So, Fridays at work are usually blissfully peaceful. No one really expects you to work right?

WRONG!

Sadly, I had a ton of work to do, and I'm not sure I got it all done before I left. Oh well. It'll be there for me when I get back from training.

Otherwise, I tend to love Fridays. They're the day you can finally feel that freedom of the weekend pass into you. You realize you don't have to go to bed early, and you don't have to get up early. You can stay up and write, and then read late into the morning in bed.

So I've decided that we should put together a few old-west style stories online to get your blood pumping about Phoenix. I need to put together the basic content area, and then start the first story.

I'm trying to decide between a short story about a family that moves out west (no, it won't be house on the prairie or anything NEAR that), a rogue cowboy, a saloon owner, or a story about a small city.

First, I apologize if I rant. I'm a writer by heart so I tend to rant quite a bit.

In case you didn't see some of the information before, I thought I'd share a little about who I am, what's my relationship to this project, and why it's so hard to see me right now.

Yes, the title is sarcasm. :)

Garage Games (AKA the company we license the core game engine that makes Phoenix possible from) is preparing to release the latest version of TGEA, or what they're calling 1.7.0. This is a very exciting time for us Phoenix devs. Sure, it means porting yet another slew of updates back into our core, debugging, finding what broke that has been working for months, etc. In this case, it's worth the time, no matter how much of a pain it will be to integrate.

There's not a whole lot of new items to report for this weekend. I've been down with flu-like symptoms for most of the week. Generally achy, severe headaches, and dizziness. For the most part, I felt like crap, but I seem to be getting over it.

There's a new "Server Status" pane on the main web site (if you can't see it, you're not logged in!), placed there mainly to taunt and tease, but it's a start toward a more "public view" of what is going on behind the scenes. For the curious, here is a general overview of Phoenix's server architecture:

I've been really bad about keeping the community informed about the development of Phoenix. This blog is my attempt to remedy that. I'll be posting here on a semi-regular basis on the status of the code, where we are with internal testing, anf other tidbits of information I deem web-worthy. So, welcome to my blog!