A Plethora

"Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora." - The Three Amigos

Version 3.5 is eating away my life. But in a good way. As I have been rendering new images, I realised that I did not have models for various, quite important things. Also, various players (lead by Dwain) have been nagging me for years to do some more space craft. So, I married this two things together. I wanted to create a new image of a space craft docked onto a Mex Building, using the new new Mex building models and the new Cyclone (the old Cyclone is featured in the current image). However, the new Cyclone is very large and it was difficult to create a scene with just one or two Mex buildings and the ship. Therefore, I started creating the Gaterunner but got a bit lost halfway through the model and did the Blackwater instead. Both are quite small so I should be able to construct the scene.

This sudden flurry of ships has spurred me on to do 3D models of the Crowthorne and the Bailey. I am trying new modelling techniques for both of these so they might be a while. After that, I will go back and do some more images for the next Elements Alpha (try and get it half filled) before uploading it. There will be a few little rule changes, as being discussed on the Forums.

Italian Translation

Over on the Italian site, Paulo is putting together the new site version. I created all this in XML with XSL Transforms, so creating a new site should be simply a matter of changing some XML. Once this is done, we should be able to share news stories across the websites. Don't believe me? Do a view souce on this page and note the lack of HTML. See? Told you so! Paulo has also set up an Italian Language Forum, of which I understand nothing but it's cool to see him starting up a community.

Astraripper 5

I want to take this chance to congratulate Byrn and Dwain on the Astraripper 5, it's great to see some old ideas come to life in modern models. Nice one! They're a good team and I hope to see some more from that stable.

One Big File

Finally, once the Elements 3.5 is complete, I am planning on creating One Big File. This will be a zip file that will have everything in it. All the rules PDFs, all the equipment JPGs. Everything. Although this file is likely to be very big, I think enough people have broadband to make use of it. I will see how many different mirrors I can get to host it, initially, it will be held over on the Maison de Stuff. Of course, this will all be transparent to the downloader but I want to spread out the bandwidth used by Icar.