I'd talk about something else, but this is all I've got to talk about.

I did some minor skimming of the other maps, and managed to make a very loose outline of the future terrain--turns out that on the left half of the map, 250 is about...50 tiles too many.

...In spite of 200 being about 50 too short on the right half of the map.

WELP.

Looks like I'm going to have to improvise some terrain, then. Might need to look at an actual geography map to get an idea of what terrain I'll be improvising, specifically, because I'll be including stuff north enough to maybe be worthy of a north pole in places.

We'll have to see, exact map is still forming in my head.

While I was at it, though, I took a quick inventory of cities to make.

Many cities will, inevitably, overlap; what I ended up coming up with, though...was.
Well, Persia's still got far too few cities.
Carthage is a bit short on cities as well.

The Goths, on the other hand? Go from being one of the smallest to hands-down one of the largest powers in the game. (Oops?) Since they combine half the French, half the English, all the Vikings, the Germans, the Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Polish, and more rolled up into one.

The Celts, for their part, also expand quite a bit, to be a respectable power--not as strong as the Goths, but controlling a fair amount, as the other half of the French/English with their own holdings added in.

The Mongols (combo Scythians/Huns/generic Asian/Mongols) are pretty screwed over comparatively, as are the Persians/Carthaginians. (Carthage can only expand to include so many cities. Including the Spanish/Portuguese/Arab cities only does so much good when they all occupy the exact same territory, the Iberian Peninsula and the northern tip of Africa. Persia runs into the same problem; they only have so much land mass to expand into.)

Technically, so too are the Egyptians, but that's by design rather than anything else. (And, heck, terrain-wise Egypt isn't that terribly bad off; they've got a lot of resources nearby to work with. Gold, Horses, Iron, Spices, Gems, Ivory...)

All-around it's exhausting, but I am​ progressing.

Key to success is variety, and I apparently know none. Not only does that apply to my blog being so central to the one topic, but also to my progress therein. I am, genuinely, making progress. I have finished recreating the work I originally did, on a larger canvas. I have added in approximations of islands, which I'll be making better versions of when I tweak terrain and whatnot.

I have outlined key areas, from the Iberian Peninsula up to England, and through Italy. The terrain is slowly, meticulously, coming into place more closely.

...The problem is.

It is methodical work--work which I have to very carefully strain my eyes to make sure I'm not making errors. And even when I am working on connecting two areas that are entirely within the boundaries of a single map (so, no distortion going on), I'm finding...sometimes, there's clashes. Clashes which have no discernible explanation; I check the tiles, check the math, double-check each, triple-check it, and somehow end up most often short a tile or two (where there's a need for two different tiles to occupy the same square) or on the rare occasion, its inverse (too many tiles).

You'd think they'd happen in equal measure, but no. Far more of the "not enough space" crop up than vice-versa, in spite of my efforts--and the effort is starting to wear on me. I am looking at the map, and I know I am making significant progress there. But at the same time, while I objectively can see the significant differences, each time I'm working on it, it feels like I'm only making small steps forward.

Small, meticulous, labored steps forward, to get what amounts to a massive prototype-of-prototypes map. Keep in mind that even after all this work, I may need to scrap it all and start from scratch again, circumstances depending. Probably not (England is disproportionately low on the map, at only a little over 50% of the way up, and most things in later maps have England near the top), but you never know.

I just feel a little drained out.
In spite of me really wanting to get this done.
If I can get the map done--and I know that it won't magically get done, I need to work on it bit by bit until it is when it is a ton of work--then I can get the scenario functioning. The basic steps are to finish generating the Rise of Rome map, tweak Rise of Rome with Mesopotamia, then tweak it with Fall of Rome, then tweak that with The Middle Ages which expands further and so on and so forth.

I can see that goal being obtainable, if I keep working...and working...and working.

​But it's sure not easy.

In my defense, wasn't much else I could do. Between work and family night, could only manage so much.

Still, I did, with 99.9% accuracy, a recreation of my work on the old map.

