over to make sure I didn't leave anything out. Plus we still need an unlock. But the class is playable and I hope will add a lot to the game once it's all polished up and released.

I'd like to share some of my favorite talents with you though as a teaser of sorts.

Paradox Clone - You summon your future self to fight alongside you for a few turns. (Note that this is a full player clone complete with tactical AI. Probably one of the toughest summons in the game. It also has a really cool side effect but I don't want to get to spoiley.)

See the Threads - Darkgod did all the coding on this one and came up with the idea. Sweet spell that lets you exist in three different timelines for the next few turns and then pick the outcome you like the best.

Precognition - My idea, DGs code. This spell is the reason I've decided to remove the vision and detect type effects from the chronomancy tree. This is your vision, this is your detect. You cast this and get to act for a few turns, see what's in a vault, fight a monster you've never encountered to gauge it's abilities, or whatever you want to do in that time (even learn a talent to test it out before really having to learn it). When the buff wears off the game reloads you back to where you cast it as though nothing happened. But you, the player, gets to keep all the knowledge you've acquired.

Lots of other neat stuff too but those are my favorite three.

They'll be here very, very shortly. They don't play like any other class in ToME, so I decided to highlight some of their oddities and point players in the right direction. Some things to note:

1) Talent info texts refer to 'energy' while the resource bar on the left side of the screen says 'psi.' It's all the same stuff.

2) You're never going to have much energy. It goes up by one per character level and one per point of willpower.

3) Energy doesn't regenerate naturally. You have to absorb it through damage shields or various other means.

4) Mindslayers are all about sustains, though it's not as simple as just turning them all on. You'll never have enough energy to do that.

5) Many key abilities are triggered by turning sustains *off*.

6) Telekinetically wielding a weapon requires a special talent that mindslayers start the game knowing. Use that instead of the 'w' command. Use 'w' for wielding weapons in your actual flesh and blood hands.

7) Mindslayers are perfectly happy wielding two-handers, one-handers with shields, bows, or slings in their flesh and blood hands. Don't feel confined to a single weapon type. However, you can only telekinetically wield a single melee weapon, so it's usually best to make that one a two-hander.

8) ToME still gets a little confused when you try to equip a shield while telekinetically wielding something. For now, just remove the telekinetically-wielded weapon, equip the shield, then re-equip the weapon. Sorry!

9) The entire Focus tree is designed around telekinetically wielding gemstones instead of melee weapons. Try it out if you want to play a mindslayer like a caster.

10) Mindslayer abilities scale powerfully with stats and talent points. If some talent doesn't look worth investing in, check again later.

11) The Conduit talent interacts in a complicated fashion with the various aura talents. If you're wondering why an aura isn't cooling down, it's because you've got it tied up in Conduit.

12) The shield and aura talents are exceptional tools for absorbing and dealing damage spikes. And, of course, managing damage spikes is how one wins.

This was Sirracco's idea but I figuring out to actually do the effect ended up taking a lot longer then anticipated. The idea was to pull power from other time lines. As much as I love Sirracco's initial idea of casting a spell, cloning the player and the bolt to reload the level, then doing it all over again, it sounded like a lot to implement. So I ended up going with a next spell cast inflicts X more damage route (I know, a bit boring but hey).

So at first I tried to use something like Martyr except having the spell hit the target again rather then hitting yourself. I ran into an infinite loop here and after a failed attempt to fix it decided to scrap that idea.

Second idea was to have this be a stacking buff that broke on cast. So the first turn you get a big bonus to damage and if you don't use it right away you can stack more damage on top of it, though in much smaller percentages. After five turns of this you'd lose the gathered damage if you hadn't used it. Casting a spell at any time would also end the effect.

So I created a time out effect and the activate/deactivate for my new timed effect and I started testing. The power on the tooltip updated as I wanted it to but the power on the character sheet never went up. At which point I realized that activate happens once (on activate) and whatever number it pulls at that time is the number it will have.

Next I tried putting the damage buff in the time out effect itself (time out effects happen everytime the timer ticks down) which led to the character ending up with +1000% damage. It was putting the value on everytime as I wanted but wasn't clearing the old values out.

After wracking my brain for awhile I remembered that on merge effects work for damage so they could probably work for this (I'd used them for stuff like damage over time effects but never anything else). I looked over a few on merge effects, specifically bloodlust and the berserker strength one (bloodrage?) then went to work modifying bloodrage for my stacking damage effect.

Here's how everything came together and the guts of what a self stacking timed effect needs.

