Splash Screens

Clan Lord is in desperate need of a new splash screen.  The current one is five years out of date.

I thought that it might be fun to do a short series of new splash screens that show old areas that are no longer used (like the Castle's Mirror Room), old areas that were developed but never used (Puddleby Sewers), and perhaps include some previews of areas in development.

Asides from needing to submit one new splash screen for each update, there is also the issue that players would need to download every new splash screen as they are updated.  They're not small – around 400k in size – and I am mindful that some players are using dial-up modems.

The simplest option is to update the copyright information on the current splash screen and stick with that, but if we were to do that then we would never see charming Glacier Town, built circa V212.



I would like an updated splash screen for V660.  This is update week, so content is due Friday.  That does not give me a lot of time.

Redaction Action

Today was spent undertaking a project that I had not planned on undertaking: I updated the image list for the Helpers.

Helpers get a "lite" version of the world editor, and it includes pretty much nothing.  It doesn't even include instructions!  Helpers may view the CL image file, but the images are unlabeled.  This is a problem in that if I were to ask a helper "please create a forest area, using only pine trees" then the helper would need to sort through images manually/visually and note which images are pine trees.  This is a massive waste of time and resources.

The full version of the editor includes tags for each image, but some of the information needs to remain private.  I spent the afternoon going through the list line by line – 4,741 lines to be precise – and redacted any information that could be considered as private or as a spoiler.

It was a good use of time, and it really needed to be done.  The last update to this list was 2005.