I hang around because I have a great deal of admiration for what Scawen has achieved, a life style based on his hobby and a working environment where he doesn't get two major crushes over the Christmas period (I do love my job, but there are limits...).
I see Vic every year and consider him a friend. And I even once had a PM from Eric (before that I wasn't even sure he spoke English!).
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For me to get into playing a game again I have to be able to mod it (I did a lot of mods for LFS), and right now my focus is on graphics and shaders. LFS has an old DX engine and no shaders, and the game architecture is only moddable at the server level. It's not like other games where you can take a game built for high fantasy and rebuilt it for Star Wars or something.
Currently I'm actively developing my own game, there is a part of me that hopes I might achieve something similar to what Scawen has, although I know my game is the wrong genre, wrong platform, and despite the odd Christmas double-crunch I do love my job.