Its getting pretty exciting, the amount of improvements and adjustments are going to be even huger than module 2 was.     

The latest news is that warforged will now receive their full tabletop benefits at first level, no need to use enhancements to gain them.  This should make playing warforged pretty cool, despite the fact that most people don't like having to use twice as much heal magic.

Dang, the spell vault kept spiraling larger, and its going to be really cool, but I keep getting pulled into other projects. :(  The forum skin was just ugly in many ways, it was only half done and it would have been very difficult to fix. 

Plus webcomic.net had to deal with the standard skin for a long time, which I didn't like because it wasn't doing anything to "brand" the site.  it "will" get done, and it will hopefully be cool, have patience everyone!

I've found that "naming" concepts while programming helps me to work on the project, as well as to explain to others what I'm working on.

Calling the member submitted area the spell vault helped solidify to me what I was working on, before that it was just a series of pages, many of which could be called similar things.  Of course its nice for branding as well. 

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I woke up early today at 6am, got some work done on the spell vault, renamed a couple things, improved the spell lookup a bit, and created a stored procedure that allows spells to be added to the character's known list of spells.

I do have something I am pondering though.  Instead of merely making public spells available to everyone but editable by the submitter, maybe they should be editable by all registered users?  Like a wiki I'd keep a copy of each change to a public spell, so if someone messed it up, the spell vault librarian (moderator) could just roll it back to a previous version. 

Would it install more participation by people spellchecking and/or clarifying spells? Or would it merely end up with the entire list corrupted constantly by people playing? 

It would be a bit more work, but I think it would probably be for the best.  I looked at a wiki yesterday and someone had defaced it.  I thought hey, I've never used a wiki before, maybe I can fix it.  I clicked on update, but couldn't find the profanity.  I went back and refreshed the page, and someone else had already fixed it.  It kind of gave me hope for humanity, that the number of people who cared to fix it seemed to outweigh the number of jerks childishly ruining the site.

Any thoughts anyone?

heh, I always am tempted to make a "first post" comment on the comic comments when I know Jenn is adding the comic. ;) 

This blog is more or less just for the dndorks crew to rant about gaming stuff without filling up the main page with extra things.  Basically medium-small rants go on the site, medium-long posts go here.  These posts tend to stay longer and aren't connected with the comic itself.

At any rate, I wanted to point out something to those that are visual studio users. 

If for some reason you are working over a period of weeks with Visual Studio 2005, and at some point every time you hit save it gets "very" slow, painfully slow, the kind of slow that makes you want to throw your monitor through the window.  Well, you may be experiencing a pretty simple problem to fix.

Basically at some point your list of prior solutions might point to a solution that no longer exists.  This is the list that you choose from when you first start VS2005. 

To fix it, open regedit, and navigate to Hkey_current_user/software/microsoft/visual studio/8.0/projectMRUList  There you'll find a list of registry entries that define what you see in that list of solutions.  I just deleted them all, you may want to pick and choose.

I encountered this issue with dndorks.  5-10 seconds each time I hit save.  Searched on Google, found this page: http://blogs.dotnetcoders.com/jfoster/SolvingAPainfullySlowSaveProcessInVisualStudio2005.aspx

And realized I had an identical issue, which I had been dealing with at home for about 2 weeks, and it had been seriously dissuading me from wanting to work on the site.

So, what was I working on?  The Spell List Manager for the Character Vault!

And let me tell you, once I fixed the save slowness, my work output dramatically increased!

Here is how the spell manager works

Spells are organized by spell list, Spell Level (0-9 and a 10th category referred to as None), and public or non-public.

Spell Lists are submitted by users, and can be flagged as public.  Spells likewise are submitted by users and can be flagged as public. 

Characters can be given spells and how many they have prepared from the overall pool of self-submitted and other public spells.

This way, the community as a whole can pool their efforts into adding spells to the vault, hopefully reducing how much time people have to spend typing in their spells.

Ideally I'll also have a CSV import option available, with instructions on what kind of format is needed . 

There will also be the option to "report" spells, in case someone just starts putting in junk.  Maybe we can get someone to become the spell moderator to help us keep the entries inline.

How long on this feature?  It will probably go into beta by this weekend, maybe sooner.