Looking at Icar version 3.5 hurts my eyes

[Rob Lang]

I've been concentrating on version 4 for some time now, in all its graphical beauty and when I look back at 3.5, it actually hurts. I haven't even looked at the Scavenger Setting in PDF form (my rewrite edits are done in notepad) and if Naji hadn't I wouldn't have opened it ever again. The PDF is dreadful. Poorly written and organised with few fuzzy 72DPI images and some very arbitrary decisions. The cluster star maps can't really be drawn on when printed, either! Madness!

Oddly, I don't look back on the pencil drawings of guns I did in 1990 with the same horror. Perhaps it has a lot to do with those years being far from now. The long afternoons spent with Fish and the lads murdering mutants in space stations and huge complexes seems like a lifetime ago. The weapons were hurriedly drawn to pad the game out and named by slapping vowels and consonants together. The current version of Icar, though, grates.

Sadly, I won't be updating the 3.5 game or the books that support it. The changes aren't big and it would be possible to do in short order but I really need to just concentrate on v4 in the little time I have to work on it. That means that the painful state of the game will remain for the time being.

The only cure is, of course, finishing version 4 (or at least getting the alpha out there). Then we can all forget Version 3 ever existed and look forward to the future - which is the point of Icar anyway!

[misterecho]

yes, hurry up Robert. I'm quite sick of waiting.

[Kinslayer]

So this is indeed a true new edition, not just a cleaning up?

[Naji]

Yeah Rob's changing a few (or totally revamping) of the rules for combat, space combat and hacking. Btw Can't wait for v4!

[Rob Lang]

Thanks Naji - I can't wait for it either!