Long time no post. Let me bring you up to speed:

Personal life: Not bad. Up to 16+ miles per week at a 9:30 pace. Weight coming down, energy level coming up. Just bought a pair of Texans season tickets. Only six and a half months of alimony left to pay.

Luv life: Nothing happening at the moment. Had a few dates in March...one girl lived too far away (an hour). Another had no time in her life for sleeping let alone relationships. I'm currently in my 'tween dates "lose 5 pounds and try again" mode.

At the office: I'm still employed, though it remains to be seen how long that will last. Between my boss wanting to hire his friend and the head office in the UK wanting to convert all custom applications over to SAP, my job may be gone by year's end. Ramping up on ASP .Net at home and at the office. Updating my resume just in case. I really don't want to switch at this time -- I have almost 3 years with my current employer, and I hate looking. The work is fairly interesting, too. I will go ahead and put in a resume at NASA, just because. I may have to ramp up on UML and design patterns to do so, but it's NASA! Short of doing game dev full time (for real money), that's what I really want to be doing.

Game Software Dev Status

Monthly total for April 2004 is 28 hours 17 minutes. Yearly total is 103 hours 32 minutes.

I am on vacation this week. I am putting in 6-7 hours a day on the game. My goal for this week is to have the low-level AI making reasonable moves. I am currently using a test scenario based on the Opening Moves that pits French IV/2 against the Russian 8th division. My goals for this week are:

• write a pathing algorithm that makes moves in accordance with the rules
  
• implement formation SOPs using the pathing algorithm
  
• add attack code that integrates maneuver with fire, assault, and charges
  
• tune the low-level AI using the test scenario
  
• add cavalry to the mix at the divisional level and retune the low-level AI
  
• add code to the high level AI to properly employ independent cavalry divisions
  

At this point things look iffy for having any kind of Beta before Origins. There's too much to do for me to have much confidence. Chris got snowed under at the office (big promotion), so I think I've actually been putting in a lot more time lately. I am personally aiming at having a Beta based on a Beta database containing only the Opening Moves scenario by June.