News from the Top

Yes, folks, I’m afraid today has seen the creation of a monster. A blogging monster, to be exact! Zen has set me up with my very own login to the EXCO blog, so now I can keep a running account of my cheevies. What are these cheevies, you might ask? Otherwise known of as “Achievements”, cheevies are the measurement by which I gauge my Xbox 360 progress!

Ok, so this won’t be about cheevies. My login might be revoked if that becomes a recurring theme. Or we might have a staff revolt from certain people who detest the word, for reasons I cannot understand.

Anyway, as the other EXCO members try out their own new logins, we look forward to hearing from you. And if you have any questions about HeavenGames, please shoot any of us an email and we’ll see about answering them in this arena. And if no questions are forthcoming, look forward to hearing about my progress in Dragon Age and Fallout 3 and Halo ODST and …

We’ve pushed the update for 2.4.1 to the servers. This is a bug-fix release.

Changelog

• Youtube embed code now updated to be in a widescreen aspect ratio [#97]
• Auto-URL interpreter now recognizes *.heavengames.com as valid URLs [#99]
• Auto-URL interpreter thought “www.” alone is a valid URL [#99]
• Fixed grammatical error on post reply page [#98]
• Hidden forums are now visible to forum admins [#94]
• Moderators list not updating to reflect latest changes
• Main forum URL is now index.cgi
• Copyright notices consolidated and automated
• Linebreaks were stripped from multi-line code content [#96]
• Signature text were at the wrong size [#93]
• The code tag messed up <, >, [, and ] characters
• Blank lines were not appearing for Firefox 3.5.x users [#92]
• HTML Entities were not encoded inside code tags [#91]

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

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.

We have received a number of reports that the “add fav” button isn’t working for a number of you. If you use the “NoScript” add-on for Firefox, make sure javascript is allowed for HeavenGames:

Otherwise, if you are using other browsers, make sure scripting is allowed for HeavenGames.com.

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.