I'm beginning new work--Mesopotamia needs its islands, but otherwise, it's mostly outlining the Rise of Rome map, comparing it to the Fall of Rome map to see if I need non-resource shifts, and then expanding/changing based on The Middle Ages (primarily) and Napoleonic Era (secondary), with final touchups from Age of Discovery.

Map-generation-wise, I'd say I'm approaching around 50%.
Won't be long, now, before I need to start adding stuff in to the map--cities, fog, starting points, units, roads/fortresses/barricades/mines/irrigation/etc.

But of course, first I need the forests, rivers, and resources to be in place.

Which...will come!

If I included them, though, the map completion plummets to like 30% at best, though; they're kinda their own time-intensive thing.

I really want to get it done, though.
Because once the map's done.
The fun times stuff begins.

My goal is to get the scenario to the point where it is theoretically as-is playable and coherently an expanded version of Rise-of-Rome; map larger, more cities, more units, but base gameplay momentarily untouched.

...And then, when I'm at that point of playability with the base format, extrapolate and add in alllllllllllllllllllll the extras, these hundreds of units/buildings.

Which requires documentation first, mind you, to succeed, but.
​One thing at a time.

It's one really good--would be borderline-NSFW to describe as the story idea (a webcomic) would itself be incredibly NSFW featuring just about every trigger warning, but the concept of the story is amazing and the main character I absolutely loved from the moment I saw her interacting with people. (I also love her aesthetic. Her hairstyle's AMAZING, and her body build suits her look perfectly.)

It's an incredibly good idea...but honestly, it's one I kinda want to keep to myself? It's not something I'd ever be able to make. (I'm not skilled enough at making a mangaesque art with the level of detail necessary especially in a lite-high-fantasy setting. Especially not one where being anatomically accurate holds plot relevance and I can't draw people properly proportioned. Also there's the whole, "It's basically porn with plot" premise to it.)

It's a really good idea, though, one I find hilarious, cute, endearing, and yet disturbing, the perfect mixture of twisted messed-up stuff and absolute slapstick carefree lightheartedness. It's just a story idea that I want to enjoy by myself, more or less, to have as something to run my head through "reading".

I even completed the first chapter start to finish, and have an idea of many key events happening in it, along with no less than three possible endings (which one, I favor in spite of it being by far the most cliched of them, simply because there's a sense of poetry to it).

Genius idea, Bree.
Go get the idea of "I should look up Age of Empires I units/buildings, see if I can use some".
When you're already having trouble making a coherent tech tree.

That'll surely not give you extra work, nope, not at all!
...Especially not by giving you some AoEII/AoM units/buildings you forgot about!

*siiiiiiiiiigh*

It could be worse, though.
As far as extras go, I only got about...53 definitives, about 65ish total including the maybes.

And new buildings, they actually smoothly integrate no problem at all.

And of those that are definitives...there's only a few that'll be challenging. 
...By which I mean 38 of the definitives.

I am an idiot.

It basically means that I need to redo the entire tech tree work I did.

Not to worry though, was planning on expanding it anyway.

I am currently using three different files, would be nice if I could consolidate them into only one.

Anyway.

I just gave myself a whole lot more work.

But if I can make it work...
...Then the result of it will actually be amazing in having given a ton of stuff for people to play around with.

This was a needed thing, kinda sorta.
Both to get it out of my system, and get me into the right mindset for getting this stuff together.

I'll have to start over, yes, but start over smartly.

Also the map's coming along nicely and I know what to do there, too.

Wasn't planning on blogging again, but on a whim, decided to google jacknife, and found out there's actually a good video showing a version of the jacknife, albeit not quite what we do. It's close enough to be an accurate depiction tho!

Hands start above the head, legs start on the ground, flat; everything's on the ground. Body, with arms, raise as shown in the video; legs raise, but are straight the entire time, the idea being to get pretty much as close as you can to having your fingers touch your toes in the air, with both being in the middle.

​It is a core workout, and core's basically one of the most important parts of tkd.

...While we're on the subject of creating the mod, I am making good progress on recreating my work on the map. Turns out that you can have more than one civ 3 editor window at one time, so I have the old map and the new one open in different editor windows. (I tried this before once, but something went wrong at some point for a probably unrelated reason and haven't tried since.)

