Just by the way..  my MMORPG Tycoon 2 issue tracker now has only five items remaining for the MS3 build.  And I have five days to accomplish them;  I’m feeling pretty good about the chances of having something real to show for that milestone build.

For MS3, I’m trying to meet the goals I originally set for the MS1 build (nearly three years ago, distressingly) — have the player build an MMORPG starting area, and get simulated subscribers to play and out-level it.  There’s some extra stuff in MS3, too, such as being able to choose your starting region, more thoughtfully-designed terrain editing, a distinction between AI GMs and AI developers, etc.  And this:

Amongst the things I accomplished today, I very nearly finished revamping AI pathfinding to avoid impassable terrain.  There’s probably still about an hour more of work in that, but I’m going to leave that for tomorrow.  AI players are now avoiding walking over mountains and canyons.  They’re just being a little stilted about it;  I need to smooth out the paths they take, again.  This could never have been done in the MS1 codebase;  it’s only been my recent revamp of the terrain engine which has even let me begin to consider giving this sort of smarts to the simulated players.

Finally, it’s worth noting that MS3 will not support saved games.  There’s just no time to give that the sort of testing which it needs before release.  Save support is on my list for milestone build 4, though.  Whenever that happens.