Tech Preview 2? Soon?

Holy crap it's been 6 months since Tech Preview 1. Time flies when you're a solo hobbyist dev. So what have I done since TP1?

- Pokemon Walk. I shifted focus for a couple months onto another game idea, one my child was much more interested in. This is largely complete now, and besides occasional bugfixes shouldn't eat up much more time.

- Yearly data processing. Twice. Not only did I change up the format on what gets stored for my offline data setup, I screwed up how those files get merged and had to redo them after the complete set was put together.  I will need to do a little more investigating, but I may do a third pass on this to fix other things in the files as well. 

- Server core update. After almost a year's worth of development, I had to update PraxisMapper's server app to keep up with my new plans.

- Background tech. Like I said in my last post, the map component needed reworked for flexibility. Doing that has been a huge help, but I also then needed to update my demo library app to use the new component and flexibility, which exposed other things that needed to be updated like the GetFile component for downloading map data.

- Multiplayer Concepts. I've been poking at theories on how I might want to do multiplayer code for my games, though none of that is anywhere near ready to go. This has been fun to think about but difficult to really work out the best plan for all of this.

But now that we have that in place, I can start moving on with this project again. The next step is using the map to track different elements. I added that capability directly into the map now, and I am in the middle of determining if its sufficient or if it needs to be enhanced to be usable. Right now, I think it works as long as you have a layer that converts your game's data into Nodes the map can track. I also found a couple of things to fix when tapping the screen on nodes, and may find a few more things to fix before a second example is ready. But an update should not be another 6 months away. The next one should involve some game-like stuff at least, and not just show off the map tech.