And it also turns out that in spite of the maps being different sizes, when you manually hit the up button on the scroll bar (and presumably also the side button, but the up button is where I expected trouble), they progress up at a literally identical rate; if you start in an identical spot, then ten up in one map is that same ten up in the other. Which makes recreating the map a breeze.

I did that work yesterday, don't know if I'll do it more today, we'll have to see just like we had to yesterday, but progress is progress, bit by bit.

Still bummed out that I wasted time doing something I could do any day, on something which might never be made real, and even if it is made real is utterly worthless, rather than the tkd test tho.

So I was supposed to help with a belt test for tae kwon do this Saturday--by which, I mean. Not in four days, but three days ago.

I completely and totally forgot.

And the real stupid thing is.
I knew I would forget.
And there were any number of things I could have done to stop me from forgetting.
Telling my family.
Telling my girlfriend.
Blogging about it here.
Writing a note.
Anything.

But nope.
I didn't.
And so.
I forgot.

And wasted my time on Saturday.
I'm pretty sure the thing I did on Saturday was work on my civ 3 mod, nothing else constructive.
Something I could have done on literally any day.

So I am a complete utter idiot.

And I'm going to pay for it from my self-imposed punishment: 50 jacknives (apparently what I know as jacknives may not universally be known, but they are basically kinda sorta a combination same-time crunch plus reverse-crunch, where both the upper body and legs move upward at the same time), 25 knuckle pushups, and I later added in 30 (which I pushed up to 50 later) crunches.

Now admittedly, I did these in sets of 10/5, later adding the 10 crunches.
And of those knuckle pushups, pretty sure the first 15-20 didn't have proper technique.
And near the end of the jacknives, I could tell I was failing to do them with proper technique. (I made up for it by doing some in-air cycling, after I discovered neither a crunch nor a reverse crunch were faring any better than the jacknife.)

But this is still brutal. Especially since whenever I felt like I was recovered, I did more. I felt like vomiting was a possibility before I had even done any of the workout for the class proper. And I wanted to push things so that doing things in the class would be as difficult as was possible, while not being impossible. (I don't think I succeeded, but I got fairly close.)

It hurt, but it didn't hurt enough. It will hurt big time tomorrow (aint enough stretches in the worlds to keep the soreness from debilitating me tomorrow, aint enough protein in the world to properly fuel my regrowth), but it still wasn't quite enough of a punishment for my sin.

That's okay, overall, however, because my instructor more than made up for it. Not in her chastising of me (there was a small amount--not nearly as much as I deserved, but a little justified chat on the subject), but rather, the words which were meant to be an encouragement.

The words meant to be encouraging to me were a stab through the heart harsher than any of the words of criticism, in spite of being only a single sentence: "I appreciate your help." Meant to be genuinely reassuring; was actually a dagger twisting in the wound deeper, because she appreciates my help...and without warning, I wasn't there to give it to her.

For no good reason.

Because I forgot.
With no excuses.
I thought of making some.
I had some which I could create.
But I couldn't use them--in spite of having created them, I just couldn't use them. It just...was something I deserved to take in full.

I still think I got off lightly--lighter than I should.

I don't know what else I can really do to punish myself more than I did, but I basically got what amounts to a slap on the wrist. Jacknives are a white belt punishment. (Admittedly, more like 5-10 of them at that rank, and a punishment used with decreased frequency, butstill.) Knuckle pushups, can be as early as a gold belt punishment. Both are test requirements from green belt and above, doing 10 + 5/rank. (So at my rank, it's somewhere in the 20-30 range anyway.)

I'm out of shape, so I can do less than I should be able to do for my rank, butstill--these are things that ceased being punishments and started being part of my training literally years ago, kept as a punishment more as a relic to have something as a punishment.

​So I still feel bad, and feel like I should feel even worse in every way possible.

