And not a single update to the site or the git repo for Coldest. "What gives?", you may ask.

Well, 2013 was an...interesting...year for me. Some of it was expected, some not. To start off, I spent the first half of the year recovering from a shoulder surgery. When just using a mouse is difficult or even impossible, game development is not an ideal activity.

That was the planned part. My shoulder had been bad for close to a decade and the time had come to do something about it. Everything went perfectly, and my recovery was right on schedule.

If you're reading this, your DNS has updated to point the site at the new server and everything should be functional (except the master server, which will be back up soon). Let me know if you find any problems.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a VPS account to cancel...

Edit: The master server is up and running, and seems to be working fine.

My host for this site has screwed up my virtual server once again (which is why the master server is down), so I've decided it's time for a change. I have a new server lined up and hopefully I'll be switched to it shortly, but until you hear otherwise assume anything you post on the site or the forums might disappear in the transition.

On a happier note, I have been doing some work on the game, but I can't deploy the changes to the updater until the site and master server are in good working order again.

My server host moved me to a new environment recently and as you may have noticed if you tried to visit the past couple of weeks, it didn't go smoothly. I've got the basics reinstalled so the site is obviously back up, but there is still more to be done so expect problems. I'm out of time to fix them right now though, and will be on vacation without internet for the next week so it will be at least that long before everything is running smoothly again.

A problem with forum registration e-mails not getting sent was recently brought to my attention, and I believe it has now been resolved. My tests have worked, but it worked when I tested before too so apparently that doesn't mean much. For some reason it was able to send to my personal domain (which is not related to this domain in any way), but not to other little domains like GMail. I have activated a couple of accounts that were pending and hopefully those users haven't completely given up on me. :-)

Apparently my playtesting schedule is on Valve Time. My last blog post said I would be ready for playtesting soon, and our more astute readers will note that it has been almost two months since then. I did note at the time that I had a vacation coming up that would probably push things back, but I did not expect the dead hard drive that I came home to after the trip.

A bit later than expected perhaps, but bots are now available in the official builds. There were a number of sticky problems that popped up since the last post, and I've fixed most of them. There are a couple of issues that I was not able to track down, but they aren't things I expect most people to run into so hopefully they won't be a problem.

The server update went sort of smoothly - the site never went down for a significant period of time, but I did lose access to the server for a while due to some problems with SSH after the update. Everything seems to be working correctly again, but if you find any problems with the site, please report them [url=http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/coldestgame/ticket/10]in this Trac ticket[/url]. Or just use the forums if you are able (but a site problem might prevent that, hence the ticket).

This is just a quick heads up that the website might be down for a while at some point in the near future. The Debian version I'm running on the server is going out of security support shortly so I'm going to have to upgrade it, and the last time I did that for this server it was down for something close to a week due to some unforeseen difficulties. I'm hopeful that this one will go more smoothly, but consider this fair warning. Also, I'm not sure exactly when I'll get around to doing this, so it probably won't be until 2012.