so, important question..

would you rather I get the custom dog tool working on test, OR get a souped up chat window that can be dropped in on both test AND live?

I dunno about you, but slow chat window updates drives me bonkers.

ok. this is slightly technical, so I'm going to attempt to simplify it (and probably fail)

presently alacrity does everything by hand. that is, it uses long if/else chains basically on every page. it then outputs some page information, and then jumps elsewhere in code or ends unexpectedly.

Item usage /purchasing likewise has lots of exceptions.

Think of it as a contract when you buy insurance or a mobile phone/tv etc. "you get this and that, except when this or that, unless more this that. BUT if you have this then you also get that"

Confusing right? yea.

There are some other issues, such as alacrity having over 100 tables in the database. all of questionable organization.

this makes life very difficult to modify the site. and that is why Alacrity was so slow to update historically.

what to do?

Design a game engine! have you ever played a game like skyrim, or counterstrike? you press the tilde key and you see a console that opens up and lets you type in commands?

So we arent going full crazy for this. that would take too much time for me to do it. But since we arent dealing with a 3D video game, I can greatly simplify the engine. (although ironically, ours will perform the same kinds of tasks , some better, some worse, excluding the graphics portion.

And thats what is being done.

About 50% of the way there for the basic framework to be up. thats when I can put the pedal to the metal and start cranking out things.

so. basically the front end interaces for shopping (paypal, in game items, and perks) , are all finished.

remaining items now:
-backend item/perk adds
-custom tool.

it will take a few days to fully debug, and implement a system for adding equipment to inventory.

otherwise, we are in the home stretch!