Shepherd
Ya'll might want to check the Lassie website. :wink:

looks very interesting.. i've been wonderng what you've been upto :lol: does it need Flash 8? (still on 2004 :oops: )

Cool stuff! :P :P any screens yet? :lol:

Yes, Shepherd will require Flash 8. I could have done it in 7... but... well, no sense dwelling on the past. And yes, I will be releasing a functional interface very soon for everyone to -*test*-('") drive. Then I'll be opening the floor for all of you to provide input.

right i'll get Flash 8 sorted has Lassie-AS ran its course now? will projects made with the beta versions still function or is it going to need work to switch over? the reason i'm asking is the "BIG one" is in motion and and i'll just keep things basic as for as the building the game is concerned i just intend to work on building the game layout for a long time anyway

i look forward to seeing it :D i've sorted Flash 8 so let the good times roll lol

LOL... okay Nige! But again, Shepherd is a long ways off. I've got a prototype going with many working features, though it's still just a scratch in the surface of what need to be done. And... I'm fielding job offers right now and will be taking one by the end of this week. Once I'm employed again, I'll be working substantially less on Lassie (sadly).

Hey, I was actually working a bit on Shepherd again this weekend. Ya'll will probably hate me when you hear this, but I basically gutted the application and took it back to interface-only (which needed redesigning anyway). Bottom line is that I built way too much, way too fast initially. It was becoming unwieldy and would suffer in the long run without a lot of re-tooling. It was tough, but necessary. So, I've taken it back to the bare-bones basic (classification and methodologies), which is painstaking sloooooooow. However, it ultimately yields an OOP that has a prayer of holding up under its own weight in late development. Also, I've decided that I'll be developing Shepherd open-source. I'll maintain the only development build, but I hope having the source available will attract gurus who can offer components and insight. It's a BIG application, and nothing says that I'm always approaching it the best way. I have no planned date for release, but once I have the groundwork laid for how I'd like to see the program grow, I'll post source.

good to hear some news :D .. altho though you've totally dismantled it lol

I also like to think that it will be a good growth for Lassie, too. This will move LassieAS up to a distinct version 2... It does have additional feature sets designed into the interface, including support for multiple walkable areas/light matrixs/scale matrixs. Oh yeah, and the new one: speed matrixs.

so Lassie AS is still being developed? i figured it had ground to a holt in favour of developing Shepherd and to move on from the Director problems

'course it is. Just because a project doesn't get updates in three months, six months, a year–however long--it's not terminated unless the developer officially states "Hey, I've abandoned this project, you'll never see another update so use it indefinitely in the state that its in". Not the case. Besides, given that these are all pieces of the "greater" project, the fact that I'm working on Shepherd is the same thing as working on LassieAS. I can hardly make updates to LassieAS to accommodate Shepherd features when Shepherd isn't even built yet, right? =P

Update: I got a good chunk of time to invest in the project this evening. Perhaps more time tomorrow. And I can honestly say that I made some great progress! However, having said that I need to be honest and admit that --functionally-- I'm still only at the point where the initial room selector pulldown ALMOST works. Or in other words, the app as a whole still doesn't do jack. Right, so where's the progress? The progress has been made in laying out the application's framework. In my previous version I had built walls and a roof before I'd ever bothered to dig a basement. And go figure, that house o' cards collapsed under its own weight. My flash skills have improved dramatically since then, so I've adopted a much more powerful execution. Of course, its also much slower to set up. However, my hope is that once all the heavy-lifting stuff is in place, development pace will quicken since the simple presentation/interface layer will just need to get linked into the data model. Keep your fingers crossed. I'll keep posting updates as they happen.

cool 8) just out of interest do we still publish an AS in Flash that Shepherd produces?