My boss/cousin (or whatever I should call him; he's married to my cousin, and he supplies me with all of my contract work, though he's not really my 'boss'; anyway) went under the knife yesterday to have a cancerous tumor removed. They had to crack him open like a nut, split him right down the sternum. I guess the tumor was somewhere between softball and soccerball sized. [wow] They think they were able to get it all, and they said it didn't look as if it had spread to anything, but even so he'll be out of commission as far as work is concerned for several weeks. I'll be picking up the slack and trying to keep things running as much as I can.

I continue to fiddle fart along. As far as The Project is concerned (don't really know what to call it, I suppose) I'm working on the testbed framework to get the world built and in place. I'm shamelessly ripping off a lot of the work and stuff I did for Golem and Accidental for this thing, as far as random level generation is concerned, since that is really what (still) interests me. But it's looking like I'm going to have to build some sort of quad-tree structure for the map, since right now the script interface simply tucks each piece of static geometry generated into the root scene node. Bog down is considerable with large numbers of objects.

I'm rather pleased with the relative ease of getting things up and going with Irrlicht. We're really getting the issues and problems we've had with it ironed out. It may not be the most robust or fully-featured of libraries, but so far it has performed acceptably and for a small-scale indie sort of project it seems quite sufficient.

Some small problems I have had with it I've managed to find patch files to fix, though a few of the patch files were 'broken' and I had to apply the relevant fixes by hand. Such is life, sometimes.