Hi everyone,
If you've been following VIET since before the HIP days, you probably know that since roughly November-December of last year I've been mantaining VIET in the wake of cybrxkhan's unforseen absence (with the help of the great Jordarkelf, it bears repeating) and generally making sure the mod doesn't fall to the wayside and the community stays active. It wasn't always an easy task for busy-person-me but overall I like to think we managed the weather that particular storm rather well, even the hectic first days of the HIP project. Still, VIET is nothing without Cybr and I know all of you are as happy as I am to finally see him posting regularly after several months with barely any contact. While his health is not fully recovered, he has adapted well to my personal school of "if you can't sit on the computer and do it, code it in the iPad" and as his health continues to improve he is able to use his computer in increasingly longer periods of time. As such, over the last month I've gradually passed my VIET responsibilities to Cybr and in return we decided to keep me in the VIET development team and change from a 1-man project to a 2 people bandwagon. In this format I've had large ammounts of fun working in Cybr on a handful of updates, the biggest of which is the most recent Briton update, which I hope you are all enjoying, and which leads us to now, where we've largelly settled on what we hope to be the definitive working dynamic of the VIET team, and with Cybr taking over all of his responsibilities, which leads me to state the obvious: The regency has run its course and it's finally time to say Cybrxkhan is fully back in his chair. As it turns out, this came not a moment too soon for me...
As some of you might have heard me say in this very thread, my wife and I are currently expecting our first child and her pregnancy is now in what we can call the home stretch. It won't be long before I get started with my adventures on e journey of parenthood and ever since cybr's health allowed him to break is radio silence with me, I've said in no ambiguous terms that I'd like to take a break from most of my extra-work activities for a couple of months after my child is born, which includes modding, in order to spend more time enjoying this new and exciting time of my life without having to worry about HIP release candidate schedules, CTD's, Blank Events Of Doom and PDS patch changes. As such, we had initially planned for at least one more, possibly 2 VIET updates before I went on hiatus, likely running until right around the time my wife goes into labor. While this was indeed the plan, during the later stages of developing the briton update, and now as we're getting started on the Fraticelli/Sogdian one, I've largely seen both my avaliable time to mod severely dwindle due to final preparations for the newest member of my family, as well as a preference in spending more of my free time with my wife and being a good husband. As such, rather than stress myself and force VIET to deal with an increasingly slow (and more rushed) work turnout, yesterday I told cybr and the HIP team that I'll be taking my paternity leave from VIET abit earlier than expected, starting immediately. I would be lying if I said there isn't abit of sadness attached to this decision as I do enjoy working on all things VIET, but family always comes first and this is the right thing to do.
Overall, I don't expect things to change much. Cybr is a diligent fellow and I'm sure he'll live up to the standards he's gotten us used to so the VIET train will keep rolling regardless. While I won't get into that here, we do have contingency plans in the event that *knock on wood* cybr's health takes a turn for the worse during my hiatus so you can say we have our bases well covered up. I also won't be anywhere near as unreachable as cybr during the worst
art of his illness and I'll still keep contact with both him and the rest of the VIET tram through our communication channels (as well as this forum).
So, as they say, that's all folks. I hope you all have fun playing HIP and I look foward to write more crazy and flavorfull events for you to enjoy in a few months time. Thank you for your support
