March! March on!

Hello again!

March is already upon us (doesn't it seem like February always goes by faster than the other months??), and things are rolling along smoothly for Xsera. The crew's just chugging along with the mundane tasks of creating one feature and fixing another. One notable exception would be Alistair's creation of text colour, which is great because Ares greatly utilized texts of different colors, and the white was starting to become a strain on the eyes.

My big project as of late has been working on Xsera to work in different resolutions and aspect ratios. Once I'm finished with this, Xsera will look clean and nice on all sorts of displays - even boasting support for "full HD" (1080p) monitors. Currently the only working resolution is 1024x768, but this will soon change, hopefully.

In other news, I've been starting to play StarCraft for fun more. I'm a big StarCraft fan (although I'm not that great at the game) and I can't wait for StarCraft 2 to come out. Even though I'm pretty rusty / bad right now, I think I may actually be improving ;) I usually play with fellow Ambrosians, who generally gather on #starcraft on irc.ambrosiasw.com - feel free to come if you'd like to play with us, we could always use more people. In addition to playing more StarCraft, I've been watching commentary on professional StarCraft games in the hopes that it will make me better (yeah, right). A really good commentator / player I've been watching is Day[9], who posts livestreams daily here. Even if I don't get better as a player, I'm surely getting better at understanding the game, at least.

Another cool thing that's going on in Xsera: Geek (from the Ambrosia forums) has been working on creating the missing sound effects for Xsera. The reason that we don't have some of the original Ares sound effects is because Nathan Lamont did not have the proper ownership of some of the effects to be able to release the sounds with the rest of the game, so we have to compensate by making some original sounds for Xsera. Geek is doing some great work, and sounds are already being added to Xsera for use in the game. It's nice to see the pieces of the puzzle fitting together in so many places, and it will be very nice to have these sound effects in place when the 3rd demo is finished.

That's all for now!