Having got into Star Wars because my second-hand 286 broke and I bought X-Wing as a consolation, and heavier into Star Wars when I dipped into Dark Force Rising and recognised Grand Admiral Thrawn as "that guy from TIE Fighter", it was only natural to want to see how good a pilot I was by buying XvT and a modem.

I discovered that I rather enjoyed writing stories with my RPG character but when they involved space-combat that it was boring describing the actual fighting (though from the feedback I was managing to make it reasonably interesting to read). I had already begun to experiment with the first XvT Mission Builders and so I decided that I'd take my story-telling urges and channel them in that direction.

While I worked on my BoP campaigns and to try to make my website a source of information on campaign-making over at Datamasters the OPT Project was gathering speed. I didn't take much interest as I was satisfied with the canon ships and the methods they mentioned didn't seem to bear much relationship to any of the modelling skills I'd begun to slowly develop whilst making cutscenes.

With the release of XWA both my BoP campaigns and all my website information became obsolete so I started working on a XWA mission-set and updating my website. It was annoying though that the XWA cutscenes were in a proprietary format which hindered my story-telling and seemed to make my 3D skills less useful.

XWA mission building turned out to be quite fun thanks to the extra complexities and the ability to make pretty effects with the coloured light backdrops compensating somewhat for not being able to make pretty effects in cutscenes. I made some models to be able to assist with the graphics at the SFA site and was fairly happy.

Then Nob Akimoto asked me for a DXF of my Bulwark-II and (once the confusion over why he wanted the DXF was cleared up) got me started on OPT making, something which seems to have overshadowed my mission-building despite my efforts. Eventually I'll get my commitments cleared and I'll be able to get on with redoing the mission-set I was working on when Nob made his fateful request, if I can resist taking on new commitments for long enough that is.