I feel like I make no progress and then all of a sudden a ton of stuff gets done. I guess that’s the nature of iterative design. I’ve got to make another refactor pass over the engine and that’s always tedious but necessary. As I do more of the screen, patterns emerge. For each pattern, I go back and clean up the engine, making it tighter and more powerful. The next few screens go by in a flash and then more patterns emerge. There’s work being done all the time but the number of lines and completed screens don’t reflect that. I estimate several more months to complete the first version of the rewrite. It really depends on how much time I decide to spend on things like planet generation and experimenting with scripting. It’s hard not to stop and try to make some of the graphics better. I know it’s a lost cause but I just can’t help adding a shader here or some effect there. Every now and then I do run into problems converting the old 2D stuff to 3D. It takes some creativity sometimes to replicate some of the palette effects and manual video memory manipulation in 3D. For example, fading in and out is now a post process effect instead of setting palette colors. Lots to do but it’s fun!