Today I don't have any revolutionary ideas. I did have rather a number of dreams, but none of them were idea-worthy; at work, I didn't really think of any idea, either. Nor can I really say that I did anything today noteworthy. Or that I have something story-worthy from my daily life today; nothing comes to mind at all.

I can tell you that at work, I got inspired to work on my mod again, but who knows if I'll actually work on it tonight. Today was more of a general recovery-from-yesterday's-devastation plus catch-up-on-life day. I actually would have better luck talking about yesterday, where my girlfriend and I started watching a new anime, a magical girl anime. I don't remember the full title; all I remember is the protagonist's name, Asuka, being part of it.

We've only seen six or seven episodes, but so far, I really really like it. It has a genuinely interesting take on the concept of magical girls, and has an amazing capacity for worldbuilding; right off the bat, so much of the setting is given to you in so little time, but in a way where you're able to perfectly digest it. It doesn't drag on, it's not an info dump, not an exposition overload, and not done too subtly to miss it all; you can reasonably follow what's going on.

It's got a really good sense of pacing and strong characterization focus, with a continuous sense of intrigue. Some things are fairly predictable, but the show uses these predictable plot devices in a thoroughly entertaining way; it doesn't need to be original to still be good as a narrative, especially when it's framed the way it is. The concept's probably not the most original, but the execution of it is clean, pristine, and ridiculously well-done.

Quite worth the watch.
Especially since the characters are gay as gay can be. (Not that they've shown an actual kiss, but they've done everything short of it, with fairly explicit dialog, fairly explicit emotions expressed, and fairly explicit gestures that in Japan are "basically more intimate than any kiss".)

It surprised me, since I'd never heard of the show, yet it's just that good. I'm kinda assuming it's fairly newish, because if it wasn't new then I'd surely have heard of it if through nothing else my TVTropes binging. (Granted, been doing less binging these days than I used to, butstill.) Not a bad find for something we decided to more or less watch on a whim.

I guess I can also talk some more about the civ mod, even if I don't end up working on it tonight. (We'll have to see.)
Basically, there are three things I need to get done in order to get the scenario playable.
There's plenty of features that I want to include, but these three things are the things that need to be done for it to be passable.

One, I need to complete the world map. This is the main hurdle, because if you don't have a map, you can't so much as even playtest the scenario. The map needs to be there.

Two, I need to have the techs laid out and in a coherent fashion. This is almost just as important, because if you don't have the techs set up properly, then your game is literally unplayable.

Three, I need to have the documentation for everything set up before I work. This is necessary because it minimizes the chance of errors, makes the process less haphazard (if I'm doing one thing here and another thing there, the result is going to be a mess, whereas if I have everything laid out, I have a structure of exactly what I need to do), and basically gets me so that I can get everything done right.

Everything else will flow from there.
Science adviser giving commentary, optional, but nice touch.
Scores are something which will guarantee I'll keep playing the scenario over and over again, but ultimately aren't needed to make the game playable.
Resource display is something not needed to be playable and is an aesthetics thing.
Music is something to enhance the game, but not critical.

Heck, even setting up civ contacts is something not crucial, even if it's preferable.

​I just need to get the work done.

I'm a little dejected right now and just...
*siiiiiiiiiiiigh*

I got my hopes up when I discovered an "Import" option.

It can import as much or as little as you want.

It can import rules, units, cities, the whole map, and such.

...But if you import the map, it also imports the size. If you don't import the map, then the coordinates of the generated cities/units/etc. are off. 

What would be actually helpful: importing the map, with it having a fixed appearance spot, without adjusting the map size.
Bottom right, I import Mesopotamia; top left, I import Napoleonic Era. Top right, The Middle Ages. Bottom left, Rise of Rome.

Or what would still be actually helpful: expanding an existing map's size, without losing everything. It'd expand things out from a point, mind you, but I could work with that; if it expanded out right/down, I start from Napoleonic Era and expand outward as needed. If it expanded out left/down, The Middle Ages is my starting point. Right/up, Rise of Rome. Left/up, Mesopotamia.

Yet to my knowledge.

...Nothing.

Just.

...Aaaaagh.

​The map will be the death of the scenario if I can't get this darn thing down.