Hi all,

Got an INL server up and running, and finally got to do some playtesting on my own machine with the minidraft code.  At the risk of being immodest (and not too much so, since James has written the majority of the code), I think it's awesome!

I'll be pushing a patch, probably later today, to fix problems regarding placement of captains and players in the TOP_TO_BOTTOM mode (ie, my mode).  Picks and captains will now land in reasonable locations.  I have to say, I think all of the placement modes are great.  I expect we'll end up using the default mode in the long run.

I've also toyed around with trying to get the ships to spin.  I slowed down the transwarp (by doing dx/20 instead of dx/4, etc), and noticed that the ships definitely do some quirky flipping around, right up until they start getting close (~1 tactical) of their final destinations, when it stops.  Simliarly, when they're picked, they do -no- spinning, since they are already so close to their destination.  It's unclear why distance to destination would have an effect.  I'm going to keep playing around with it.

I've noticed a possible bug where sometimes, if my ship is orbiting, it does not transwarp to the desired location; it gets "caught" on the borders of the core planets.  I'll do more testing and see if I can reproduce it, or what.

I'd like to finish with I think we'll be ready to playtest this thing for real pretty darn soon, if not now.  I mean, hell, the worse that can happen is we crash the server, and Karthik managed to do that 2 or 3 times the other night anyhow :-)

Rich