I've taken a couple week break from TMJ spriting to concentrate on the issue of the massive lagosaurus invasion that has hit these websites. I figured that would be a good short-term project before resuming with TMJ in full force.

Now that I think most of the lag has been resolved, I will report on what the main culprit on the server seems to have been: Commander's 3DS website! Nah, just kidding. It was actually the "doing now" feature. Every time every member landed on another page, the status would be updated. Simultaneous to this, every page on DSiPaint, 3DSPaint, WiiOperaSDK, HB Online, and TWiiter, would access member information. This was causing a collision of potentially hundreds of reads and writes from the member data at one time. I've split out the "doing now" feature to store to a different location in the database that it accessed only when viewing the homepage alerts and friend list. For now, that seems to have resolved the issue.

As for TMJ, the next sprite I plan to draw is Eduard, the lounge singer. He is a non-playable character who makes a short cameo in the same scene as Thor. Once that sprite is finished, I will work on adding all the frames of animation to the other sprites so that they can join Old Man Skunk in Mt. Hildar and replace the old sprites. Additionally, I will port Mt. Hildar to 3DSPaint.com when I get a chance. Since it will be a port and not a graphical redesign, there will be some unused space on the higher resolution screen. This will be occupied with the chat dialog and status icons.

There will not be a meeting for TMJ this Friday, but I would like to have one Saturday at the usual time.