* progress so far: both coders took vacation breaks during the last two weeks, so between the two of them we had only 1 working week. i'd rather have the team finish the project with a fresh eye then with a tired blindness of someone who just has to kick the box out of the door. hope you agree
* internally, we wrapped a serious milestone (the most serious so far), some people on the team got their bonus raises, etc. without going into details, we passed what we think is a point of no return (also known as "monkey spot"), i.e. if you take what we have at the moment from us and hand it to a bunch of shimpanze, even the monkeys will be able to finish the project and it will be a nice game
* Character Screen wasn't touched much but we added a) showing marital status & sons/daughters info to all characters in their Character Card b) showing whether the character has Agreement with you (or is at War) in a sep column in Character List. this is important because you immediately see who are friends and who are not without having to click to see Char Card.
// while we're at that, of long-term Agreements we have 4 types: Agreement to Marry (otherwise known as Engagement), Defensive Union, Offensive Union and Peace Treaty //
* Negotiations Screen suffered the most: still working on the sidebar column that filters 3 possible lists (Proposals Received, Offers Sent, Agreements Standing).
!! a question 2all: have heard yesterday the quote from some papal order that proclaimed silence to be the mark of approval. i suggest that in CK, when you receive agreement proposal and you have 30 days to respond, if you don't click "Decline", then in 30 days it is automatically deemed accepted. what do you think? (i think it will be a great way to hit other players who can be too busy fighting wars with neighbours to notice a dumb proposal, and then oops you just agreed to sell your province for 1 ducat ) !!
* Log: wasn't touched codewise, but have it designed & first content is poured into proper TXT file by the Duke. just to remind you, we have =>
News -- which is report on ingame events that occured, but which you can't influence (i.e. new character is born, somebody married somebody, etc.)
Events -- report on situation where you can take action, with a deadline normally
Log -- confirmation of your actions
<= so that you don't have the Event Window polluted by confirmations, but still have these at the bottom of the screen to make certain when you clicked something actually happened.
* finally, Dima implemented filters for Event Window (they are available there as a part of Settings) -- for each type of event or news, and there are many of these listed, you can set a) how long to keep it in the Window b) whether to popup E.Window automatically when new event of this type comes across. this is the kind of "alert system" that we craved for since last months' playtests.
!! and before we part -- this week we will ask everybody involved to check our list of Laws and make suggestions. keep an eye on the Data & Comments forums, we will have only 2 weeks to hear any comments and then will close this list until GM !!
adios.