Imperator

After 2.5 years it should be apparent already, but for the formal record: Praetor will never be finished.  For all the fans who are reading this and are dismayed, please believe me when I say that this pains me far more than it does you.  My wife will attest that I hate leaving anything unfinished, much less something that I invested so much time in.

The death blow was a conjunction of three unthinkables:

• My source code repository died - The hard drive failure that took out my repository didn't worry me at first, since I had an active working copy of all the source code.  But when I had replaced the repository's drive and went to rebuild the repository from the active content, the active stuff was gone--and I don't know why.

• My backups died too - Here's the unthinkable part: being a veteran programmer, I make backups religiously--in fact, in addition to my primary and repository sites, I have a dedicated RAID-based NAS device to keep backups around.  So when my first two sites died, I shrugged and started recovery from my most recent backup on the NAS--not too bad, just a month or so out of date.  Except that while it was restoring, the NAS died too--and instead of its RAID masking the drive failure, it panicked.  I was never able to get the source off--and had to resort to my fourth, last-ditch backup, a thumb drive on my keychain: this has all the Earth, Water and Air levels but none of the new stuff I had written for Fire at all.  But worst was:

• Microsoft killed support for XNA on Windows Phone - XNA is the graphics toolkit that Microsoft encouraged us all to use in writing games for Xbox, Windows Desktop and Windows Phone.  They still in fact tell you to use XNA for the first two, but no longer support it at all on the phone.  Which means I can't even recompile the old out-of-date Praetor source code that I managed to recover, much less add new stuff.

So, to move on!  I've thrown out the NAS box and replaced it with an entirely new brand, I've rebuilt my desktop machine, and I've invested in a bunch of next-generation development tools including Unity.  I've planned and schemed, I've contracted an honest-to-god fantasy author to do the plotting and script writing, and I've got a screenshot or two to throw out there to whet your palate.  Yes, there's going to be a sequel--and it's going to be awesome.