This problem is a big case of being burned out.

Year ago I used to love painting, it wasn’t about what I painted it was the act itself that I enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong I liked trying new techniques out, experimenting with colours and concepts, but it was the actual painting that was at the core of it all.
Over the years I grew disinterested in the Art scene, I found most of it to be tiresome, pretentious and quite frankly, full of crap.

I put down the paintbrush and it has been many years since I have picked it up again, I moved on utilizing the interest I had in graphic design and illustration which in turn lead me into web design.
But I still find myself yearning for the days of old where I enjoyed painting, enjoyed art, so I have been looking over my old work trying to find that spark to fuel.

I found one of the pieces where I had started experimenting with colour and found myself pondering expanding on it albeit in a digital format.

Despite being stupidly busy at the moment with all the Visa a moving issues, it is definitely something I have and shall continue to look into, thus far it lead me to this creating this piece called iRIS;

Hopefully I can get over this burnout and find the spark I’ve been missing for so long.

Across Azeroth a plague spread, those who succumbed and fell to it found themselves risen up again and starting to hunger for human flesh.

Yes, last night during one of the World of Warcraft holidays, a world event kicked off in preperation for the coming expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

Down in the port town of Booty Bay players can find corrupted cargo which when opened infects the player with a plague. They have 10 minutes to seek out an Argent Dawn Healer, or another player who can cure (Priests, Paladins etc). Failure to do so results in the player dying and returning as a zombie, all of the old spells and attacks are replaced with special zombie attacks like being able to cause yourself to explode and infect anyone near you, or lay down a cloud of plague fog which again infects others.

As it stands if you are infected you can infect others by dueling them if you are still alive, if you are dead you can attack them, kill them and they then turn, or you can lay down plague fog or make yourself explode. When you become a zombie you are an enemy with all non zombies, even your own faction, all other zombies are friendly regardless of whether they are Horde or Alliance, the zombies will also have their own language which can be understood by Horde and Alliance zombies.

Last night at the start it was easy for other players to cure those who were infected, but it is getting harder and harder and at some point containing it will not be easy resulting in a huge increase in zombies.

Last night I spent a lot of time in Westfall, or Lichrise as I decided to rename it after we washed over it like a giant undead wave. People ran to us, to fight us and were in turn taken into our fold, Inn keepers and workers cried out for guards as they feel into undeath and joined the ranks, the guards themselves fell to our army.

Alas as quick as we were to rise the Alliance arrived with healers and the zombie army was quashed, Lichrise returned to being Westfall and the war was over.

Or was it?

The odd zombie still roamed, infecting others, and slowly the ranks grew again and Westfall was stormed once again.

Definitely one of the best world events I have taken place in, it is going to be interesting when the ranks swell as the plague is harder to fight. However I can see it annoying people as NPC ’s fall to the onslaught of the war.

Yesterday I decided to remake them using the Guild of Maintainers colour of burgundy.

We’ve both decided we wanted to get the Collectors Edition this expansion pack, Jen wanted the little frost dragon pet it gives and I was interested in the soundtrack and book of WoW artwork.

I started playing WoW back in 2005 I believe it was, Uru Live was no more and I had heard a lot of buzz about WoW so being a fan of Warcraft I tried it out. Three years later (and I finally hit the level cap before it was raised again) I’m still playing.

However after those 3 years I have been finding that my level 70 Night Elf Hunter is not as an enjoyable experience as it used to be. I now find myself mulling over the concept of retiring him for something new. I sat down the other day and thought about it, what would my Night Elf do? Three years ago he left the relative safety of Shadowglen and ventured out into the world, growing stronger, fighting in wars and venturing through the Dark Portal to take on the Legion itself. What horrors would he have seen and how would they effect him? I think perhaps he would return to Teldrassil perhaps hang out at the lake down in Dolanaar and spend his days fishing.

I had thought about perhaps replacing him with my Gnome Mage, or perhaps my Blood Elf Rogue, but then Wrath of the Lich King presented another option, the Death Knight.

I had said a fair while ago to Jen that WoW needed a Necromancer class, I had dabbled with Necromancers when I played Guild Wars and enjoyed the class. When news came about the Death Knights and their skills of raising ghouls (a long with other things) I knew that would be something I would want to check out. I decided to give Death Knights a whirl in the WotLK beta.

For the Death Knight starting area Blizzard had introduced “Phasing”. This phasing causes the environment to change depending on what you have done in the game. If you had completed the quest to kill Bob then Bob would no longer appear before you, but he would appear to the people who had yet to do the kill Bob quest. This move allows WoW to have some more fluidity to story telling, it allows for the world to not be so static and rigid, to change with the story. Something that was, in my opinion, a big issue for the game.
The one thing I always liked about Uru was how the storyline was passing in real time, if a wall collapsed it did so only once and would never do it again for the next person who came along. This phasing combined with the kick ass storyline of the Death Knights starting area coupled up with the Death Knights themselves equaled in a thoroughly enjoyable game play (to the point where I had long past the point I should have gone to bed to continue playing).

