As the title states, this isn’t a second post, but rather it is a post about the second part of the Winds of Change content.

I played through it over the weekend (by which I mean Sunday), and found it to be very enjoyable. Part 1 did set the groundwork, but part 2 was more enjoyable in most aspects. First of all, I found the story to be more interesting and engaging. Secondly, it felt better balanced, which made the gameplay more enjoyable.

To expand briefly on those: Part 1’s story was more or less “Go to this zone and kill all of the afflicted.” It then segued into “these gangs are bad, m’kay? Please kill them.” Part 2 has the opportunity for relevant spoilers, which already shows that it is an improvement! Balance-wise, part 1 had some fairly challenging-to-absurd quests, with tons of powerful enemies. Part of it was builds, but another part of it was the sheer number of enemies, combined with deadly Afflicted Soul Explosion variants. Part 2, while not “easy” per se, was significantly less frustrating.

Really, the biggest negative I have to say about part 2 is that it’s kind of annoying that you have to get through part 1 to play it.

So, in Guild Wars today, I got Legendary Survivor. Soooo much Kilroy’s Punchout Extravaganza. Sooo much. And so many scrolls. Took all day, but now the title is a) done and b) I get my character back. :D So happy to have it done with! :D

The music player is almost done. At least, this first version. It turns out, I decided to switch to using FMOD when I discovered that, yes, there IS an FMOD C# library. I probably wouldn’t have bothered, except the previous audio library I was using wasn’t exactly great, and randomly had a problem wherein it wouldn’t play certain songs for some inexplicable reason.

Anyway, I’ve added some things, the most notable being the ability to search for tracks, both in the current playlist as well as in all playlists. So that’s cool.

At this point, I just need to let it run and see if it crashes on me. Hopefully it doesn’t, but I’d rather it did if there’s something that could cause that to happen.

So, my music player is approaching completion, at least for its first version. I have added the ability to save and load playlist collections, which is important. The program also remembers the last used playlist collection, last current playlist, and last track playing, and will load all of those on start up.

Overall, this program is looking pretty awesome. It has the hotkeys and functionality that I want. Well, all except for one thing: Random advancement through a playlist. That’s what I’m currently adding.

Well, my music player now has playlists. It even generates them from directories! Which is pretty exciting, in my opinion. The next step, of course, is allow for a bit more than that. Right now, you can click on a song in a playlist and it will play that song. However, it won’t play a playlist just yet. That seems like an important next step.

Still, I am pretty excited as this marks an important point in the program’s development.

Currently working on a music player program, because as much as I like WinAmp, it lacks in a few critical features, and has a few too many in other areas.

So far, this program is coming along nicely. I just got code in for global hotkeys (ones that work without the program having focus). I’m pretty happy about that.

The program itself is written in C#.