May 2002
I have returned
Well, I'm back. I didn't
do daily updates this month, but I'll try to start them in June.
Lately I've been busy with Azenera, of course, and I also got the game
Morrowind. At first I couldn't get Morrowind to work with my Radeon
video card because the drivers were old and the latest official ones wouldn't
install, but then I found some unofficial drivers that were up to date
and now the game works fine. I'm really enjoying the game and it
seems like there's a larger variety of things to do than in the previous
Elder Scrolls games. The world is smaller in size, but it's not randomly
generated so there's really a greater variety of quests and settings than
in the previous games. In Daggerfall, it seemed like all the dungeons
were huge labyrinths made out of different arrangements of all the same
parts, and the towns were the same way, and the landscape just wasn't worth
walking around on because there was nothing on it except a few trees and
the occasional enemy, and all the quests involved either finding something
in a dungeon, killing something in a dungeon, guarding a building from
enemies who would never fail to show up, or delivering something to someone
in another town. In Morrowind, the game starts out with the chance
to investigate the disappearance of a tax collector in the first town,
and later on you can take on tasks such as convincing people to join the
Mages' Guild, helping a woman find a bandit she fell in love with, freeing
slaves from caverns, and finding an animal someone saw in a vision.
Sometimes one quest will interfere with another and you'll have to choose
your allegiances. There's no fast travel option like there is in
Daggerfall, but you can ride silt striders and boats between towns, or
you can see what you find on the path between towns. If you walk
around the landscape, you'll find lots of mushrooms and plants you can
collect and a few enemies to fight and improve your battle skills.
It's been years since I started
working on Azenera, and I'm not even finished with level 4! I plan
on having a total of 14 levels when the whole thing is finally complete,
and I've come up with a general plan for each level, but the hard part
is turning those plans into a reality. But still, I must finish this
thing someday, even if it takes me 10 years. I've finished all the
landscape stuff on level 4 and I'm partway through the textures, and then
I'll just have to place all the objects and the level will be complete!