Star Wars Galaxies: Dev Diary: Beast Mastery Expertise Part 2

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The Beast Master designs were approved, so we're good to go! One of the items that we decided to change was to move one of the expertise boxes up to make it available a little earlier, so I changed my design docs to reflect the change. I did that while I synced up my computer up to the developer environment we'll be working in for this publish.

I started by constructing the base skeleton of the expertise tree and getting that to show up in user interface as an expertise window. This time it's a little different though, since this expertise tree will be available to every profession and not just a particular profession.

Either way, it's lots and lots of data entry.

Thunderheart came over and let me know that there were some questions on the boards about a recent hot fix. I worked on one of the changes related to the previous publish. I let him know that I would go and field some questions on it in between while working on the expertise tree set-up.

Answer some questions. More data. Answer some more questions. Enter more data. Data and questions pretty much today.

The Beast Master expertise tree shows up in game (in my dev environment) and it's accessible by every profession. Of course all of the text is just blank code strings at this point. All of the abilities have default icons and none of the boxes actually do anything when purchased. That comes later.

The art for the icons is still being worked on, so the next order of business is to get some coherent strings and descriptions on everything in the tree. I'll do a final pass on all of this later but it really makes working on the tree a lot easier when you can tell what a box is supposed to be doing =-)

Next, I'm off to enter a bunch of titles, descriptions, names and generally a lot more data entry. It takes a couple of passes because invariably, I'm long winded and some of my descriptions don't fit.

I share an office with Hanse-SOE. While I was working on this, he let out a jubilant cheer as he successfully called his first pet, an angler. His work in writing the new pet functionality is coming along well.

William Shatner sang "Rocket Man" on some TV show or another back in 1978 I think it was. I remember actually seeing that on TV when I was like eight years old and it was just as funny then as it was today. So I found a video of it on the internet and showed it to Eidson. He then found a recent one where Shatner sang at a roast for George Lucas. I really have no idea what made me recall William Shatner singing "Rocket Man" though...

Anyway, back to finishing up these strings and descriptions.