Not, 300, but 3x100, really...

Heh, I guess you're wondering whether I've gone mad or something. In fact, I haven't. I've just noticed that Umbra is at revision 99, and I still have time to work on it tonight. By some strange coincidence, the other project I've had a say in, libtcod, also happens to be at revision 100 (101, to be exact), and Jice has just noticed his newest baby, The Cave (the first project ever to use Umbra), was at 99 too.

So, don't expect any good coding until we get sober again :D.

Progress on Umbra is very rapid. If you read Roguecentral forums, you might have already read that Umbra, as light as it is currently, can already power a game like pyromancer! (quote from Jice).

What we're working on currently is finer details that will hopefully make Umbra not also lightweight and flexible, but also developer friendly and intuitive.

Some of you might recall that at some point I released a part of Umbrarum Regnum source code as Umbra. It was sloppy and could hardly be called a "release", since I made it available only because I was unable to locate a strange bug (which, as usual, turned out to be a very silly one).

Well, this time I'm a bit more serious about Umbra. I started coding it last Saturday and have come to a point where I have a small, lightweight project that compiles and runs, even if all it does is displaying a demo module with a single line: "Hello world".

Long time no post :). I got a new job some time ago and haven't had too much time nor enthusiasm for anything involving a mouse, a keyboard and a monitor. Nonetheless, I'm beginning to make plans for a small rewrite. Before you make a facepalm, please let me elaborate.

I would like to announce the creation of a new blog directed to role playing game designers. It is called The Den: Lost in RPG design. You should have little trouble remembering its address, since it's almost the same as this site: http://umbrarumregnum.110mb.com/the-den.

I have decided to maximise Drupal possibilities. The first step was the creation of a new theme (the one you can see right now). It's quick work, so there might be some quirks here and there, and of course I might be refining things little by little. It's not the final theme yet, I still want to make it fluid width instead of fixed, but that's surprisingly difficult once there's a fully working fixed width one with a medium to high grade of complexity (for instance, there are separate style sheets for Firefox, IE6 and IE7+, the longest of which has 27kB and over 1700 lines of code).

I have recently been trying some funky stuff out. As a result, I started to seriously consider migrating from Drupal to Joomla!. Drupal is a good CMS, but there are minor issues I'd rather dump. For instance, WYSIWYG edition appears to be broken, despite having the WYSIWYG integration installed, adding images to posts requires sending them over via ftp and adding a HTML tag in the post's body, there can only be one blog per user (and I'd really love to have two simultaneous blogs - UR isn't everything after all).

I realised that the site had very little activity after the switch to Drupal and decided to investigate this a little bit. I found out that registering as a new user was quite difficult due to an extremely difficult captcha. I changed it to a simpler one. Also, anonymous users can now post moderated comments as well (but need to overcome a captcha challenge).

I hope this helps. Please leave your comments regarding the functionality aspects of the site so that I can consider making it more attractive and easier to use. Thanks in advance.

There's no new progress in UR land at the moment. I just wanted to let you know that I'm busy with another project right now (not a roguelike). It has some really smart solutions which I'd like to introduce in UR, but this requires a major rewrite of Umbra (the engine). I'll keep you posted if anything happens, but right now all my effort goes elsewhere.

Hiya!

The blog has moved from Blogger to Drupal, along with all the other elements. Now you can use a single site to access all elements such as the forum or the blog. All the posts from Blogger have been copied to Drupal, so there should be no problems with switching to the new address. You can use a single login for everything now. Oh, now you can leave comments on some of the site's pages.