There is a down side to all of this, Death Knights are going to be everywhere when WotLK is released which could be a pain. But I think I may have found a replacement for my hunter.

Perhaps at some point Blizzard will introduce the ability for the Hunter class to become Demon Hunters would definitely bring some interest back to Hunters I think, even if it does mean becoming slightly demonic in appearance.

So, Grey Skies at least will no longer be supporting Internet Explorer 6 and below.

I could list all the reasons why it is a pain in the ass to work with, I could also list my displeasure with the IE development team for blaming the web developer community for having to resort to IE specific hacks to get layouts working, but I wont (I’ll settle for making a passing comment).

Internet Explorer 6 is about 7 years old now, and there are newer versions like Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (although I would recommend neither one), I think people should be thinking about updating at some point as the internet is not always going to support browsers that are pushing a decade in age (as indicated by more and more people dropping support for IE 6 and below).

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to change browsers. If you wish to carry on using Internet Explorer 6 and below you are free to do so, however you might find items on this site that do not look or work properly as I and others begin to drop support for IE 6 and below.

However, if you are interested in changing then you may want to take a look at a website called Browse Happy, it is a site dedicated to finding people a browser that best suits them, and explains why IE may not be the best browser, in term of security, for you.

On the site you will find various people and testimonies of the browsers they have ended up using.

Things are going to get hectic over the next few months, between planning the wedding, getting everything sorted out for the Visa, and getting my stuff boxed up and shipped over.

I wanted the style to mimic that of the paintings done of other D’ni characters by Stephan Martiniere. Echoing some of the symbolism he had introduced in his pieces in this one. I have also been enjoying a lot of James Whites work over at Signalnoise, which was a definite influence in Veovis’ facial composition.

He had Beverly Knight opening for him, never seen anyone (aside from the kids) being so energetic, not sure how she managed to do it. Anyway I have posted some photos from the concert, unfortunately they didn’t come out to well.

After being persuaded by Jen to post them here they are:

Issues like Keith’s Bevin (Bevin is a single hood, not a name of all hoods, I really wish Cyan would change it back). Or Ages being listed in my Personal Links tab as Keith’s Eder Gira, but I expect that is to stop people being confused. The other issue is when you have numbers after a location name, like D’ni Jazz Club 089’s hood. I understand that, that is to do with ID’s of locations stored in the database, but it’s something that personally should be hidden, not seen.

Anyway, I was talking about the GUI of the Nexus.

As you can see I have introduced a few concepts.

1. Scroll Bar

In the old UI the Nexus was given simple up and down arrows, on which one was forced to repeatedly click in order to scroll through the masses of locations available. The introduction of the scroll bar would allow the user to scroll through at speed as one does on an internet browser. 1 click, held down, allows you through all the entries on that page, as opposed to countless clicking.

2. Alphabetical Organization

One of the things I liked about the Neighbourhoods tab in the Nexus is the option to browse by population or by Name (A to Z or Z to A). However this is something that can be expanded on a little bit with the introduction of alphabetical organization. Looking for that Hood which starts with a P? Then clicking the “P” would list just the hoods beginning with a “P” thus cutting out a bunch of other hoods to scroll through.

3. Pages

Again this is more directed at the Neighbourhoods tab. Hood names soon build up and there is often a lot of hood’s beginning with a specific letter. The pages tabs would allow for users to specify pages thus cutting down further on the amount of scrolling needing to be done within the UI.

Not only that, but the Alphabetical and Pages tabs would mean that all hoods can be displayed (unless set to private by the members), the Hood’s had a nasty habit of vanishing off of the nexus when they hadn’t been visited in a while which was a complete pain in the ass when trying to arrange parties or if you had something in your hood that people wanted to see. If the hood is public, I shouldn’t need to log in to make it so people can visit it.

4. The Cogs Icon

I have left this one until the end for the reason that this section has a larger write up and further concepts to go with it.

The Cog Icon opens up the Hood Management screen. Inside this screen users can control aspects of their Neighbourhoods.

Hood Name: Does exactly what it says on the tin, this area would allow you to change the hoods name, a feature removed to stop trolling issues which certainly needs to be bought back.

Hood Customization: To be honest I am not really sure if this belongs here, however here it is. This option would allow hood owners to activate and deactivate aspects of the hoods (firemarbles, lamps etc) much like they would with Relto Pages in the Relto Book. Customizations would “flag” with the DRC and changes would be made by the DRC (IC explination of lamps appearing/disappearing).

Hood Ranks: This works akin to guilds in other games such as World of Warcraft. The person who set the hood up would be the Hood Mayor, he would have full access to the hood’s settings in the Nexus. In the hood ranks section he can set up ranks for members of the hood controlling what they can access in the Hood Management screen. He can also assign Hood Mayor to another hood member if he chooses to move to another hood (there would be a limit of only 1 hood mayor in a hood at a time).

This would allow the Hood name changing feature to return but would set it so the trolling issue of the past would not occur.

Thus concludes my concept for the Nexus GUI. Now I turn it over to you the readers and ask if there are any views you have or maybe I overlooked something that you’d like to highlight?

Entries in this Series

• Concept - Uru Live Beginning