By the start of the fifth Apolyton year I was working with all kinds of imports to be done to the Apolyton Directory. Importing from old databases and HTML-pages took most of the time I had available for Apolyton during that time not taken by file manager duties. Having the programming to fall back on was really good during my time in the army. It was good to have something totally different to do in the weekends, and the evenings when managed to get hold of a computer for more than thirty minutes total.

Other than the directory programming I've been involved in during the passed year I've also had the chance to do some other PHP-programming for Apolyton, by the creation of the CivGroups feature last fall. Too bad I've not had the time to involve myself in the Democracy Games as much as I've wanted to during this year due to the military service at first and now the prospect that I'm moving to a new location for this fall. Anyway I'm sure that many others then I have found great use for the CivGroup feature, and I hope to be able to be a little more active in the demogames in the future.

Of course there happened many other things during my army time, and as I was home most weekends, and over Christmas, I still was able to follow the major moves of the Civilization-community. The release of Civilization III: Play The World gave me a task to update my tools to support the new file formats. This wasn't made easier by the long difference on release between the European and the American version, as well as the patch progress differences during the first patches due to lack of compatibility between the different copy-protection systems used in Europe and America. Also my willing to maintain the support for vanilla CivIII didn't help me in the progress. Adding support for BIX-files was a simple step, but coding the support for PTW saves wasn't as easy, while I still wanted to both be able to load and save the old format. The time before the PTW saves being loaded and could be saved back correctly was quite long; as I couldn't really start with it before the time I was home for Christmas.

My duty as CivIII Files Manager has made me keep up with the creation of new files for Civilization III. That is at least when I weren't on a two week exercise in the army or something similar . Of course it sometimes could be many files to move when I had been unavailable for a while, especially when PTW was newly released. It showed the PTW really had put some new spirits into the creation of stuff for CivIII. Yet again a decrease in new files has started to show that most creators are waiting for the next expansion before starting on new scenarios, and I expect the creation forum to fill with new files again by the end of this year.

This May I got writing news added to the list of duties I have for Apolyton due to Markos making his military service. Lately I've not submitted much news due to the fact that I've been busy with other issues not related to the site, and the fact that the other newly appointed news editors are doing a great job reporting all news that wouldn't require a load of time to write. I hope to be able to give you all news submitted by me again in a near future, once all changes to my life are complete.

As for the future I reckon I'll stay active on Apolyton for many years to come. This fall I'm starting on university studies which will take much of my spare time, but I don't think that shall be an obstacle for me staying active on this site. Still it will mean that there might be periods when I have really hard to do stuff, and I'm still not sure how mush time I'll have to maintain my CivIII tools up-to-date, but if I find I can't do it on my own I might try to find someone to help me out. Over all I'm looking forward for another year in Apolyton service and as a member of the Civilization community.

/Gramphos