One concession I’m making to time–I’m going to start the beta before the vision-related tools are integrated. I know, for some of you that’s going to be a downer, and I won’t feel bad if you want to wait for the vision support. There’s a lot of functionality that’s in pretty decent shape, though, and starting early with people who aren’t as concerned about vision will give me a gentler beta ramp.

I’m going to start reaching out to folks over the next few days to gauge interest in beta 1. Stay tuned.

The tabletop is working and auto-save is hooked up. Access to the catalog of saved items is still not there, so if you were to close the tabletop, you’d have no way to retrieve it. Suboptimal. The catalog is pretty necessary for alpha-1, but maybe not for this week’s game.

The features left out of this first alpha are no longer visible or accessible, which I’ve found has a marvelous focusing effect on me. It was too easy to worry about things not actually targeted for the alpha when they were staring me in the face.

Messaging (i.e., the new “forget port forwarding” messaging) is working, in the sense that message are getting back and forth, and this evening I’ll be reintroducing the message handlers and the participant join protocol.

I’ll keep you guys posted.