It appears that the ReCAPTCHA plugin that I was using to verify user registrations has been broken for some time now. I'm not sure exactly how long, but looking at my backups of the site pre-Lenny upgrade it doesn't seem that it was properly installed even there. I'm not sure how this happened, but it should be fixed now (and based on the spammer who registered this morning, I feel fairly confident saying that registration is working again. ;-). My apologies if this prevented anyone from registering.

No, don't run away! It actually is good news! Futurama is coming back!

Since Debian Etch has recently gone out of support for security updates, I was forced to go through some hassle getting to Debian Lenny. Unfortunately the virtual server I'm running on doesn't support normal upgrading through apt, so a clean install was necessary. I've reinstalled almost everything at this point, but there may still be parts of the site not working.

Where indeed. To start with, I had decided to take a bit of a break to catch up on some things I had been neglecting before. Unfortunately the break became indefinite when I made the mistake of "upgrading" to KDE 4. Sadly, two years after the first allegedly stable KDE release, KDevelop 4 is still not only considered beta, but it's not a Google-style beta that is perfectly usable. From my experience, it's really only useful to developers who are actually working on KDevelop itself.

As you've probably noticed, I lied in my last post. Given the relatively small interest so far (thanks to everyone who gave it a shot though!) I've decided to get back to work and see if I can make Coldest a bit more marketable. As it stands, even if everyone who downloaded it kept playing it wouldn't be enough to support an online-only game like this. Granted, there are a few more places I could look for players, but I've already tried the ones I expected to generate the most interest and given the time of year I expect a lot of gamers are busy with the AAA titles coming out right now.

Yes, I'm still here, despite what the lack of any updates to the front page might indicate. It was recently brought to my attention that all of my wiki links wouldn't work unless you had a SourceForge account already. That was unintentional on my part and has since been fixed.

On a more interesting note: I plan to do some larger scale testing next week. Currently I'm looking at Wednesday night, but that's not set in stone yet. Check back early next week for final details.

Yes, I know I'm not the first person to apply that phrase to my code, but I promise I came up with the idea before I found out about the others. In any case, that admonition appears at the top of my collision detection code AKA "where edge cases are literally edge cases". Note that this is actually a proper use of "literally" as opposed to most of the places you'll see it.:-)

After some very limited real-world testing Coldest appears to be in pretty good shape. A number of problems were found in our one-on-one game, but on the whole the important things worked well, or at least well enough, and all of the problems we found have been fixed.:-)

Hopefully some larger scale testing can take place shortly and once that is scheduled I will provide the details here. In the meantime, enjoy the new screenshot of the player who helped me with the initial testing (thanks Bman!).

Thanks to Valgrind I've tracked down the last serious bug(s) that I'm aware of, so testing could commence tonight if I were so inclined. I'm having a few client-side performance problems again though, and I'm trying to eliminate or at least reduce those before I package up a build for testing and make a concerted effort to find testers. Small-scale testing would be fine right now, but when I connect to a server with 15 bots connected I have a pretty poor framerate and a few minor hitching problems.

As you may have noticed, testing of Coldest hasn't actually started yet. This is due to a number of different things, including but not limited to:
[list]
[*]The death of my home webserver.
[*]More Windows STL problems.
[*]A crash (possibly particle-related) that I discovered during testing
[/list]