Activate - This is your base value you want to happen the first turn.
Deactivate - To remove the effect completely at the end.
Time Out - This is your trigger for reapplying the timed effect (we're applying the exact same timed effect so our merge code can merge them.) Put whatever value you want to add or remove as the power.
On Merge - Here you need to remove the old timed effect and make sure your new timed effect gets the correct duration and updated power before it gets applied.

The rest of the talent was pretty easy once I got that out of the way so I won't go into it. I'm sure anyone that needs to deactivate a talent when another talent is used can search for stealth or lightning speed and figure it out ;)

I'm pretty happy with the end result and may update my speed control tree now that I know how to do this. A slow that starts off big but loses power every turn could be fun as would a speed effect that gave you a big boost but lost power each turn.

After a few false starts, like trying to compile with the MinGW/SDL1.3 setup which I already had installed, I got a clean compile and successful create of a new character with the sources from svn.

I started fresh with a clean MinGW install and followed the instructions in the wiki.
What a concept!

How to get source from svn.
How to build dev environment and compile sources.

Mindslayers are the first subclass of the Psionic class. They don't control minds or read thoughts or cloud vision or sow confusion. They don't sense danger or see the future or will changes to reality. In fact, they can barely even manage to apply any forces outside of their immediate reach.

Hey! What kind of psionic is this, anyway?

They're the kind that uses their thoughts to pick up a twenty pound greatmaul without even touching it. And then, without moving a muscle, they use it to murder anybody who looks at them funny.

But what if they want to murder somebody else at the same time, you ask? Well, that's why they have hands! With a little assistance from judiciously applied mental forces, mindslayers can quite easily heft whatever weapons they want and do their blood-letting the old fashioned way, too.

That's stuff you get for free. It's not even in a talent tree. So what else can they do? I'll talk more about it later, but here are some highlights:

-Set people on fire with their brains
-Electrocute people with their brains
-Reshape weapons and armor
-Run and jump like a Yoda-trained olympian
-Erect mental shields to absorb damage and energy
-Project energy through melee-range auras
-Leech energy from surroundings and foes
-Enhance all of the above using gemstones as psionic foci

Hopefully we'll see them in beta 19!

For those that haven't been following the development thread I've decided to ditch the Infinite Traveler for now and roll the dual-wielding into an archer/dual-wield rangerish class.

The old Temporal Warden idea (more of a traditional Arcane Blade) is still on the back burner too but the name Temporal Warden will belong to this ranged/dual-wield hybrid.

To facilitate this I coded a new tree, Temporal Archery that has some neat archery effects and a +movement speed talent called celerity that lets you swap weapons without spending a turn. Also revamped the Temporal Combat tree a bit to supply some Strength and Magic through talent points so that they won't be so stat hungry(two separate talents that give a percent of Will to these two stats while sustained).

Been playing around with this class to test balance and what not and most of all... to make sure it's fun and interesting to play.

I also got some anomalies coded though they're not yet implemented (going to need DGs help with that part). Maybe the Temporal Warden will be ready for b19, we'll have to see :)

Worked on cleaning some stuff up today so that the chronomancy talents will use the talent format that all the spells are moving too. Also moved Damage Smearing into the Temporal Combat tree and replaced it with Swap in the Weaving tree (swap will let you switch places with another actor).

Wrote the Infinite Traveler description up and have it's talent trees pretty much set.

Coded Borrowed Time, originally I wanted this to give you two actions then stun you after those two actions are finished but handing out energy or lots of global speed broke the timed effects. So instead Borrowed Time will greatly increase your global speed (1000%) for a few turns then stun you for a few turns.

I still need to do Temporal Double (a beefier shadow simulacrum) and Temporal Wake (a beam that inflicts random status effects) for the Threading tree and Time Skip (removes an actor from the game for a few turns) for the Time Travel tree. I'm not sure yet on how I'll do Time Skip (the turns need to be counted somehow so the timed effect will have to be on an entity other then the target).

That'll leave Premonition, See the Threads, and Revision. Then the class will be finished enough to playtest (anomalies aside).

The boys slept at the same time today so I had a chance to finish up another talent tree.

Speed Control
Entropic Shield - Slows Projectiles and provides some physical resist.
Slow - Small radius ball that reduces targets global speed.
Haste - Increases the casters global speed for a short time.
Stop - Stuns targets near the caster in a radius of three (four at higher talent levels).

I've also been thinking more about Premonition and Deja Vu. Premonition I think would be cool if it created a savefile, let you goof around for a few turns, and then reloaded the savefile (regardless of what happens) or just reloads the savefile when you die. In other words, you get to see what's in the vault or gauge the abilities of a boss you've never seen before. Deja Vu I think should daze for a turn so you have to really pay attention to sense creatures :)

Not sure what I'll work on next. For anyone that's curious here's the development thread on the forums...

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=22592&start=15