News from the Top

VIPs are users who appear blue in our forums, and they are VIPs in the sense that what they say usually convey a lot of information about the game they are working on. Thus, we reserve the VIP title for regular, permanent game dev staff, given the attention that their posts get. When people see a name in blue, they naturally think that the person represents or speaks for the company.

Interns, by definition, are learning the trade, and don’t necessarily speak for the company. Plus they come and go, and if it became a regular thing it could be difficult to keep track of. Thus, we have decided to not grant VIP status to interns working in the industry. Exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis by the EXCOs if the intern was working as a community relations manager.

It's a tradition for HG Seraphs to give their forums a skin on Halloween (... and April Fool's Day), so here are this year's "costumes". Enjoy!

We’ve pushed a maintenance update to the forums, with one new feature

New Features

• BBCode Assistant now works across all modern browsers with javascript enabled, thanks to the work done by HussarKnight

Bug Fixes

• Backslashes not escaped properly in the Forum Styles control panel (Thanks Aro)
• HTML Entities not escaped properly in the Forum Styles control panel
• Incorrect formatting for the Last-Logins table in the “My Accounts” area
• Moved google analytics javascript to the bottom of source code
• Minimum value check not performed for “max topics per page” when value exceeded maximum permitted

For the most part of Friday the forums sent out the wrong caching headers for threads, so that unless you performed a force-refresh in your browser (or cleared your cache), it would show you the cached version of that thread from the last time you saw it before 5am Friday. The bug ended up being a pair of single quotes that was supposed be double quotes, and once we fixed that around 3pm today everything returned to normal. Sorry about that.

Whenever you visit a forum index, topic index, or thread on the forums, the browser checks with the server to see if the page had changed since the last visit. If it hadn’t, the browser will load the cached version, and the script will stop right there without proceeding to query the forum database files, combine them with the forum templates, to serve up the HTML for your browser. This saves bandwidth, CPU processing time, and should result in a slightly faster feel to the forums. As far as I know we are one of a few handful forum applications out there (if not the only) that does proper browser caching (well, as of 3pm this afternoon anyway 8^) )

Almost eight years ago, someone wrote the following on Age of Kings Heaven

we got this BIG forum, and we got lots of talented people. what we need to do is band together adn work on possibly putting out our own version of a war game. imagine the type of custom map editor, the ideas… all we need is people skilled in: webdesign- c++ – programming – art (both 3D and sketch) – we work up an idea taht mixs the best of everything. maybe get some sketchs drawn up, work out the bugs, get a basic design… and get it to a company. there are companys out there who will do that.

I KNOW it would be hard. uf not next to impossible, but i have followthrough, and i know everything is possible. what is the general public’s view on this?

Fast forward to the present. The talented people have banded up to form Reverie World Studios, and their own version of a war game is called Dawn of Fantasy. HeavenGames is proud to announce the latest addition to our family, Dawn of Fantasy Heaven, our way to honor and support the work which had their beginnings in our communities. We have a lot of enthusiastic staff on board for this site—they’ve worked very hard these past few weeks to launch the site—and we hope you will enjoy their work in the months to come.

There’s a new security hole in Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat, where the attacker can exploit a problem with the Flash plug-in inside a PDF file to install malware onto your computer. Such malware could introduce viruses that could damage files on your computer, as well as install software that could capture your various logins and passwords, banking information, key codes for games, and credit card numbers

The problem currently affects Windows PCs only, and an update will be released by Adobe by July 31st, 2009. In the meantime, it’s recommended that you delete a file on your system to remove Flash capability from Acrobat Reader/Acrobat:

Deleting, renaming, or removing access to the authplay.dll file that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x mitigates the threat for those products, but users will experience a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF that contains SWF content. Depending on the product, the authplay.dll that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows is typically located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\authplay.dll or C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0]\Acrobat\authplay.dll. Windows Vista users should consider enabling UAC (User Access Control) to mitigate the impact of a potential exploit. Flash Player users should exercise caution in browsing untrusted websites. Adobe is in contact with Antivirus and Security vendors regarding the issue and recommend users keep their anti-virus definitions up to date.

The forums software was updated to 2.3.1 to fix minor bugs.

Details:

• Links to YouTube and Vimeo inside the URL BBCode tag are no longer converted into embedded videos (Fixes [#6])
• The text-wrapper function no longer truncates URLs inside BBCode tags (Fixes [#7])
• “me” is now an allowed username for email addresses (Fixes [#4])
• Embeddable content only shows up on the news when the news database was rebuilt. It should show up when posting news. (Fixes [#9])
• Fixed unquoted HTML attribute on the post reply page. (Fixes [#3])
• Fixed “Unterminated string constant” error on the login page. (Fixes [#11])

The server maintenance on 7/14/2009 has been postponed by a day due to technical difficulties. WICH, AOKH, ETWH, SPOREH, and DOW2H will be down (not all at the same time) on July 15th, 2009 between 10pm and 11pm for software upgrades. Radiant is being upgraded from 0.7.1 to 0.8.0 and the Gallery extension is being upgraded to the latest version.

Are you a graphics design/typography geek? Do you dream of baseline grids, 1.618, #abcdef, and treat the “Elements of Typographic Design” as a bible? Do you like compositing multi-layered and textured illustrations that reflect fictional and historical themes from all sorts of time periods? If you think you can come up with comps on demand, or have ideas on how to improve HG’s graphic image, please send an email to zen@heavengames.com with the subject “Art Internship at HG.” Please attach some examples of your work in the email. This position is a part-time volunteer position. Applicants need to be able to use Photoshop CS3 or above and have a steady broadband internet connection.

Welcome to 2009 :) At the end of 2008 we launched Empires: Total War Heaven, and I’ve got some stuff to say/write about that site as it’s got some new features and stuff both up front and under the hood. But, that’ll have to wait… We’ve been hard at work on other projects for 2009 =) Something’s coming around early February, and something big around this summer, and a bunch of little announcements in between. That’s on top of us getting new servers this month to alleviate the problems with the sites loading slower than a snail, thanks in part to jack-ass comment-spam bots.

So, that’s it for an update for now. The next post will be in early February, barring any last-minute emergencies.