AB40k Maintainers

Posted: Oct 23, 2008 - 04:55 PM

Greetings,

About two months ago, a number of you asked what was up next for Army Builder and when would it be released. It was the week before we left for GenCon, so I briefly outlined the situation and promised a more concrete response after Colen and I could spend some time mapping out a concrete plan. We mapped that out in late August and I was going to post the details.

Before I could do that, though, I got hit hard with a serious health problem. In a nutshell, I have acquired a severe, chronic neck condition that results in pinched nerves and/or numbness. It rendered me barely able to work during September. With extensive treatment, I've finally rebounded to about 50-60% of where I was at previously. Unfortunately, it's not likely that I'll rebound much further in the near term, but my fingers are still crossed.

Needless to say, this threw a major wrench in the AB 3.2 plan that we devised. So we re-convened and revised the plan. My health condition has resulted in me being waaayyyy behind in my role on our various commitments for Hero Lab, but Colen's tasks are largely wrapped up now. The original plan was for both of us to switch over to work on AB in November. At this point, either Colen can help me out with my Hero Lab stuff for another couple of months, working on portions of the code that he's not very familiar with, or he can switch over to work on AB while I wrap things up on Hero Lab at whatever pace I'm capable of. After giving it a lot of thought, we opted for the latter solution, since that will (a) be more efficient for us and (b) get something released sooner for AB 3.2.

So the good news is that work on AB 3.2 should be underway in the next few weeks. The key drawback of this approach is that some of the engine stuff that we wanted to add to AB 3.2 will not make its way into the release. This is because I'm the engine expert and I'm not going to be able to get started right away, nor will I be able to get stuff done as quickly as originally anticipated. We'll get the bulk of the UI improvements and refinements implemented in V3.2 and then follow it up with a separate release containing the engine changes at a later point. The timing for that follow up will depend substantively on my health and productivity, both of which are major points of uncertainty right now.

We'll post a summary of the key things we've got planned for the V3.2 release in the next few weeks. We still need to investigate a couple of items before we can confirm exactly what will be added. In the meantime, this should give everyone some certainty that V3.2 will be arriving relatively soon.

Thanks for your patience with everything. I'm confident you're all going to like the new stuff that we've got slated for inclusion in V3.2.

May the dice be with you....

-Rob