Miscellany

The first annual Dragon awards were awarded at DragonCon in Atlanta over the Labor Day weekend. Congratulations to all the winners.

Language generation is nearly done, with just a few cleanup steps to undertake, and I think I understand how GitHub integration with Visual Studio works.  I guess I'll find out if that understanding is correct when I try to commit the code tomorrow.

The next book review is likely to be the biography Ace of Aces: The Life of Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker by H. Paul Jeffers.  I finished that on Saturday morning, and soon began reading Jungle of Stones by William Carlsen, which chronicles an interesting set of explorations and explorers.  I'm about halfway through that, and it has been quite gripping.

A versatile basic planet generator is in the works, but I want to get the language generator out of the way, and be sure I understand GitHub a bit better, before I spend much more effort there.  I'm still not completely satisfied with any of the solutions, including the traditional fractal techniques.  The 2D plate tectonics simulation and the Experilous spherical planet generator are both better, in my opinion, but the 2D approach is too two-dimensional to completely satisfy and requires an extended time frame to run the simulation, and the Experilous spherical planet generator both lacks adequate resolution and misses some of the puzzle-piece-like continental splitting, but is faster. Perhaps I'll attempt to combine the two approaches somehow.  A pure fractal approach has too many downsides, though it can be very fast and it is traditional.

I've not made much progress on the Pandora's Gate story, but have started to write down a little of another, earlier story set in the same universe, that is in many ways the first story that came to me in that universe.  Whether you'll see the first bit of that or more of Pandora's Gate next is an open question.