After about a month of off-and-on work, I have nearly enough banters (read: minimum amount with more to be added later) ready to start coding for my first test version. After that, it's on to the interjections. Maybe a BETA won't be too far off if I'm ambitious enough and can figure out everything without too much hassle.

Well, I have coded some banters, uncoded them, rewrote them, etc. I should have things smooth out considerably in the next few days. Maybe I can get the majority of the beta banters in soon.

I have also begun work on writing/coding interjections. These are going along more smoothly than the banters, fortunately!

I'm back to work after a one-week break. Yes, I needed one to prevent a burnout or else I might have dropped it for a few months.

I'm looking to have the banters completed within the next few days. After that, it's on to the quest.

My vacation means, of course, that this mod will suffer from lack of attention for a couple of weeks. Someday if I have a laptop...

I was finally ambitious enough to finish looking through the dialogue files and select where interjections would be appropriate for Halbo. As of now, I'm working with nearly 100 possible interjections. That seems like a monumental task to code for a first version of my NPC, so I will probably pare that number down at least fifty percent. Even so, he'll be piping up fairly often. The good thing? He won't always be referring to turnips in his interjections.

Before I delved into coding again, I decided to write out the PC/Halbo dialogues -- both the PC initiated and the regular. Halbo will chat quite a bit with your PC provided you talk about what HE wants to talk about. Of course, options will be given to try to guide the conversation your way. Good luck with that!

It might take me a bit to work out this setup so it'll go smoothly, but once I finish it, most of the dialogue (banters, interjections, PC initiated, and joining/leaving) will be completed. After that I'll code it up.

I just have a few bits of banter/dialogue to jot down before I'm done with all that, so I decided to go ahead and code the interjections while I give writing a break. So far the first ten worked out fairly well. The only mistake was when I accidentally turned Halbo into some sort of monster by using the wrong command. I had to cheat to get him back in the party because I don't think my test character had it in him to defeat the transformed Halbo.

I've now coded (but not tested) all interjections that do not require appends. That's over 60 total. The coding was easy. Testing is going to be what takes time.

I now have all interjections (Append and no append) coded and ready to test. Testing is something I hope to have done by the end of the week so I can get on with the remaining few PC/NPC dialogues.

It's been a long break, but I'm slowly working my way back into this thing. It seems the longer break I take, the harder it is to pick it up again.

Well, as Riviera pointed out last month, some area-related interjections would be good (and I forgot them before that! Duh!), so I started writing up a few. Also, I have five PC/NPC dialogues ready to insert into the main file. I shall probably add one or two more.

Funny, but it's been nearly a year since I first posted in this progress thread stating that a BETA might not be far off. Yeah right! I now know how much I was dreaming thinking I'd have the ambition to work THAT hard on something.

Well, now a year later and I've finally taken the plunge to actually do some real work on this thing again. I spent the last few weeks re-reading how to code, getting my links and resources back in order, and trying to get my lazy self to actually do something.

Result? Not much in the way of coding, or writing, but I have gotten some things more organized and also found out that I have a total of 51 banters done. I need to write a few more, refine some old ones, then do the PC/Halbo talks. Unless I'm forgetting something, there shouldn't be much else to make this playable. Don't hope too much though!

I've been thinking of reviving this mod. I'm still undecided since I've got a couple of other projects going right now, but considering I'm not the type to stick to just one thing, it's entirely likely that I'll hop back on this here and there when I'm temporarily bored with my other modding stuff. I know, that's not progress, or even a promise of progress, but it at least means I'm alive and thinking of this old project! That's better news than none, right?