In his and my defense, the first version of The Icon Editor sucked. I did optimize it to be smaller with newer versions.

He continued on in another E-mail but the web archive doesn't have it. in it he basically says that his was smaller and did rotations, enlargement 1-6x, was faster, and all kinds of other stuff.

Now I never actually posted to the list, (it forced you to subscribe and I already abhorred e-mail by this time) but my defense would have been two things.

One, it was never meant to compete with his editor in any way. I wont lie, I got the Idea from Icon Maker to make an Editor for Icons but that was basically it. All I wanted was an editor under my control in case the programmer retired, quit or something bad happened. (And, unfortunately I was right here. more later) In the Process, I made Icons compatible with his 16x16 editor (at the Time, icons supported 12x12 Icons) and made the editor. The only reason it was a separate download was because I wanted to support older Icons Versions (since the Icon editor would adjust pic size dynamically, it would work with the old 12x12 format). I released it and then found the post.

Two, The Icon Editor could do most of the stuff he was complaining about, but didn't because I didn't want to compete with his editor. Enlargement was trivial, same with inverting, rotation would be a pain but why would you need that for a simple Icon editor? About the only thing it did that he liked was the dynamic pic size, which was basically what I was more concerned with anyway.

For the Record, I truly believe that Michael Van Der Kolk was the best basic optimizer out there. Some of http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.iserv.net/~mikev were some of the best things anyone who wants to program 68K Ti-Basic could read. Frankly, Much of the Slayers Engine is optimized based on the tutorials he made, and is a lot of the reason why it's so fast. Eventually I tried to track him down to ask him if I could add him to the credits of the Engine as a "special thanks To" section when I found http://web.archive.org/web/20010730195235/www.hollandsentinel.com/stories/050901/obi_0509010022.shtml Now, I seriously hope I'm wrong here, but from what I've gathered, (His sudden disappearance from ticalc.org and his own site, His Website hosted from an ISP in that town and the site account was removed) It's a very good chance that this is him. It's sad considering the talent that he was, and frankly, He's pretty much guaranteed in the credits if the engine is not dedicated to him in the first place, and this is coming from someone who never met or talked to him once.

 Yes. Actually it was worse 5 years ago.

Hays was a subject of a lot of fun between Me and Hiryu, It basicially became a hobby to bash them and their guestbook, not that they didn't deserve it, they were flat out ripping a ton of programmers off. The NPO vs Hays readme was an absolute joy to write, and one of these days try typing Hays game co in google and see what you get when you feel lucky. I should be a real dick and change game to games in the rant like they did to avoid that problem.

I still believe they knew I was doing the majority of the GOD stuff, I mean NPO VS Hays was an huge clue. There are some posts in the board on my site of them replying to the rant. I find it amusing that it took them 20 minutes to respond to it. Look for "your lame April fool's joke" in the board to see what I mean.

Slayers (the Game) was made By Hiryu. In fact both games were. If I remember correctly, the one you currently have is the second one. I don't know if he ever released the first one.

Slayers (The Engine) is Pretty much my next RPG platform. What and when it will be released seems to be an enigma. It was originally designed from the ground up to be the Directors Edition of FFVII until copyright scares changed it's focus to Punisher X-Treme. When Punisher X-Tream Failed the Mike Wallace Test, I shifted it's dev towards Legend of Landel, which is Basically Mystic Legend 2.

The reason it's called the Slayers Engine is because the Proposed Fighting Engine was designed to mimic the fighting style of the Slayers Anime. Ironically it's never been used for a Slayers Game. I should rename it one of these days but since I've been calling it that for almost 6 years now...

The engine Itself is designed with two things in mind: Speed and Scalability. In theory, it should be possible to make a completely different RPG without changing little if any of the code. This is a lot of the reason why so many games are associated with it. At this point it's had these games either considered, planned or in Development.

1) Slayers Duel - It was going to be a Quasi RPG fighting Game. You would basicially watch the cutscenes and then fight the battles in betweeen. Ironicially Never broke Planning Phase.
2) FFVII Cloud's Quest - Directors Edition - This got as far as consideration until the Monopoly CAD. There's a rant about it on my site if you want to read a ton about it.
3) Punisher X-Treme - This was going to be the next game in the Punisher series. Got as far as development and planning. We even got a storyline somewhere. Was Dropped when we decided that it was too risky of a game to be made with school shootings and all, even though the new storyline focused more on clones and alien technology rather than teacher violence. It was still in the school however, although it was renamed the compound.
4) Legend Of Landel - This is the Second Mystic Legend Game. at this point it's at the Development level with storyline and many of the images created. So far the game is Huge, and we're probably going to run into the same problems we ran into with FFVII. We're currently shooting for a release under 300K and hopefully this year. We're probably going to start finishing this thing After Mystic Legend 89 Is released, but Since Hiryu is moving right now and settling into a new job, it's going to be a little longer until it's released.
4A) NPO Vs Hays 2 - Something Survived - Another one of my shot's against Hays. I more or less needed something as a basic system runtime test for the Slayers Engine. It was going to be a real simple game (like a demo) of what the engine could do and how a game would perform under it. Luckily, Hays Games Co. didn't tick me or Hiryu off enough to follow through with this.