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It's official. As of yesterday evening Omega Sentinel has tendered his resignation as programmer of HMW. It is a very sad time as he did more for this game in the 9 months as programmer as anyone has done in the past 5 years of its existence.
OS left for two reasons. The first was real life work has him working 60-80 hours a week and add on HMW coding, he found it difficult to spend time with his wife and friends. The other reason was that he wasn't used to the community here, and the drama that can be generated on here from time to time killed the fun that he saw in this game. We are sad to see you leave OS, but you're always welcome to come back.
But like everything, life goes on. HMW isn't in a state where it can be left to be self-sufficient, so I've volunteered to pick up the code and Ryan has agreed to do so. So as of tonight, I'll be the new HMW programmer.
First off, my qualifications: I have a Bachelor of Computer Science and am familiar with several computer languages: Pascal, Java, C, UNIX Shell, C++ and VisualBasic.NET. At this point, I'm just beginning to learn PHP, but it seems that it's very similar to Java so I should pick that up all right. I'm not a programmer by trade, and have picked this up out of a) a desire to further contribute, b) a chance to learn and c) out of necessity. I don't want v2 to be a pipe dream; I want it to be a reality.
My life isn't as hectic as Glyph's or OS's. I work on a 4 day on/4 day off schedule, which means that every 8 days, I should have some progress made. After I finally get into the swing of things, I'll most likely start a blog on site somewhere so you guys aren't kept in the dark as to what's going on.
As for various things that I'm going to do:
--For the most part, I'll be keeping OS's vision of v2; a warmap with 4 factions fighting for dominance. There are some details that I'll change, but for the most part things will be as OS intended.
--First thing I want to do is give love to the maximals and predacons. This means setting them up with missions, altmodes and give new players the ability to choose those factions upon startup
--Get the HMW admin panel fully finished and functional, and then figure out how to outsource parts of it to other non-staff members (mission creation, mini games, front page advertising etc.)
--Minicons will return, as will Quintessons and maybe some other NPC missions.
--I didn't like the idea of robot modes boosting stats. I'll work on restoring them, but there will be no benefit to them at this time. They'll be purely eye candy.
--Subfactions: I'm not keen of turning HMW into a purely clan-based game, but I'm not going to marginalize those that exist either. I'm not sure yet what I want to do, but I'll think of something, after getting input from all subfactions of course. Naturally I'll make sure that your forums will actually work in phpbv3.
--I want to add features right: Triplechangers for example should allow a player to choose between two of ANY altmodes that they have available, not be set in stone as previously previewed. Yes this means that they may take some time to figure out but I would hope that the results will be worth it.
--Sure, I'll bring back Goribus, just as soon as I get access and figure out how.
--I like Glyph's idea of victory points, and will look into adding Lucky's and Glyph's Ranks/Awards. Of course this means I'll have to find someone willing to make some for the Maxs/Preds, but that'll come in time.
Since I'm just starting out, I will be ignoring most of the PMs that come in requesting side changes, extra xp, etc. If there's a real glitch with your team, I'll check it out. Please don't pester me on MSN/YIM/email about them either as the end result will be the same. The more of my time you waste tending to your personal wants, the less time I'll have working towards the betterment of the game as a whole.
The bottom line is this: I'm not leaving. I won't be as fast as OS so please don't expect change to come overnight. Rest assured that I want v2 here as much as every one of you so it will come.
